Thank you for this….

Thought for the Day

For those who wish to climb the mountain of spiritual awareness, the path is selfless work. For those who have attained the summit of union with the Lord, the path is stillness and peace.
   – BHAGAVAD GITA

Receiving inspiring thoughts from a range of the world’s great wisdom traditions is a delight.  I received this teaching from the Eknath Easwaran centre – SOURCE

 

 

 

AWARENESS: inspirations from Baha’u’llah, Abdu’l-Baha, Ken Wilber and Rupert Spira

Earlier today I posted a piece about Deikman’s ‘I = awareness’.

Here are four other teachers on the nature of awareness;

1a) “…..according to the great sages, there is something in us that is “always conscious” that is literally conscious or aware at all times through all states, waking, dreaming, sleeping. And that “ever present awareness is Spirit in us”. That underlying current of constant consciousness (or non-dual awareness) is a direct and unbroken ray of pure Spirit itself. It is our connection with the Goddess, our pipeline straight to God.” — Ken Wilber in One Taste p. 64 – -0-

1b) The one thing that we always are already aware of is….awareness itself. We already have basic awareness in the form of the capacity to witness whatever arises. As an old Zen master used to say, “you hear the birds? You see the sun? Who is not enlightened? None of us can even imagine a state where basic awareness is not because we would still be aware of the imagining. Even in dreams we are aware. Moreover, these traditions maintain, there are not two different types of awareness, enlightened versus ignorant. There is only awareness. And this awareness, exactly & precisely as it is, without correction or modification at all, is itself Spirit, since there is nowhere that Spirit is not. The instructions then are to recognize awareness, recognize the Witness, recognize the Self, & abide as that. Any attempt to get awareness is totally beside the point. “But I still don’t see the Spirit!” “You are aware of your not seeing Spirit, and that awareness is itself Spirit!” You can practice mindfulness, because there is forgetfulness; but you cannot practice awareness, because there is only awareness. Ken Wilber in One Taste: p130

2a) BAHA’I INSPIRATIONS: “Earth & heaven cannot contain Me; what can alone contain Me is the heart of him that believeth in Me, and is faithful to My Cause.” How often hath the human heart, which is the recipient of the light of God and the seat of the revelation of the All-Merciful, erred from Him Who is the Source of that light and the Well Spring of that revelation. …..Those hearts, …. that are aware of His Presence, are close to Him, and are to be regarded as having drawn nigh unto His throne. SOURCE – http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/b/GWB/gwb-93.html

2b)…..the Essence of God is incomprehensible to the human mind, for the finite understanding cannot be applied to this infinite Mystery. God contains all: He cannot be contained. ….. The whole is greater than its parts. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá – SOURCE – http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/ab/PT/pt-5.html

3) Rupert Spira inspirations: Awareness cannot be found by the mind, in most cases it is deemed missing. And as a result of that, the peace and the happiness that are inherent in it are also considered missing. And hence the imaginary self goes off into the world in search of the missing peace and happiness. And as we all know, it doesn’t live there. Where does it live? In the simple knowing of our own being. It’s knowing of itself, that is, awareness’s awareness of awareness. And it is your innermost experience at all times. It’s not a new experience. It’s not something that has been lost and has to be found. At worst, we could say it has been overlooked, apparently. The screen has been overlooked due to our exclusive fascination with the body, the mind, and the world.
…….. just relax the focus of your attention from the body, mind and the world. You don’t have to get rid of them, just cease being exclusively focused on anything. It’s like withdrawing your attention, it’s like putting the camera slightly out of focus. Your attention flows back to its source which is your self. You just stand as this space of awareness. You just let the body, the mind and the world do whatever they’ve been conditioned to do. Just let them flow by. NB Rupert’s YouTube videos are here – https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rupert+spira+

The world is illusory; Brahman alone is real; Brahman is the world.

NONDUALITY
On pages 201-205 of One Taste, Wilber says:

Ramana, echoing Shankara, used to say:

The world is illusory;
Brahman alone is real;
Brahman is the world.

KEN WILBER ON THE NATURE OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE…

KEN WILBER ON THE NATURE OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

‘Great art grabs you, against your will, and then suspends your will. You are ushered into a quiet clearing, free of desire, free of grasping, free of ego, free of the self-contraction. And through that opening or clearing in your own awareness may come flashing higher truths, subtler revelations, profound connections. For a moment you might even touch eternity; who can say otherwise, when time itself is suspended in the clearing that great art creates in your awareness?’ Ken Wilber

The Essential Ken Wilber p145

So the call of the Nondual traditions…

“So the call of the Nondual traditions is: Abide as Emptiness, embrace all Form. The liberation is in the Emptiness, never in the Form, but Emptiness embraces all forms as a mirror all its objects. So the Forms continue to arise, and, as the sound of one hand clapping, you are all those Forms. You are the display. You and the universe are One Taste. Your Original Face is the purest Emptiness, and therefore every time you look in the mirror, you see only the entire Kosmos.’
— A Brief History of Everything , p. 240

Transcend but include – Ken Wilber

“Transcending the ego” thus actually means to transcend but include the ego in a deeper and higher embrace, first in the soul or deeper psychic, then with the Witness or primordial Self, then with each previous stage taken up, enfolded, included, and embraced in the radiance of One Taste.

