Conversations & Questions: 28/01/20

Post-Awakening Expectations and Staying in the 'Only Don't Know'   Q: I can’t say that there have been any significant noticeable changes from Cosmic Consciousness to Unity Consciousness, is this common in your opinion? I guess it's hard not to be waiting for some unmistakable shift? Imogen: Yes, looking for certain experiences or markers post-awakening can get really tricky…

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To Love It All

The arrogant one The fraudulent and untruthful one The one with complete lack of integrity The narcissistic and the deluded one The selfish and self-centered one The unjust and angry one The petulant and unreasonable one The unkind, uncompassionate and unloving one   It is our job to make friends with all these aspects of our self and not…

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Some Thoughts on Politics this Xmas

While faith has a political dimension Party politics is deeply divisive The faithful of whatever stripe Must cleanse their hearts of such division Individually we must include the ‘other’ Warts and all If our hearts are filled with self-righteousness And moral certainty Of the kind that condemns the other That abandons the other As fallen And unworthy Of love…

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The Gift of Love

To meet others we first have to be willing to meet ourselves. To meet ourselves doesn’t just mean to meet the bits we like or are proud of and ignoring those aspects that we wish weren’t there. To meet ourselves means to meet it all, embrace it all, learn to love and accept it all. How can we expect…

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Celebrating the Expressions of Life

In all that I write and share I only ever want to invite you to explore, discover and ultimately accept the entirety of your experience. To standing in YOUR truth, YOUR self... not mine and not anyone else's. To encourage and support you to see more and more of the beauty of your expression, even when that expression isn't…

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When You Find a Friend

When you find a friend where there is no pretence, no mask, no holding back. A friend that you can laugh and cry and shout and be with no matter what flavour of you is shining through. A friend who can see you at your messiest but still see your beauty and your love. A friend who is a…

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A Call Into the Unknown

Fear is a call into the unknown beyond the known, and the mind hates nothing more than the unknown. The mind is the realm of the known, the content of life, but our essential ground of Self is beyond that, it's prior to the known content. It's not the object, it's the subject - the seer, or awareness of…

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Conversations & Questions: 14/11/19

Q: Can you tell me how to get rid of attachment and aversion? It's not about eliminating (getting rid of) anything but seeing that it's all arising in you - consciousness. This is awakening. Experiential focus or identity is shifted from the foreground (phenomena) to the background (consciousness). When this is recognised to be true in your experience the…

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Let Your Heart Sing Its Own Love Song

Don't be tempted to listen to another's heart as each heart has its own way, its own movement that when allowed to fully shine sings its own song. Your song is unique and makes you YOU. No wrong notes, no right notes... just YOUR notes. More often than not all it takes is simply getting out of your own…

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Filling the Low Ground

If there is to be a global awakening then awakening itself needs to be democratised. Meaning everyone needs to recognise that FREEDOM IS FOR THEM, FREEDOM IS FOR ALL. Individuals of all shapes and sizes, in all walks of life are waking up, are discovering their true nature in an abiding way. And whether we have to reject the…

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Some Thoughts on World Mental Health Day

There's a tendency to avoid dealing with the subject of mental health in some spiritual traditions and teachings. To poo poo inner work and growth, to try to meditate away 'negative' emotions, reactions, thought patterns and conditioning. But spirituality and spiritual awakening is not a panacea, it is many things and in some ways a lot of the "problems"…

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In the Embrace of Love

One of the biggest helps for me to move beyond my conditioned responses and traumas and to heal and integrate them has been learning how to cope with strong and intense emotions - which for the record I was pretty fantastic at avoiding for most of my life! I would say that when all the strategies for avoiding no…

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Scary Beautiful Love

In relationships we have to trust and we have to communicate. It's a constant leap of faith to say the things that we think they won't want to hear and we won't want to hear the answer to, to constantly face the fear of rejection and hurt. But if you do take that leap of faith and trust, then…

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Courageous Openness

When we show ourselves to others, fully open and vulnerable with our hidden tender aspects, without self censoring and hiding, we step into the conversation, into the relationship in a new way. Through this we also invite others to free themselves of their constraints and speak their tender truth too. It's a true gift, the gift of openness and…

