Kasminnu bhagavo vigyate sarvam idam vigyatam bhavaiti
Know that by knowing which everything is known.
– Mundaka Upanishad 1.1.3

Bhaga means God
Vigyat I don’t know but is clearly about knowing as it repeats
Sarva is everything, whole
Bhava means becoming

Thus we can see the context. This is not referring to knowledge of superficial values of things. It is knowledge of wholeness or unity and of becoming, of God expressing. Only from the level of wholeness expressing can we have the big picture.

Once established, that is not lost in the details.
Davidya

I’ve spoken about Gratitude here a number of times. It was a key step in my own cleaning house. It is an excellent preparation for awakening as it helps us to let go of resistance to what is. It is an opening to be happy and happiness is the nature of reality.

There are a number of variations on this that can similarly trigger this OKness.
Many faiths suggest tithing 10%
Many people do service like volunteering or simply helping others, Altruism
I mentioned Gratitude Week to end homelessness.

Ran into this today – the 29 Day Giving Challenge. Their goal is to “revive the giving spirit” in the world. Under “How it Works”, see the Story for the impact this can have, including healing, and her note about not making a list and trying to control the process. She understood that manipulating the process would defeat the purpose. This is about inner healing, not outer doing.

The key of course is where we’re giving from. Because we’re supposed to? Because it makes us look good? Or is it a celebration of Thanksgiving? True Altruism does not result from loyalty or duty or moral obligation. (not that these are bad) It is giving without seeking reward or benefit. We may have to do some clearing like forgiveness to get this right.

We could get into a big philosophical or ethical debate around altruism. But really, it is very simple. It is stepping out of the perspective of a me and seeing things a little more from the we. That we’re in this together. Indeed, the Kabbalah is said to define altruism as the desired goal of creation. It is the compassion of Buddhism. In the Bible, “love seeks not its own interests.“

Give of yourself. There is no other.
Davidya

In a long discussion on various esoteric traditions and belief, the question of what is true arose.

What came out of my mouth was interesting, so I thought I’d share it here. I’ve touched on this in related ways before.

Understanding basically comes in 3 types or stages:

1) The Believer. We follow a teaching or faith.

2) The Maverick or Synthesizer. We ‘figure it out for ourselves’, blending various teachings.

3) The Seer. We experience it for ourselves. Revelation.

The third is of course the key – anything before that is based on belief or the intellect rather than perceived truth. This stage in itself has its own subroutine of “sorting it out”, finding the understanding and language to grasp mentally what has been experienced.

It’s also worth noticing that this is also a fairly typical sequence of personal development. The Tribal keener tends to outgrow the box and become more Individual. Gradually, they have more and more direct experiences until they transcend the ego of Individual and step through Self realization. Then the journey of awakening begins.

And what a journey it is…
Davidya

“Stop looking where you are looking,
and look where you are.
What bounty! Love loving you just as you are.

Then, how does your life respond to that?
It is your lifetime.
This lifetime of attention is all we have.
Where is it being spent?”
– Gangaji

I thought this was a particularly interesting quote, given recent discussions on places like Takuin’s blog. People talk of looking at the finger pointing (the teacher/teaching) rather than what the finger is pointing at.

Here, she observes one should stop looking ‘out there’ and just look ‘here’, “where you are”. It is saying the same thing but a little differently. Occasionally, that makes all the difference.
Davidya

Recently, I wrote about how Intention is key – practices like visualization are based on the creative drive or intention behind it.

I’ve written before about Adam, the Dreamhealer. He has recently launched a web site for just this – using intention and visualization in healing. They do periodic intention “Research Projects”, asking “well-intentioned people” to be active participants in the projects.

The site includes the visualizations to be used at a specific time for 10 minutes. The one coming up appears to relate to healing someones brain. They release the results after followup testing.

Imagine having hundreds of people focus their intention and attention on your healing. This would certainly cut our medical costs.
Davidya

IntentionHeals.com

Dreamhealer.com

I’ve always enjoyed a cartoon’s ability to capture the essence of a story, idea, or vision. Both word and picture have to be refined to an aphorism. What they call in Sanskrit a sutra, meaning thread.

While many people view cartoons as childrens fare, they did not start out that way. Characters such as Wile E. Coyote and Daffy Duck were first used in pre-movie cartoons for adults. If you watch them on childrens shows now, you’ll see the deeper message often present. Cartoons use humor or irony to step them past our guard, open us to the message.

Recently, I had the pleasure of reading Guardians of Being, a work that blends distilled messages of presence from Eckhart Tolle with images from Patrick McDonnell, creator of Mutts.

The main message is how dogs and cats live in the now. By spending time with them, we can be present. Be in the Now. Enjoy life as it is. Love unconditionally. The cartoons capture it beautifully.

Most intriguingly, Eckhart suggests the purpose of the dog-human relationship.

