In yogic view, shakti is the energy essence of the phenomenal world, the purely active force in the manifestation of the universe. Shakti is seen as the divine Mother, the essence of the feminine principle, because she brings the world into being. She is also energy, the primordial power that is always at play, creating, preserving, destroying, the world of form. There is no object or event that doesn’t disclose the presence of her power. But the body of a yoga adept is a particularly open channel for the play of pure energy.

The thing is though, that you can’t really understand the action of Shakti in the world without understanding Shiva, Shakti’s consort. Shiva is the masculine principle in creation. He is the pure witness consciousness, the archetypal seer. He is the formless brahman, pure spirit, transcendent, without any attributes. You might think of Shiva as the still point, the absolute subject, the One. And Shakti is the dance. It’s like T.S. Eliot said “Without the still point, there would be no dance.” In the yogic view, the entire universe moves between these two poles – shiva and shakti. Pure consciousness and pure power. Pure being and pure becoming. The still point and the dance. Always arcing toward one another.

Here’s the really cool thing, In hatha yoga-the practice of postures and yogic breathing-the whole drama of the universe gets acted out right within this very earthly body. In this drama all the condensed powers of shakti lie coiled at the base of the spine. This is what we know as kundalini, the essence of divine goddess energy. The kundalini shakti rises up to meet her consort shiva, pure witness consciousness, who resides in an energy center at the energy center at the crown of the head, the so-called crown chakra. The union of shiva and shakti, which is the goal of hatha yoga, is accomplished when shakti moves up through the central energy column in the area of the spine-called the shushumna-and arrives at the crown. On its trip to meet shiva, this highly condensed energy of kundalini shakti awakens all the latent energy centers in the body, and as this happens, the body moves spontaneously into hundreds of postures. The dance that results is the interplay of energy and consciousness, or what yogis call lila-the divine play.

…
An argument for radical truthfulness goes deep: Lying takes you out of alignment with reality. This was Gandhi’s position, based on the insight that truth lies at the very heart of existence, of reality. A yogic text, the Taittiriya Upanishad, says that God is truth itself, while a Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, calls truth “the signet ring of God.” In psychological terms, lying disconnects us from reality and it always makes us a little bit crazy. Anyone who grew up in a family that kept secrets will recognize the eerie feeling of cognitive dissonance that arises when facts are concealed. That dissonance currently rages through the bloodstream of society; lies and secrets having become so embedded in our corporate, governmental, and personal lives that most of us assume that the president, the media, and our religious institutions are continually lying to us.

When the consequences of lying are so spiritually and socially destructive, why would an ethical person ever choose to tell an untruth? First, an ethical person might decide to lie if telling the factual truth would compromise other, equally important values. In the Mahabharata, the great ethical treatise of the Indian tradition, there is a famous moment involving a lie. Krishna is guiding the righteous Pandavas in a pivotal battle against the forces of evil. Krishna, who is considered by orthodox Hindus to embody divine truth in human form, orders the righteous king Yudhisthira to tell a lie in order to demoralize the enemy general. Yudhisthira agrees to tell the first lie of his life—that the general’s son, Aswatthama, has been killed in battle. Krishna’s position is that in a battle against terrible evil, one does what one must to win. (The position is similar to the Allied disinformation tactic in World War II, which misled the Nazi intelligence about the real target of D-day.) In short, Krishna makes the decision to lie because it serves what he perceives as higher values: those of justice and, ultimately, peace.

My college philosophy teacher used to make this point with a personal example. As a Jewish child living in Germany, she was saved from being captured by the Nazis because a Catholic family lied to the Gestapo about her presence in their back bedroom. For the family to have told the truth would have brought about her death. It was a small lie for a larger truth.

Another situation in which lying might be ethical is when the truth is simply too harsh for the person who is receiving it. A friend of mine, when diagnosed with breast cancer, told her 90-year-old mother that everything was fine, because she recognized that telling the truth about her condition would create too much anxiety for her already-fragile mother.

Conversely, there are times when telling a factual truth can be an act of disguised or overt aggression. When Fran tells her friend Allison that she saw Allison’s husband with another woman, Fran may be speaking out of concern for her friend, but she may also be expressing a hidden hostility or envy. Most of us can remember less dramatic but equally painful examples of bitter truth telling: disclosures made in anger, hurtful comments about a friend’s or partner’s secret vulnerabilities, revelations that destroy trust. In the past 30 years, especially in certain spiritual communities, there’s been a prevailing ethic that privileges full disclosure, public confession, and extreme transparency in relationships. The results have been liberating in some respects, destructive in others. So it seems vital that we each find our own way of balancing truthfulness with other values. One great yardstick to use is called “the four gates of speech,” which include the following questions: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? and Is this the right moment to say it? When we feel caught between speaking a bitter truth and keeping quiet, these questions help us sort out the priorities.

