Good meeting you today, Kathleen.
I read the pages you gave to me [the once you are proofreading, page 200-203].
The challenge, so ‘they’ say, is to meet people where they are.
Included in this is the use of words that are easily understood and agreed upon.
A book might be delivered and consumed as entertainment.
I love the question: What do I really want?
In the end, doesn’t it all boil down to happiness!
“Happiness through unbroken peace of mind, independent of circumstances”.
In our confusion about me, myself and i, we try to get happiness through pleasure (circumstance), but can never find lasting peace in the flow of life.
Paradoxically through some gentle reasoning we recognize and experience that our true ungoawayable nature is happiness itself; hidden in plain sight.
Yes, definitely to move from believing, hoping, assuming to clear experience.
Do I want to be free in the mind or free from the mind?
And again words… what do they actually mean and who is hearing them?
Luckily, wholeness and well-being don’t need an explanation.
What seems to be missing?
Am I a character in a story?
Who am I?
So amazing to see how easily we are intimidated even by our own thoughts and feelings.
What do I know that is not filtered, conditioned, interpreted through the thinking mind?
Mind is a powerful servant, but a cruel master.
In our ignorance we believe I am “body-mind”.
But after some simple inquiry and inter-human inter-change, we cannot deny that I simply am, aware of “body-mind-world”.
I am not a thing.
I am the only one who never appears.
What I longed for is not in a distance, doesn’t require any change, can never come or go.
Ya but, is the voice of the separate-self, which playfully dissolves in love.
What do I really know?
Peace,
Holger
I don’t see a good reason to be so critical of this analysis of relative existence. I think it is quite a good analysis. The only criticism I would have is that it appears to leave out consciousness, which is the observer of all of life and of which all of life and all human lives are composed. While it is true that everything in the relative springs from pure consciousness, a full life maximizes functioning both in the relative and in the Absolute pure consciousness. By repeatedly “visiting” or relaxing into our true Self the false falls away, eventually leaving the true. Then the one true Self returns to being fully functional, both in its Absolute unchanging nature and in its dream-like changing relative nature. At first we trust our path as leading to this goal because we trust our teacher and the teaching, but later we find confirmation in our own experience and we become our own best teacher. (All of this is just my opinion; who knows, I could be wrong.)
Dear David, did you reply to the correct post?
I don’t see where your “I don’t see a good reason to be so critical of this analysis of relative existence” fits in.
Who could leave out Consciousness, the cause, substance and witness of everything subtle, gross, unnamable?
Who talks about the canvas when looking at a painting?
Who talks about silence in a music performance?
Who talks about the stage in a theater play?
Who talks about inner space?
Relative, absolute and even “consciousness” are concepts, but nothing in itself; we overlook the obvious, and all words fail because they are only pointers.
“Everything in the relative springs from pure consciousness” is itself a dream model, a concession.
Thank you David for your contributions, your love for truth.
Love,
Holger