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Living with Change

It’s true that we have be willing to stand behind our truth as we see it, to defend, to justify, to explain. But also more importantly we need to learn to change our minds, to let go of our blind loyalties to people, ideas, views, and positions as we go along, and keep doing it. We need to be…

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The Awakened Heart is a Broken Heart

There's grief in awakening. Grief at the loss of autonomy, grief at the loss of purpose and meaning. Grief at the loss of knowing and certainty, however deluded they were. There's grief over losing one's power, and one's familiar identity. There's so much loss in awakening. When it dawns that there's nothing we can keep, nothing can be retained…

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A Place to Contemplate

We’ve lost the focus of a spiritual centre in communities and culture today. Don’t get me wrong I am not advocating for religion in its traditional sense, but what I am noting is that life used to have a balance of both the practical or material and spiritual. At the heart of our communities used to sit a church…

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Healing Our Traumas

Many of us have experienced trauma and hurt from abusive, harmful or dysfunctional relationships of all descriptions and types in our lives. I bow at your courage to try and move beyond it and heal. Equally if you’re not quite there in your journey that’s okay, I honor that too. I feel conversations about this topic are so vital…

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Part & Parcel

Sometimes I think this is a twisted culture where it’s so hard to be who and what we are, express ourselves naturally with our community. Instead we’re trained to take our essence and modify it and package it so we can sell it to each other. It’s not so easy to share our gifts and talents freely in natural…

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Buckle Up!

I find it funny that the further into this journey of life I get into the less and less 'spiritual' I become. Granted, I never self-identified as particularly spiritual, but at least outwardly I certainly was a card-carrying member of the 'spiritual seekers brigade'. I was brought up surrounded by spiritual types, I meditated from aged 6, I want…

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The Difficulty of Pretending with Others

I was asked the other day how I deal with being around others, particularly when there's a level of pretending or not speaking your truth that seems to be required of you. --- I too know all too well this feeling of suffocation in the company of others. The subtle unsaid permissions of what you can say, which topics…

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My Role

There’s so much focus on enlightenment and awakening in the abstract. In the projected ideas and ideals of what people, seekers, see in their idolisation of gurus, teachers and enlightened sages. In the goals and focus of wanting never-ending bliss and happiness, and superhuman abilities and powers because they think that’s what it’s all about. The person becoming bigger…

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On Spiritual Transmission

One field of consciousness appearing as everything. As a seeker I was always sensitive to spiritual 'presence'. I noticed it in groups of TM meditators, watching Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on videos, yagyas, and the darshan of sages I met, even in certain places such as Arunachala. The energy was there, call it what you will; Shakti, presence, transmission. Back…

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Being Human

The only way forward and through this life is to embrace our humanity, not run from it. It's no good hiding in "nothing is effecting me" and "I am beyond it all." While true on an absolute level, it doesn't account for the lived, embodied experience of being human. To be beyond it all is to accept it all.…

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Where ‘In’ Becomes ‘As’

What are we but a self-knowing energetic field of consciousness? And what is nature of energy if not a quality(s) of consciousness? Self-examining our nature, that is, exploring consciousness with consciousness naturally results in the discovery of our formless nature. When we settle in to the direct observation of our essential subjectivity we find that we don't find any…

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Before Thinking – I Am, You Are

Our trouble starts when we privilege thinking over direct experience. When this becomes an ingrained habit of relating to the world and ourselves even the suggestion to drop out of the mind and into the non-conceptual being can be violently resisted. But for the sake of our peace and freedom we must learn to let go. Attachment to views,…

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Why Not Choose Freedom?

In my last post I said that that when it came down to it most people didn’t actually want to wake up. Someone asked for my thoughts on why that might be the case. This was my reply... In terms of why most people don't really want awakening/liberation, I'd say that this freedom requires (and is) a willingness to…

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Taking Off The Mask

There is a mask that we've all experienced. Many even have several masks, each for a different set of circumstances, a different set of people. The mask that you wear for your boss is not the same mask that you wear for your grandmother, which is not the same mask you wear for your friends. All a partial view…

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Problems

Sometimes it seems there’s a whole generation of people who are perpetually triggered and always tense. They live in a state of constant reactivity. They’ll often report the reasons are things like systemic injustice, racism, sexism, etc. And so their anger and agitation is justified. Maybe so. As a generation Millennials (and Gen-Z) are not unique in their exposure…

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Where Does Your Loyalty Lie?

