enlightenment – Quotations Treasury – a sub-blog of Soul Needs

Francis Lucille: “What We Are Speaks More Loudly Than What We See”

Francis Lucille was (is?) Rupert Spira’s teacher;

YouTube Notes:

Interview with the spiritual teacher of the tradition of Advaita Vedanta (non-duality) Francis Lucille for Buddha at the Gas Pump.

In this conversation, amongst other things, we explore the intellectual understanding of enlightenment, how our neglected bodies change after becoming awakened and if consciousness is limited. Francis Lucille – Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview:

Francis Lucille was Rupert Spira’s teacher. See https://batgap.com/francis-lucille/

Francis Lucille is a spiritual teacher of the tradition of Advaita Vedanta (non-duality). He became a disciple of Jean Klein, a French Advaita teacher whom he met in 1975.

This was the beginning of a close association that lasted until the death of his friend and spiritual master in 1998.

Jean Klein‘s own guru, “Panditji” Rao, whom he met in India in the nineteen-fifties, was a college professor in Bangalore who taught Sanskrit and belonged to a lineage of traditional Advaita Vedanta teachers. Francis Lucille speaks about one thing: awareness, our true nature, the Absolute.

This is the ancient teaching of non-duality, the common ground of Advaita Vedanta, Ch’an Buddhism, Zen, Taoism and Sufism, the same common ground which is at the core of the message left behind by the founders of all great religions.

In a loving, open, blissfully peaceful manner, Francis leads us to a deep understanding that what we are is love, the pure awareness behind and between all the activities of the mind.

“Everything is created from moment to moment, always new.”

Like fireworks, this universe is a celebration and you are the spectator contemplating the eternal Fourth of July of your absolute splendor. – Francis Lucille’s quote. SOURCE

How simple can your and my enlightenment be?

Vicki Woodyard is teaching us how in a very homely simplicity;

Vicki’s channel is here;
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vicki+woodyard

Her blog is here;

http://www.vickiwoodyard.com/

TAGs/Topics: Vicki Woodyard, enlightenment, spiritual maturity, triumph after great pain,

Scott Kiloby: Daily Pointers to Enlightenment -'The One and the many'

Our session in our One Garden group yesterday was a pointing to Nonduality. When I got home I found the piece below in my email inbox. As with most of his 365 pieces in his book ‘Reflections on the One Life; daily pointers to enlightenment’ it is simple, clear and profound – and therefore valuable.

“The One and the Many
Oneness includes the many. Non-duality is not only a realization of the formless realm or non-conceptual awareness, but also a recognition that form is none other than formlessness. Form includes people, jobs, relationships, ideas, feelings and all other things. So what is the difference between living life as a separate self and living life from non-dual realization?

The only real difference is that instead of believing that you are a person separate from the rest of life, there is a recognition that what you are in the deepest sense is (RP? delete ‘is’?) an unnamable presence. That presence is also the essence of everything you see. In that way, what you are is not separate from the rest of life. This seeing reveals a natural compassion, love, peace, and joy.

Your very essence is spacious awareness. This spacious awareness is prior to the story of being a separate person. But don’t let the realization stay there. See that the nothingness of awareness is appearing as absolutely everything.

As soon as the mind starts to associate non-duality only with nothingness, it is holding onto an idea about non-duality. That is not non-duality. Although the word “non-duality” is an idea, it is pointing to reality itself. In reality, form and formlessness are not two. The One is appearing as the many. Don’t try to grasp that intellectually. Look to where the words are pointing in your direct experience.”

~ From: Reflections of the One Life, by Scott Kiloby http://www.kiloby.com/

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I gratefully receive Scott’s reflections from Peter’s Pearls – Web Site: http://www.peterspearls.com.au

I bought my copy from Amazon – if you are in the USA its HERE – https://www.amazon.com/Reflections-One-Life-Pointers-Enlightenment-ebook/dp/B00472O78S/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1467259446&sr=8-4&keywords=kiloby#nav-subnav

How do you understand enlightenment?

“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.”
~Zen proverb

How do you define enlightenment?

Dennis Waite in his book Enlightenment: the path through the jungle, p8, says,

‘Enlightenment is the event in time when the mind realizes that we are already free’.

“Who Is The Experiencer?” asks Echart Tolle

Who Is The Experiencer?

‘What you see and hear, taste, touch, and smell are, of course, sense objects. They are what you experience. But who is the subject, the experiencer?