As I’ve said, balancing the relative value of, say, truth and kindness, is not always easy, and it requires a high degree of honesty—especially about your own deep inner motives. If the compulsion to be relentlessly honest sometimes conceals aggression, the decision to hide the truth because of kindness, or because the time is wrong, can be a cover for your fears or for the desire to stay inside of your comfort zone. Radical truth telling is simple. You just plunge in and do it, regardless of the effect it has on others. Discriminating truth telling demands far more attentiveness, emotional intelligence, and self-understanding.

As you begin to look at how you lie, it becomes possible to find out why you lie. My friend Alice is getting divorced and is facing a child-custody battle. Her lawyer suggested that she write a description of all the incidents in which her ex-husband had failed as a father and husband. She wrote a series of “He said, then I said” dialogues, highlighting the ways in which her husband had hurt her and their daughter. When Alice reread the document, she realized that she hadn’t included her own hurtful words and actions. Part of the reason she hadn’t was tactical: She wanted sole custody of their child. But another part of it was her need to feel justified about leaving her marriage. “Once I started to look deeper at these conversations, I could see that both of us were at fault. In fact, there were times I acted like a total bitch. I so much didn’t want to see myself that way that my memory would literally distort what happened.”

Alice was confronting what most of us would recognize as a particularly insidious form of untruth: the justifications, excuses, and blaming strategies that we use to avoid facing the gap between how we want to act and how we actually behave. For the postmodern, psychologically informed yogi, Patanjali’s vow to unconditional truth demands much more than a commitment to factual accuracy. It asks you to become transparent to yourself, to be willing to gaze unflinchingly, yet without bitterness or self-blame, at the parts of yourself that you are afraid to expose to scrutiny. Only when you’re willing to look at your areas of falseness can you discover the deepest possibilities of the practice of truth.

Here are the basics in the practice of truthfulness: Pay attention to factual truth. Notice and make a point of calling yourself on the urge to conceal embarrassing facts, make yourself look better, justify mistakes, or run away from confrontation. When you notice yourself telling an untruth, acknowledge that you did it. As much as possible, make a point of not saying anything you know to be untrue.

As you learn how to catch your own characteristic patterns of untruth—both inner and outer—you will also begin to notice that sometimes truths need to be spoken, and other times remaining silent is an acceptable alternative. In other words, your commitment to truthfulness comes to include an authentic and trustworthy capacity for discriminating speech. Truth is a genuine teacher. When you decide to follow where it leads—constantly asking questions such as, What is my motive for speaking? Is it kind and necessary to say this? If not now, how will I know that it’s right to say this?—the power of truth will show its subtleties as well as teach its wisdom. Patanjali says that through truthfulness we gain such a power that all our words turn out to be true. I don’t believe that he means we become alchemists, able to turn the base metal of lies into the gold of reality just through our words. Instead, I believe that he is actually talking about the power to speak from inspiration—to hold firmly to the truth that is not only factual, but that illuminates, that can be received, and that reflects the deeper state within the heart.

“In the world of yoga, you must remember that there are hell realms and heavenly realms and animal realms and other realms where souls abide. But the human realms are the most precious. Here in the human realms we suffer, but we also have the tools to wake up. And unlike the heavenly realms of the devas and brahmas, celestial beings, we have the desire to wake up. The human realms have just the right mixture of pleasure and pain to produ us toward taking the path of liberation.”

“You have come to live in the gurus house, now. This is a very auspicious time, you know. Maybe thousands of lifetimes you wait for this. You must be very careful not to waste it.” Amrit talked about the preciousness of taking a period of time to live quietly, deliberately, away from the restlessness of our culture. “There must be movement back and forth from the mountaintop to the marketplace, but just now is a moment for the mountaintop. How will you use it, I wonder?” He talked about how yogis discovered the amazing potentioals present in the “seed of the self” and challenged us to be yogic scientists, to experiment while we were at Kripalu with those ways of living that helped us to be fully alive. He urged us to tune in carefully to our energy, to listen to it, not to abuse it. “A conscious use of energy is the hallmark of the yogic lifestyle.”

Continuing to read this book for the second time and still finding yummy tidbits. These are from the final chapter of the book.