What if your true Self was something your mind rejected, found disgusting or worthless, what then? Would you spend your whole life rejecting what is at the core of your Being? Or would you give up the constant resistance and accept what the mind won't? It's exhausting to be in resistance to what is. What is it in you…

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To Do or Not To Do

Awakened mind is the impersonal sentience and not the contents of awareness. Even the sense ‘I am’ is known by this awareness. But who can say how this thing works? Getting into a technical analysis of the structure of consciousness and the nature of awakening becomes an exercise of intellect, and therefore true enough on that level but not…

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Embracing Your Totality

We deny our humanity. We hide in the ideals of 'The Absolute' and yet it's the absolute that contains all of humanity. It's the absolute (field of awareness) from which all of this springs. Does awareness have such distinctions? Does awareness *need* life to look a certain way. No! That is the small limiting notions of the human mind,…

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Acceptance = Love

In my travels it's become very clear to me that to talk about acceptance is to talk about love, and to talk about love is to talk about acceptance. They are one and the same. They are the key to peace and freedom. They are the key to the recognition of your own nature. They are the key to…

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Notice and Return

You have all the tools, all the things you need in life. You are not lacking in anyway. You are not broken, you just need to accept all that you are... accept even the seeming imperfections into the wholeness and you will see that your light was there all along... hidden under the rock of self doubt, strategies and…

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Fullness

Is nondual spirituality nihilistic? Desirelessness, powerlessness, emptiness. Sacrifice, surrender, formlessness. Are these more fundamental than, say: fullness, all-possibilities, bountifulness, unboundedness, bliss? It’s all well and good focusing on the qualities of mind required for the apprehension of silence. But this emptiness is full, this fullness is empty. All around me I see fullness, I see rich intelligence and abundance…

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May You Live in Interesting Times

When the awakened view dawns it becomes apparent that everything we experience points to it, and always did. It’s the recognition that each moment is a Dharma Gate, the opportunity to realize the nature of what-is and it becomes fascinating and fun to see how the consideration of any given domain or field of knowledge offers an opening to…

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Love

Many of our words and concepts, we think we know what they mean, when often our understanding hangs short of the great depths of being that we miss. Our recognition stalls at the conceptual and clings there instead of plunging into the open experiential oneness that upholds and contains all.   So words like ‘love’ can be like objects,…

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The Calling of The Soul

How much of our time do we spend bracing ourselves against the possibility of someone else's reactivity? When we fear to break a rule or make a mistake, how often is that apprehension based on the anticipation of having to deal with someone's anger, sadness, or disappointment? Bumping into people's reactive emotions is unpleasant and depending on how much…

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Mirroring Back to Self

We are all figuring out life best we can, in our messy and imperfect, perfectly human way. Life includes in it the whole spectrum of experience and there's no guidebook or rule book, there's no one way to live life. A lot of the people I meet along the way are looking to others to give them answers. But…

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Awakening and Creativity

Spiritual awakening is a bit like the creative process, because when you engage in meditation or introspection or inquiry, if you're motivated by money or getting you want or anything like that it pollutes the process. It's more important to be open and to play and be curious, to be intuitive and fearless rather than be wondering what you're…

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Untitled Thoughts #8

The ego constricts around a more-or-less fixed mode of being. So when the ego is transcended and the constrictions are released, then the manifest being reorients to a more natural, unconstrained mode. And we don’t have any real idea what that might look like. During the ego’s reign fundamental embodied modes of intelligence may well have been completely subsumed,…

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Waking up in the Internet Age

In the age of the Internet the possibilities are endless. So how does this apply to Enlightenment and Self-Realization? What does it take to wake up? #BootstrappingEnlightenment – Take advantage of what you've got, don't focus on what you haven't. It's all here for you. Ask us questions in the comments down below... Transcription: Okay, so I have this…

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The Compassion of Nonduality

The teachings of nonduality can sometimes seem to be somewhat abstract, or removed from one’s lived experience, or even rejecting of it. It may be that these teachings, being so uncompromising about the causes of suffering and its remedies, seem to disregard the human-ness of life in favour of a cold, relentless discrimination. But the truth is that the process…

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The Impulse to Spiritual Practice

The impulse to spiritual practice is the impulse to awaken so even if practice is wrong or poor or difficult or ineffectual it's never misguided, and in the worst cases it can be redirected or transformed to better express the core impulse. All the prayers and mantras and chants are well and good but the urge to practice goes…

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Not Me and Not You?