If you now say, for example, “Well, of course, I, Jane Smith, senior accountant, forty-five years old, divorced, mother of two, American, am the subject, the experiencer,” you are mistaken. Jane Smith and whatever else becomes identified with the mental concept of Jane Smith are all objects of experience, not the experiencing subject.

Every experience has three possible ingredients: sense perceptions, thoughts or mental images, and emotions. Jane Smith, senior accountant, forty-five years old, mother of two, divorced, American — these are all thoughts and therefore part of what you experience the moment you have these thoughts. They and whatever else you can say and think about yourself are objects, not the subject. They are experience, not the experiencer.

You can add a thousand more definitions (thoughts) of who you are and by doing so will certainly increase the complexity of the experience of yourself (as well as your psychiatrist’s income) but, in this way, you will not end up with the subject, the experiencer who is prior to all experience but without whom there would be no experience.

So who is the experiencer? You are. And who are you? Consciousness. And what is Consciousness? This question cannot be answered. The moment you answer it, you have falsified it, made it into another object.

Consciousness, the traditional word for which is Spirit, cannot be known in the normal sense of the word, and seeking it is futile. All knowing is within the realm of duality — subject and object, the knower and the known. The subject, the I, the knower without which nothing could be known, perceived, thought, or felt, must remain forever unknowable.

This is because the I has no form. Only forms can be known, and yet without the formless dimension, the world of form could not be. It is the luminous space in which the world arises and subsides.

That space is the life that I Am. It is timeless. I Am timeless, eternal. What happens in that space is relative and temporary: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, birth and death.

The greatest impediment to the discovery of inner space, the greatest impediment to finding the experiencer, is to become so enthralled by the experience that you lose yourself in it. It means consciousness is lost in its own dream. You get taken in by every thought, every emotion, and every experience to such a degree that you are in fact in a dreamlike state. This has been the normal state of humanity for thousands of years.

Although you cannot know consciousness, you can become conscious of it as yourself. You can sense it directly in any situation, no matter where you are. You can sense it here and now as your very Presence, the inner space in which the words on this page are perceived and become thoughts. It is the underlying I Am.

The words you are reading and thinking are the foreground, and the I Am is the substratum, the underlying background to every experience, thought, feeling.’

by Eckhart Tolle – From his book, A New Earth, Page 241.

ENLIGHTENMENT a compilation by Joan Tollifson

1 Realization is nothing to be gained anew….Realization consists of getting rid of the false idea that one is not realized. –Ramana Maharshi

2 That which is before you is it, in all its fullness, utterly complete. There is naught beside. Even if you go through all the stages of a Bodhisattva’s progress toward Buddhahood, one by one; when at last, in a single flash, you attain to full realization, you will only be realizing the Buddha-Nature which has been with you all the time; and by all the foregoing stages you will have added to it nothing at all. –Huang Po

3 Stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing.
–Nisargadatta Maharaj

4 This is the one and only race you will win by going absolutely nowhere! –Mooji

5 If you need time to achieve something, it must be false. The real is always with you; you need not wait to be what you are. Only you must not allow your mind to go out of yourself in search. -Nisargadatta Maharaj

6 If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where do you expect to find it? –Dogen

7 No matter how much we keep looking for liberation, for enlightenment, we will never find it as long as we are going somewhere to find it, because actually it is here. Life is enlightenment. Life is the sacredness. Life is emptiness and emptiness is life…Manifested is in the unmanifested and unmanifested is in the manifested. This is the great unity. –Anam Thubten

8 Enlightenment is devastatingly simple….Enlightenment is what we are. There is nothing to gain, only its recognition….Awakening to enlightenment is a journey from here to here, not from here to there. There is nowhere to go and nothing to be attained. Enlightenment is simply an awakening to what has always been the case. There is only the seeing through of our own ignorance.–Gary Crowley

9 You are already enlightened, but you can never conceptually know what enlightenment is because when you think of it you create a gap between yourself and enlightenment.–Dainin Katagiri

10 You can only reach something in the dream. And what you can reach, you have to lose again. And the loser you can lose, will pop up again….Nothing has to go, nothing has to come. You are still in that idea that something has to change for you to be what-you-are….Inspite of all the happenings, inspite of all the presence and absence, whatever can be or not be, you are That.–Karl Renz