Without the impairment of (egoic) dysfunction, our intelligence comes into full alignment with the outgoing cycle of universal intelligence and its impulse to create. We become conscious participants in the creation of form. We don’t identify with what we create and so don’t lose ourselves in what we do. We are learning that the act of creation may involve energy of the highest intensity, but that is not “hard work” or stressful. We need to understand the difference between stress and intensity, as we shall see. Struggle or stress is a sign of the ego, as are negative reactions when we experience obstacles.
The force behind the ego’s wanting creates “enemies,” that is to say, reaction in the form of an opposing force equal in intensity. The stronger the ego, the stronger the sense of separateness between people. The only actions that do not cause opposing reactions are those that are aimed at the good of all. They are inclusive not exclusive.

The three modalities of awakened doing…
There are three ways in which consciousness can flow into what you do and thus through you into this world, three modalities in which you can align your life with the creative power of the universe. Modality means the underlying energy-frequency that flows into what you do and connects your actions with the awakened consciousness that is emerging into this world. What you do will be dysfunctional and of the ego unless it arises out of one of these modalities.
The modalities are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm.
Whatever you cannot enjoy doing, you can at least accept that this is what you have to do. Acceptance means: For now, this is what this situation, this moment, requires me to do, and so I do it willingly. If you can neither enjoy or bring acceptance to what you do – stop. Otherwise, you ar enot taking responsibility for the only thing you can really take responsibility for, which also happens to be the one thing that really matters: your state of consciousness or mind.
Enjoyment
The peace that comes from surrendered action turns into a sense of aliveness when you actually enjoy what you are doing. On the new earth, enjoyment will actually replace wanting as the motivating power behind people’s actions. You don’t have to wait for something “meaningful” to come into your life so that you can finally enjoy what you do. There is more meaning in joy than you will ever need. The “waiting to start living” syndrome is one of the most common delusions of the unconscious state. When you say, I enjoy doing this or that, it is really a misperception. It makes it appear that the joy comes from what you do, but that is not the case. Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world. The misperception that joy comes from what you do is normal, and it is also dangerous, because it creates the belief that joy is something that can be derived from something else, such as an activity or thing.
Then what is the relationship between something that you do and that state of joy? You will enjoy any activity in which you are fully present, any activity that is not just a means to an end.
Enthusiasm
Then there is another way of creative manifestation that may come to those who remain true to their inner purpose of awakening. Suddenly one day they know what their outer purpose is. They have a great vision, a goal, and from then on they work toward implementing that goal. Their goal or vision is usually connected in some way to something that on a smaller scale they are doing and enjoying already. Enthusiasm means there is a deep enjoyment in what you do plus the added element of a goal or a vision that you work toward.

The most important, the primordial relationship in your life is your relationship with the Now, or rather whatever form the Now takes, that is to say what is or what happens. If your relationship with the Now is dysfunctional, that dysfunction will be reflected in every relationship and every situation you encounter. The ego could be defined simply in this way: a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment.

Do you want the present moment to be your friend or your enemy? The present moment is inseparable from life, so you are really deciding what kind of a relationship you want to have with life.

Time is what the ego lives on. The stronger the ego, the more time takes over your life. Almost every thought you think is then concerned with the past or future, and your sense of self depends on the past for your identity and on the future for its fulfillment. Fear, anxiety, expectation, regret, guilt, anger are the dysfunctions of the time-bound state of consciousness.

There are three ways in which the ego will treat the present moment: as a means to an end, as an obstacle, or as an enemy. When this pattern operates in you, you can recognize it and – decide again.

Chapter 5 – The Pain Body

Any negative emotion that is not fully faced and seen for what it is the moment it arises doesn’t completely dissolve and lives on in you later coming up as illness, addiction, drama.

In intimate relationships, pain-bodies are often clever enough to lie low until you start living together and preferable have signed a contract committing yourself to be with this person for the rest of your life.

You may wonder whether this is your partner’s real face that you had never seen before and whether you made a dreadful mistake in choosing this person. It is of course not the real face, just the pain-body that has taken possession. It would be hard to find a partner who does not carry a pain-body, but it would perhaps be wise to choose someone whose pain-body is not excessively dense.

Although the body is intelligent it cannot tell the difference between thoughts and reality. Every time you think of something negative or some problem your body will have a response to it.

You cannot expect someone to act beyond their level of consciousness. You must let go and forgive those who’ve hurt you. It’s never on purpose.

It’s all about experiencing negative emotions when they come up. Letting go of the repeated, painful stories we tell ourselves over and over again and make part of our identity.