I was sitting outside a café with friend some time ago, and we were talking about ‘consensus reality’ as he put it. He was wishing that he could be free of its influence. I sympathised with his POV but pointed out that we aren’t actually bound by it, and it’s enough to recognise one’s existence as prior to the…

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Transgressing the Prescribed Spiritual Path

In my life journey thus far I’ve had to transgress two* major spiritual paths/groups/movements that were both whole-life encompassing – Guru, lifestyle, friends and family, home, job, it felt like a lot could and would be lost. It’s was for sure a very difficult thing to navigate but I feel it’s important to share and talk about as I…

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Humility

True humility comes when you run out of strategies and realise that you're powerless Surrender comes as a result of this It's something that happens not something 'you' do This is the difference between prescription and description in spiritual teachings The seeker hears prescription Because it can only understand what it hears in terms of itself It's personal It's…

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Untitled Thoughts #7

What magic comes from Silence? All of it Can’t you see it all comes from Nothing? I’m a voice crying out from the wilderness “It doesn’t matter!” None of it matters Perhaps What matters Is that we suffer Or that suffering is Can be What do we do with that? What can we do? More questions Find the one who asks…

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Fear

The process (of awakening) requires us to face the most profound fear of our own annihilation or destitution To face that fear and continue is the challenge of awakening In the end there’s nothing we can do We either come to the edge and let go or we don’t Rather, it will happen or it won’t There is an…

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Untitled Thoughts #6

This is new It’s all new Memory serves up similar visions That give the impression That you’ve seen it before That you know this But it’s all fresh So stay awake You don’t know what’s coming The bleeding edge Face first into the ocean spray of existence The sharp breeze Wake up! The hum of Being Alive, alive This is no…

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Willingness

If you’re serious about self-discovery, if you’re serious about the truth, then you have to be willing to give up everything you think you know. You have to be willing to question and look at every assumption and become like a clean slate. Because untruth and suffering hides under the rocks of unexplored assumptions. Here the most important thing…

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Untitled Thoughts #5

Nothing exists in isolation So many conditions that we take for granted For any single thing to occur The existence of a universe is required And everything that ever was Funny that So stay out of it You’re doing less than you imagine Nothing at all in fact What a beautiful day Of course the universe doesn’t exist That’s…

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Untitled Thoughts #4

Drop it all Leave it all alone And if you’re still having trouble It means you’ve picked it up again Simple? Yes it is Do I need to elaborate? After that is there any more to say? Is that the final answer? The only instruction? Maybe Any more would be just to assuage doubts Like, “Yes, drop *everything*” “Even…

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On Nondual Understanding

It’s often the case that nondual understanding in the dualistic mind is the product of ‘secondary mind’, the logical, analytical mind, and not a wisdom emanation from Pure Mind. True wisdom is born directly from Self-nature without reference to understanding. It’s the difference between knowledge born of Self-recognition, and the cogitations of the functional mind and it’s rationalistic outputs.…

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Untitled Thoughts #3

If we stop giving the mind attentional objects then it will tend to settle into its own non-conceptual, silent nature. It’s simply a case of remaining in an open and non-grasping posture. The mind wants to settle, remaining always in a state of engagement is exhausting. Openness and non-grasping are a relief. But there are a couple of ways…

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So What’s on My Mind?

I’ve been concerned with identity politics and PC culture lately. I don’t quite know why, maybe it’s that I’m seeing in the outside world, in groups, the same kind of dynamics of fear, control, and suppression that the ego uses on a personal level. I’ve been noticing that my attention has been liberated from the narrow introspective view that…

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10 Years Ago Today…

10 years ago today Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died. I remember the day clearly, we were in the Dominican Republic on a holiday marking our 1st year wedding anniversary. I turned on the TV (probably the only time I did) to see it on the BBC news tick-a-tape completely out of the blue – “THE BEATLES GURU DIES”. At the…

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Untitled Thoughts #2

Is there evidence for the existence of an outside/objective world separate and independent from the awareness in which it appears? We can see that the awareness itself is malleable to an (presumably) infinite degree. Or not. Are there limits to the plasticity of relative arising? Is there a higher and lower limit, a range of phenomenality? Is there a…

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Untitled Thoughts #1

If we saw the world at different scales we’d have quite a different experience and conception of reality. If we saw it at the atomic scale there’d be a lot of empty space and atoms but no material objects as such. Looking beyond atoms we’d see vibrations of the underlying field. Layers.. People at levels of consciousness report similar…

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Ready, Steady, Wake!

