You Are IT

Just as the founding of democracy relocated the center of political power from the king to the individual, so shall the spiritual revolution of our times relocate the center of true religious power, from religious institutions to the heart of the human being.

~ Marianne Williamson

What were you thinking in that moment when you first gazed into the Grand Canyon? What were you thinking when you looked up and saw a shooting star? What were you thinking when you heard the most perfect musical passage, when you closed your eyes and tasted the most exquisite dish any chef ever concocted? What were you thinking that first moment you gazed into the face of your newborn baby?

In that moment, of course, you were not thinking anything at all. The subject and object were completely merged, yet you were aware of bliss deep within. And that moment was the end of time, the end of all conflict and seeking. It was the answer, because no question arose.

But a moment later, you superimposed thought between awareness and the world; you formed a concept and a name for your experience, and you tagged it in memory, so that you could attempt to remember the experience later, and fit it into the memory file called “my story.”

We spend almost our entire lives running through our memory tags, but rarely spend a moment in the raw sweet burning energy of This. This moment is the only moment you are truly alive.

~ Fred LaMotte

See it clearly without judgement and let it go. Come back to the present moment. From now on until the moment of your death, you could do this.

~ Pema Chodron

I love what’s round, nature’s curves and asymptotes. She contains no points, only vanishings; no straight lines or right angles: they only exist in the mind. The mind is the realm of names. When we name things, they solidify into hierarchies. But when we return to the nameless circle, hierarchies melt into streams. Un-naming things makes them God again. The real revolution is silence.

God is fluid, the healing stream of melted names. Not one of us is a thing. Therefore, not one of us is superior or inferior to another. Not one of us, no, not one, is finite. Each creature bends toward the infinite, entangled in every other.

If you want to overthrow the hierarchy of unmelted things, return to the circle. Be nameless. Swim in the fluid of divine silence.

This is why the elites of every religious hierarchy fear meditation, and every true revolution is preceded by a generation of mystics.

~ Fred LaMotte

Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone.

For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.

~ Alan Watts

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

~ Aldous Huxley

Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.

~ Eckhart Tolle

When you are present in this moment, you break the continuity of your story, of past and future. Then true intelligence arises, and also love.

~ Eckhart Tolle

To act generously is to awaken a certain kind of freedom: freedom from the stranglehold of self-concern, and, consequently, freedom to choose a level of responsibility beyond the minimal charge most of us have for ourselves. To give unselfishly is at least momentarily to be free of ourselves, free of greed and attachments, resentments and hatreds, habitual and isolating acts of self-protection.

~ Dale S. Wright

Of all the words we use to disguise the hollowness of the human condition, none is more influential than “myself.”

It consists of a collage of still images—name, gender, nationality, profession, enthusiasms, relationships—that are renovated from time to time, but otherwise are each a relic from one particular experience or another. The defining teaching of the Buddhist tradition, that of non-self, is merely pointing out the limitations of this reflexive view we hold of ourselves.

It’s not that the self does not exist, but that it is as cobbled-together and transient as everything else.

~ Andrew Olendzki