After all, you’re not merely a human who’s struggling to have a spiritual experience. You are, in truth, a spirit, having a human experience.

Spirituality is not separate and distinct from you and your everyday life. Igniting your divine spark is a simple perspective shift. An internal nod.

Know this: Igniting my divine spark has also kicked my ass five ways from Sunday. My ordinary perceptions are constantly challenged. My limits are made clear and, then broken open. I cannot play safe or dumb or keep myself cocooned or judgmental. My unhealthy patterns, issues, and parts of me that are not in alignment with my divine spark come up for confrontations all the time. In order to learn who I really am, I have to learn who I am not. It’s not always pretty. It’s definitely not always fun. Truth sets me free, but it can sometimes hurt like a thousand bee stings and a bad colonic. I have ended what have felt like good relationships, moved across the country, made risky career moves, gotten pretty ill, changed my lifestyle, and experienced extended periods in which I’ve been lonely as hell and sexually disinterested, all in response to my spiritual path. My sense of self has expanded and contracted like a schizophrenic accordion. I have questioned everything, and I have felt nothing. I have told the universe to fuck off, and I have fallen down weeping at its compassionate response.

Learning how to live my truth, out loud and on purpose with inner authority, is worth it. Merging my humanity with my divinity is worth it.

You know those people you meet whose eyes are sort of vacant and dull, lifeless? Those who are just slumping along life’s crowded highways, not ever really reaching deeper into their soul’s pockets? What about the opposite type, those whose eyes dance and beam and cry and flash? The ones who seem to glow, despite their imperfections, who tend to attract good friends and good happenings like a magnet, who seem to beam out a calm and fearless sense of self? Well, which would you rather be?

I think the title pretty much sums up this book.

I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me not to get too attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough – but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for a riotous and endless waves of transformation.

“Groceries,” Richard says, “listen to me. Someday you’re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life waschanging and you were in the best possible place in the world for it – in a beautiful place of worship, surrounded by grace. Take this time, every minute of it. Let things work themselves out here in India.”
“But I really loved him.”
“Big deal. So you fell in love with someone. Don’t you see what happened? This guy touched a place in your heart deeper than you thought you were capable of reaching. I mean you got zapped, kiddo. But that love you felt, that’s just the beginning. You just got a taste of love. That’s just limited little rinky-dink mortal love. Wait till you see how much more deeply you can love than that. Heck, Groceries – you have the capacity to someday love the whole world. It’s your destiny. Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing.” I was actually crying. “And please don’t laugh at me now, but I think the reason it’s so hard for me to get over this guy is because I seriously believed he was my soul mate.”
“He probably was. Your problem is you don’t understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you will ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it. Your problem is you just can’t let this one go. It’s over Groceries….

Along the same lines as The Power of Now, this book is about the ego, and how much we let it run wild and take our lives into a negative space. I really can’t type all of my notes to this book, too much. You just have to read it if you’re interested.

The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you. In this way, cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy, love, creativity, and aliveness. They are concealed in the still gap between the perception and the interpretation. Of course we have to use words and thoughts. They have their own beauty – but do we need to become imprisoned in them?
Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much. Language consists of five basic sounds produced by the vocal cords. They are the vowels a, e, i, o, u. The other sounds are consonants produced by air pressure. Do you believe some basic sounds could ever explain who you are, the ultimate purpose of the universe, or even what a tree or stone is in it’s depth?

I was still thinking about her (crazy lady rambling incessantly on train) when I was in the men’s room prior to entering the library. As I was washing my hands I thought: I hope I don’t end up like her. The man next to me looked briefly in my direction, and I was suddenly shocked when I realized that i hadn’t just thought those words, but I mumbled them aloud. “Oh my god, I’m already like her,” I thought. Wasn’t my mind as incessantly active as hers? There were only minor differences between us. The predominant underlying emotion behind her thinking seemed to be anger. In my case it was mostly anxiety. She thought out loud. I thought – mostly – in my head. If she was mad then everyone was mad, including myself. There were differences in degree only.

For a moment, I was able to stand back from my own mind and see it from a deeper perspective, as it were. There was a brief shift from thinking to awareness. I was still in the men’s room, but alone now, looking at my face in the mirror. At that moment of detachment from my mind, I laughed out loud. I may have sounded insane, but it was the laughter of sanity, the laughter of the big-bellied Buddha. “Life isn’t as serious as my mind makes it out to be.” That’s what the laughter was saying. But it was only a glimpse, very quickly to be forgotten. I would spend the next 3 years in anxiety and depression, completely identified with my mind. I had to get close to suicide before awareness returned, and then it was much more than a glimpse. I became free of compulsive thinking and ot he false, mind-made I.