To awaken you have to be ready. But there’s nothing you can do to make yourself ready, because you’re not doing anything, because the you you think you are doesn’t exist. So it’ll happen when it happens. Not a moment too soon, not a moment too late. So do or don’t do, it’s all as it should be. This…

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What Is Enlightenment?

What is Enlightenment, Moksha, Buddhahood, Liberation? It’s the obliteration of the Ten Fetters, the complete dissolution of the occluding mental densities that give rise to avidya. It’s the destruction of the ‘thicket of views’ that confuses and confounds the realization of Self and of life in the Natural State. It is ‘what remains’ when the cloud of unknowing passes.…

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Empty Your Cup

Beginner’s Mind is very helpful in Self-inquiry. What that means is you let go of all of your concepts, all of your learning, everything you think you know – just drop it for now.  Put it in your pocket, tuck it away and come at the observation and inquiry with a fresh, open, empty mind. In this way you…

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Questions

What is This? Who am I? What am I? What kind of answers am I looking for? What could satisfy? Questions are beautiful, more illuminating than answers. Questions stop the mind. So if I told you “you are consciousness”, would that help? Would you be satisfied? Would your suffering diminish at all with that piece of information? Perhaps you…

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The Personal Path

The seemingly simple task of describing a path from ‘a’ to ‘be’ unravels the very notions that uphold the conditioned view. It’s impossible to find a starting point, there’s no beginning. It seems like a cliché but it’s true, any given point is arbitrary, no ‘event’ is original, always there is a preceding moment. So where could I begin…

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The Great Happening

Your life is not your responsibility, you’re not doing it, you’re not ‘living’ your life, if anything life is living you. It’s important to recognize this. The burden of activity is not yours. Doership is a concept that has been imposed on the uncaused nature of life. Even the notion of a cosmic, supreme doer is an imposition. We…

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Keep Quiet

That we believe ourselves to be a person is completely taken for granted. We don’t even think to look into this, to question its veracity. We’ve been conditioned to stop short in our curiosity about our nature. Go all the way. Use your discrimination and intelligence to fathom what’s true. I can set you down the right track, many…

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Trust

Trust, rest, all is well. You are home, always. This is it, believe it or not. Hope is for fools. Running, chasing, holding, grasping, needing, wanting. This is it, be here now. Let the hope fall away, need be gone, cherish what is, here, this. Simple, silence, source. Time? Gone too. Space? Just this, no inner, no outer, no…

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The Cave Where the Dragon Sleeps

Have a practice. Take time out each and every day to sit in the cave of your interior and wait and watch. This is where the dragons are and this is where the gold is. It is the cave of the unknown and that is the place of fear. It takes courage to enter and to face whatever comes.…

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You Are What You Seek

Why do we practice, why do we seek? Is it to attain or achieve some conceptual goal we call Enlightenment? Or is it to recognise that in every moment of our existence we are inescapably aware, we are here, we exist? In fact we are awareness itself, we only have to look right now to see the fact of…

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Seeing Beyond Limitations

The problem of human suffering is the problem of misapprehension. Our ideas about the nature of the world are at odds with the reality of it. The key mistake is that we take ourselves to be separate individuals existing in an objective world. We believe that our sense of I-ness originates in the physical body and in that body…

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From Awakening to Freedom

The recognition of our nature as non-conceptual awareness — spiritual awakening — is relatively simple. But the consequences of this recognition typically have challenging implications for our human-ness, conditioned as it is around the ego-belief. Awakening is rarely the end of the story. A reconstruction of the lived experience and outward expression in light of the newly acknowledged awareness-identity is inevitable, but it…

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You Are Never Lost

My only aim is to help you recognise yourself as boundless, ever-present awareness right here and now, and to recognise your essential wholeness and completeness. Your true nature is easeful, lack-free Being; freedom and peace is who and what you are. Your awareness-nature is where you’re looking from, feeling from, sensing from. Look for yourself, identify yourSelf this very…

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