And that means we do not “get rid” of the small ego, but rather, we inhabit it fully, live it with verve, use it as the necessary vehicle through which higher truths are communicated.

Soul and Spirit include body, emotions, and mind; they do not erase them.

Ken Wilber

Source: The Essential Ken Wilber: An Introductory Reader., Pages: 33

A six-element model of being human cf Ken Wilber

A triadic structure, similar to my 3Cs, is pointed out by Ken Wilber (2000 p.5)

He relates perennial philosophy to the Great Chain of Being:

“The perennial core of the wisdom traditions is…the Great Chain of Being and the correlative belief in epistemological pluralism. As Huston Smith summarizes this view, “Reality is graded and with it cognition.”…there are levels of knowing and being.

If we picture the Great Chain as composed of four levels (body, mind, soul and spirit), there are four correlative modes of knowing (sensory, mental, archetypal and mystical) which I usually shorten to the three eyes of knowing; the eye of flesh (empiricism), the eye of mind (rationalism) and the eye of contemplation (mysticism).”

In my SunWALK model instead of KW’s quadratic model/s I have used the three eyes of knowing ‘the eye of flesh (empiricism), the eye of mind (rationalism) and the eye of contemplation (mysticism)’ to link with a triadic model that sees the three voices, as Ken says the I, WE and IT voices, as the ‘internal’ dimensions of what it is to be human PLUS three more external co-equivalents that correspond to the Arts, Humanities & Sciences.

The link is that the three ‘eyes’, senses, intellect and spirit, can, be applied, at will, to any and all of the six elements of the model.

THE PARADIGM SHIFT THAT THE WORLD NEEDS
The paradigm shift that the world needs is to put all learning and teaching in the context of being ‘wholly and fully human’ – using the best we have from all cultures but especially the core spiritual truths of Oneness. “What is it to be wholly and fully human?” was the question that drove the dissertation.

Go here to read more about SunWALK, the logo for which is below;
https://sunwalkmodelofholisticeducation.wordpress.com/

The mystics ask you to take nothing…

“The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience.
The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation.”
Ken Wilber

The most famous version of this perennial…

“The most famous version of this perennial truth occurs in the Chandogya Upanisbad, where it says, “In this very being of yours, you do not perceive the True; but there in fact it is. In that which is the subtle essence of your own being, all that exists has its Self. An invisible and subtle essence is the Spirit of the whole universe. That is the true, that is the Self, and thou, thou art That.” Thou are That—tat Warn asi. Needless to say, the “thou” that is “That,” the you that is God, is not your individual and isolated self or ego, this or that self, Mr. or Ms. So-and-so.”

• Ken Wilber, The Essential Ken Wilber: An Introductory Reader

“So, it is true that reality is one, but equally true that it is many; it is transcendent, but also immanent; it is prior to this world, but it is not other to this world—and so on. Sri Ramana Maharshi had a perfect summary of the paradox of the ultimate: The world is illusory; Brahman alone is real; Brahman is the world. [Eye to Eye: 153-54]

• Ken Wilber, The Essential Ken Wilber: An Introductory Reader

“This is the structure, for example, that thinks that myths are concretely true, literally true. Level five, which I call formal-reflexive [the rational worldview], is the first structure that can not only think but think about thinking. It is thus highly introspective, and it is capable of hypothetical reasoning, or testing propositions against evidence. What Piaget called formal operational thinking. It typically emerges in adolescence, and is responsible for the burgeoning self-consciousness and wild idealism of that period.”

• Ken Wilber, The Essential Ken Wilber: An Introductory Reader

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN TWO SPIRITUAL MASTERS ‘Sanctity holiness…

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN TWO SPIRITUAL MASTERS

‘Sanctity/holiness is realizing how much we are being conditioned by the ego’ – Bede Griffiths quoted by Wayne Teasdale HERE

Teasdale goes on to say that once we have this perspective we have a tool to transcend it! POW!
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Wilber comes back with ‘spirit is that ever-present noticing’ – POW!
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The Mystic Heart dialogue between Wilber & Teasdale PART 7 – Out of the self into the light