CHANGE and CHANGELESSNESS Bahá’u’lláh, Abdu’l-Baha and John Greven

“Remember, what does not change is real. What changes is only appearance.”

Supplementary Text WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? Pages from John Greven’s book, “Oneness, the destination that you never left.” – SEE http://infiniteaffinity.com/onenesstext.php

JUXTAPOSED with

We should earnestly seek and thoroughly investigate realities, recognizing that the purpose of the religion of God is the education of humanity and the unity and fellowship of mankind. Furthermore we will establish the point that the foundations of the religions of God are one foundation. This foundation is not multiple for it is reality itself. Reality does not admit of multiplicity although each of the divine religions is separable into two divisions. One concerns the world of morality and the ethical training of human nature. It is directed to the advancement of the world of humanity in general; it reveals and inculcates the knowledge of God and makes possible the discovery of the verities of life. This is ideal and spiritual teaching, the essential quality of divine religion and not subject to change or transformation. It is the one foundation of all the religions of God. Therefore the religions are essentially one and the same.

The second classification or division comprises social laws and regulations applicable to human conduct. This is not the essential spiritual quality of religion. It is subject to change and transformation according to the exigencies and requirements of time and place. …………………

Time changes conditions, and laws change to suit conditions. We must remember that these changing laws are not the essentials; they are the accidentals of religion. The essential ordinances established by a Manifestation of God are spiritual; they concern moralities, the ethical development of man and faith in God. They are ideal and necessarily permanent; expressions of the one foundation and not amenable to change or transformation. Therefore the fundamental basis of the revealed religion of God is immutable, unchanging throughout the centuries, not subject to the varying conditions of the human world. Source HERE http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/c/BWF/bwf-17.html

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“This is the changeless Faith of God, eternal in the past, eternal in the future.” Proclamation of Bahá’u’lláh – http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/b/PB/pb-63.html

A growing number of followers of traditional…

“A growing number of followers of traditional religions are able to let go of identification with form, dogma, and rigid belief systems and discover the original depth that is hidden within their own spiritual tradition at the same time as they discover the depth within themselves. They realize that how spiritual you are has nothing to do with what you believe but everything to do with your state of consciousness.”

– Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

Compare wit this essay here – http://csp.org/experience/docs/steindl-mystical.html

From your father you may learn the things…

From your father you may learn the things you must do.

From your mother you learn who you are.

From a source of Jewish wisdom
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/52899/jewish/Your-Father-and-Your-Mother.htm

If you are depressed you are living…

“If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.”

Attributed to Lao Tzu in Taoism

“…the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.” Eckhart Tolle

What is arising now is …

What  is   arising   now  is   not   a   new   belief   system,   a   new   religion,
spiritual ideology,  or mythology. We  are  coming to the  end  not  only  of
mythologies  but  also  of ideologies  and  belief  systems. The  change  goes
deeper than the content of your mind, deeper than your thoughts. In fact, at
the  heart  of the  new  consciousness is the transcendence  of thought, the
newfound ability of rising above thought, of realizing a dimension within
yourself that is infinitely more vast than thought. 

You then no longer derive your identity,  your  sense   of  who  you  are,  from  the  incessant  stream  of
thinking  that  in  the   old   consciousness   you  take  to   be   yourself.  What   a
liberation to realize that the “voice in my head” is not who I am. Who am I
then? The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to thought, the
space in which the thought – or the emotion or sense perception – happens.

Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily
means thought forms. If evil has any reality – and it has a relative, not an
absolute,  reality  – this is also its  definition: complete identification with
form – physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms. This results in a total
unawareness of my connectedness with the whole, my intrinsic oneness with
every “other” as well as with the Source. This forgetfulness is original sin,
suffering, delusion. When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and
governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create? T

Eckhart Tolle – A New Earth

“When you don’t cover up the world with…

“When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to you life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels and images. For this to happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say, identified with.”
—Eckhart Tolle

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The great Master Dogen said,

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self,

to study the self is to forget the self, and

to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.”

To be enlightened by the ten thousand things is to recognize the unity of the self and the ten thousand things.

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TABS: ten thousand things, word, labels, re-sacralization, thought, thinking, being, Beingness, itness, identity, false identity, the Buddha Way, self, Self, enlightenment, sacred,

“What is the reality of being human on the way to realizing enlightenment?

 

We are using these quotations in our discussions at present;

TOPIC: The Reality of Being Human on the Way to Realizing Enlightenment

QUESTION: “What is the reality of being human on the way to realizing enlightenment?

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1 “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the
world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is

incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” …….“Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.”― Abraham Joshua Heschel

2 “Like two birds of golden plumage, inseparable companions, the
individual self and the immortal Self are perched on the branches of the

selfsame tree. The former tastes of the sweet and bitter fruits of the

tree; the latter, tasting of neither, calmly observes.

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“The individual self, deluded by forgetfulness of his identity with the

divine Self, bewildered by his ego, grieves and is sad. But when he

recognizes the worshipful Lord as his own true Self, and beholds his

glory, he grieves no more.”

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3 Don’t contemplate
as mere activity

Be void contemplating void.      p221  365 Tao – Deng Ming-Dao

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4 After scaling the high summits of wonderment the wayfarer cometh to the Valley of True
Poverty and Absolute Nothingness.

This station is the dying from self and the living in God, the being poor in self and rich in the

Desired One.

From ‘The Valley of True Poverty and Absolute Nothingness’ the 7th valley in Baha’u’llah’s 7 Valleys

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5 The experience of one’s own identity or “I”, is a source of great wonder……..Spiritual attainment
is a fundamental transformation of the “I” from a separate, limited, and contracted identity into a

rich and infinite one.  It is a movement from separation to union.

p85 Living Presence A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self – by Shaikh Kabir Helminski
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6 You say, “I want to know myself.”  You are the “I”.  You are the Knowing.  You are the
consciousness through which everything is known.  And that cannot know itself; it is itself.

p55/56 Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle

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About religion Max Muller said, ““He who knows one, knows none.”

Tolle says that emotion and thoughts I would…

Tolle says that emotion and thoughts (I would say heart-mind for these two are in reality a singleness) are not necessarily ego, but often are.

“They turn into ego only when you identify with them and they take you over completely, that is to say, when they become ‘I’.”

A New Earth pp131-132

The state of compulsive living is so painful…

The state of compulsive living is so painful, and its loneliness is so great that we that we do everything we can to escape it through dreams of it being otherwise – through entertainments, through self-gratification, through seeking in spiritual circles the love that we do not feel for ourselves. If we could just be, we would be able to relax from the anxiety of becoming something that we are not, getting something we don’t have, and trying to shape reality according to our own desires.

Too often we do not want to change, but instead want the pain to go away and allow us to remain the same with all our desires and with our image of ourselves being intact. We will not be successful running to anything, because we cannot run away from ourselves. And yet what we most need is what we already are; our essential Self. There is no escape; there is only coming home.
-Kabir Helminski, The Living Presence.

“He who has a why to live can…

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Friedrich Nietzsche