11 Enlightenment? How lethal it is to attach a label. Then you become somebody. At the moment of labeling, aliveness freezes into a concept. ‘My enlightenment experience!’ To be alive, fully alive, means flowing without hindrance—a vulnerable flow of aliveness with no resistance. Without any sense of passing time. Without needing to think about ‘myself’—what I am, what I will be. Our experience mongering is a form of resistance in time. Our craving for experiences is a resistance to simply being here, now. It’s the hum of the airplane. The fog. The wind blowing gently, the rain dripping, breathing, humming, pulsating, opening, closing, nothing at all…It’s such a relief to realize we don’t have to be anything.–Toni Packer

12 Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings.–Dogen

13 The discovery of truth is in the discernment of the false. You can know what is not. What is — you can only be.–Nisargadatta Maharaj

14 Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something.–Charlotte Joko Beck

15 Enlightenment is a demolition project.–Adyashanti

16 There is no such thing as enlightenment. The appreciation of this fact is itself enlightenment. Nisargadatta

17 There is absolutely nothing to attain except the realisation that there is absolutely nothing to attain. – Tony Parsons

18 There is no ‘I’ to get enlightened. That’s illusion. There’s only being here with what’s here without division. –Toni Packer

19 Enlightenment isn’t much more than remembering something long forgotten that’s been with you all along….And while it’s been said that after moments of ecstasy there will still be laundry to do, this is not true about enlightenment. This is because there is no ‘after enlightenment.’ Enlightenment lies beyond any idea of time. Any temporal notions we have about enlightenment come from our dualistic understanding. Like everything else that we can name or describe or conceptualize, [ecstatic moments and blissful states] don’t last…Something else takes place with enlightenment, however, that’s got nothing to do with ecstasy, and from which you don’t emerge. This is because what is finally realized is that there was no ‘you’ to go into enlightenment in the first place…If there’s some particular thing you can name, pick up, single out, or point to, it’s not enlightenment…It’s not true liberation or freedom of mind….Whatever it is, if it’s separated out from the Whole, it will wither and die…We think there is a particular, enduring person here, and then we wonder, ‘Is this person enlightened?’ or ‘Will I ever become enlightened?’ But there is no particular person who becomes enlightened—or who remains deluded. All such questions are off the mark…in each moment, all is fresh and new…–Steve Hagen

20 There is no such thing as an awakened person; that’s a contradiction in terms…So let’s say there is just being and ‘me’-ing…If those so-called enlightened people were honest, they would probably say to you that…there can still be a contraction into ‘me’-ing, but the final liberation is that anything is accepted and everything is accepted; nothing is denied. So both are now seen as one…There is being, but contraction can happen. It happens within the perception of the whole. Anything can happen because this is liberation…Liberation includes the total acceptance of all that is….There’s nowhere to go. There’s no goal. There’s no carrot. There’s no prize. All there is is this. But the difference between there just being what’s happening and the sense that it’s happening to you is immeasurable.–Tony Parsons

21 Awakening doesn’t mean that you awaken. It means that there is only awakening. There is no you who is awake, there is only awakeness. As long as you identify with a ‘you’ who either is or is not awake, you are still dreaming. Awakening is awakening from the dream of a separate you to simply Being Awakeness….The word enlightenment points to who you are. Who you are is not a state that can be gained or lost. It is not a spiritual experience. All states and experiences come and go. Who you are is the permanence existing right now regardless of states and experiences.–Adyashanti

To read the whole compilation and Joan’s excellent article go HERE –
http://www.joantollifson.com/writing8.html

PRESENCE – from the ‘The Light of Discovery’ – By Toni Packer

Toni Packard on being present even if it’s unremarkable.

Nothing Spectacular

“There is the wind, the sound of rustling leaves, the brightness of the room, the breathing, the color of the wooden floor, the hands resting, the heart beating. There is saliva gathering in the mouth, and the swallowing of it. What’s so hard about being in touch with what is real, with what is actually here this moment, unspectacular though it may be?

“Is this one of our problems? That to be in touch with reality we expect something spectacular, something out of the ordinary? So we fail to be with our feet on the most ordinary of grounds, a soggy path or a wooden floor, a rug.

“Last night in the meeting room there was a lamp on the table, and just beneath it a small plant with the greenest of leaves, like tongues unfolding out of the little pot, and a few red flowers, as red as red can be, with yellow dots inside. That simple. Can we see it and not expect this to do something for us? Can we just see it, hear it, feel it completely?

“At the same time there is the breathing, the sound of the wind, the ticking of a clock, and the beating of the heart. A feeling of uncertainty or calm may also be there. The entire universe is there — the wonder of it, not the concept. Just the air, the ground, the sky, the night, the stars, and the lights of Springwater.” -0-

from the ‘The Light of Discovery’ – By Toni Packer