The ego tends to equate having with Being. I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen my others turns into how you see yourself.

Those who are identified with their good looks, physical strength, or abilities experience suffering when those attributes fade and disappear, as of course they will, Their very identiy that was based on them is then threatened with collapse. In either case, ugly or beautiful, people derive their identity from the I-thought that they erroneously attach to the mental image or concept of their body, which after all is no more that a physical form that shares the destiny of all forms – impermanence and ultimately decay.

The conceptual “I” cannot survive without the conceptual “other.” The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of fault finding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said ” Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notic the log that is in your own eye?” At the other end of the scale there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the bible Jesus’ question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.

Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the world makes up so you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some egos that perhaps don’t have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don’t know what you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people, either ito their face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even just think about them, is often part of this pattern. Name-calling is the crudest form of such labeling and of the ego’s need to be right and triumph over others: “jerk, bastard, bitch” – all definitive pronouncements that you can’t argue with. On the next level down on the scale of unconsciousness you have shouting and screaming, and not much below that physical violence.

Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people and addseven more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You regret other people’s greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn’t have done. The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the “fault” that you perceive in another isn’t even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself feel superior. At other times the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.

Non Reaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond the ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of non reaction if you can recognize someone’s behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it’s not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned. At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection is being conscious. Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Non reaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for non reaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.
The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only about other people but also about situations. What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation: make it into an enemy. The implication is always: this should not be happening; I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be doing this, I am being treated unfairly. And the ego’s biggest enemy of all, is of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.

Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake or deficiency so it can be put right. And to refrain from complaining doesn’t necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or behavior. There is no ego in telling the waiter that your soup is cold and needs to be heated up – if you stick to the facts, which are always neutral. “How dare you serve me cold soup”, that’s complaining. There is a “me” here that loves to feel personally offended by the cold soup and is going to make the most of it, a “me that enjoys making someone wrong. The complaining is in service of the ego and not of change. Sometimes it becomes obvious the ego doesn’t really want change so that it can go on complaining.

See if you can catch, that is to say, notice, the voice in your head, perhaps the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a conditioned mind pattern, a thought. Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you are the awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background there is awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind. The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old conditioned mind pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. The old mind-pattern or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while because it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human unconsciousness behind it, but everytime it is recognized, it is weakened.

There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position – a perspective, an opinion, a judgment, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right. In other words: you need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger sense of who you are. Not only a person, but also a situation can be made wrong through complaining and reactivity, which always implies that “this should not be happening.” Being right places you in a position of imagined moral superiority in relation to the person or situation that is being judged and found wanting. It is that sense of superiority the ego craves and through which it enhances itself.

Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even agression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth in any case needs no defense.

All religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them. You can use them in the service of the ego, or you can use them in the service of the Truth. If you believe only your religion is The Truth, you are using it in the service of the ego. Used in such a way, religion becomes ideology and creates and illusory sense of superiority as well as division and conflict between people. In the service of truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened humans to assist you spiritual awakening, that is to say, in becoming free of identification with form.

When Jesus said “I am the way and the truth and the life.” They are most direct and powerful pointers to the truth, if understood correctly. If misunderstood, however, they become a great obstacle. Jesus speaks of the innermost I Am. When you are in touch with that dimension within yourself – and being in touch with it is your natural state, not some miraculous achievement – all your actions and relationships will reflect the oneness whi all life that you sense deep within. This is love. Laws, commandments, rites, and regulations are necessary for those who are cut off from who they are, the Truth within. They prevent the worst excesses of the ego, and often they don’t even do that. “Love and do what you will,” said St. Augustine. Words cannot get much closer to the Truth thatn that.

Both sides of the conflict are equally identified with their own perspective, their own “story,”
that is to say, identified with thought. Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective, another story, may exist and also be valid.

Here it becomes obvious that the human ego in its collective aspect as “us” against “them” is even more insane that the “me,” the individual ego, although the mechanism is the same. By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego. One can go as far as to say that on this planet “normal” equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say ego.

omg. i still have 7 journal pages on this book. i am not transcribing it all. needless to say, i dig this kind of psycho-babble.

There are no problems. Only situations – to be dealt with now, or to be left alone and accepted as part of the isness of the present moment until they change or can be dealt with.