“They have been with humans for thousands of years, and now there is a link between dogs and humans, much closer than it has ever been.”

“So part of their divine purpose is to help us. But it goes both ways. Because by living with humans, dogs also grow in consciousness; it is reciprocal.”

“Because dogs and cats still live in the original state of connectedness with Being, they can help us regain it. When we do so, however, that original state deepens and turns into awareness.”

Beautiful. Of course, Eckhart’s Springer Spaniel would be a more present dog to start with. Some pets become overshadowed by their owners emotional state or have unresolved traumas from the past. But it’s very true that animals have a natural innocence and presence that can lead us out of our story. And we all enjoy being loved.

A review with a few slides from the book

Eckhart

Mutts

Davidya

I am still regularly astonished with what happens. Many of us live in resistance to what shows up in our life. Ironically, we can be fighting what we want because it came in the wrong coloured wrapper. It didn’t show up the expected way.

Learning to be OK with what life brings you can take a lot of practice. Especially because life often uses the opportunity to throw you another curve ball. As soon as you get the lesson, it can come around again but now at a subtler level.

When you pass grade 54, 55 starts. It can be like peeling an onion, layer after layer. But if you pay attention, you’ll see that it is getting deeper. A little closer to the core. Sometimes, a little more difficult, more personal.

The key in this process is to learn to feel how it is. Not how you’re reacting and the superficial emotions but the subtler sense of it – perhaps it’s “rightness” or “goodness”. The mind may meanwhile be making a fuss, judging it wrong or saying “not logical!” But it’s the feelings to learn to trust. They’ll be the ones that keep you in the flow. If you can pay attention to that you’ll find life takes you places beyond your dreams.

You’ll find clear intentions show up and are easily maintained
Circumstances will arrange to support what is needed
Timing will be amazing – everything falls into place
Apparent problems may show up, but usually just to adjust the timing or tune some detail.

Sometimes, you only find out afterward how remarkable what happened was. It happened twice this week for me for bigger things, one of which is changing a loved one’s life completely.

As we let go and allow it to be as it is, the divine silent presence moves through us and our lives more and more. While what shows up can seem to be somehow more direct, life itself gets easier and easier. If we’re distracted by these new perturbations, we may not notice this. But life gets better, however it appears.

Now notice here that what makes life better is not life changing in any way. What’s changing is you – how you’re perceiving what is happening.

Of course, if you study gratitude or cooperation, you know that not resisting life will ALSO make the events of life better too. But not always in the way you might have once meant “better”. Perfect is much deeper than the minds conceptions.
Davidya

One of the things I’ve found fascinating is how the basic truths of reality can be found throughout the history of human thought: in religions, philosophies, and writings of old.

Often they are encumbered with a little too much person – either by the author or worse, the translator. For example, they see the perspective as “ultimate” and thus the only truth. They fail to see reality is so vast, our perception tends to be of one aspect, one way of looking. A series of experiences can give us some sense of the wholeness, but there is always more that can be included.

Some put an artificial upward limit on things, either because of a sense this has to be the highest truth or because of a feeling anything higher can’t be known. They forget that because we are That, higher can be known. But it may take more deepening and refinement.

In fact, there is no real upward limit on our perspective, simply because of the vastness and depth of it. Especially relative to the “special case” perception of humans. Even a cognition includes only everything from that one overview. One can experience the entire universe at once, yet still only know the baby fingernail of God.

Because we tend to open our perception in stages, we end up describing states and levels. Reality remains a continuum though. Also, the mind likes things in conceptual chunks, so comprehending and explaining things reinforces ideas like levels. We just need to keep in mind such divisions are broadly arbitrary. We could divide it any number of ways but what remains is one.

An example I ran into recently was in an interdisciplinary review of faiths. In this, the Baha’i are said to describe 4 “spiritual” levels.

1) hahut – unknowable God or essence “The way is barred and to seek it is impiety”
2) lahut – names and attributes of divine, the tongue of grandeur, the Word
3) jabarut – higher angelic order, all highest paradise, revealed God.
4) malakut – lower angelic order, concourse on high.
Man sits in the middle, body in the physical, soul in malakut
5) nasut – physical universe, mineral, plant, and animal realms

There was also some confusion in the presentation such as equating “central Orb of the Universe” and “hidden treasure” with hahut, the unknowable. The orb of the universe, what they call Hiranya Garbha in the Vedas, is far more expressed than hahut. Revealing any of the expressed spiritual levels could be considered finding a hidden treasure.

The difference I would observe is that the unmanifest hahut can be known because we are That. But it cannot be seen because it has no qualities. Hence:
“He is, and hath ever been, veiled in the ancient eternity of His Essence,
and will remain in His reality everlastingly hidden from the sight of men.”

Hidden but knowable, be-able, but only in higher states of consciousness, beyond basic unity.

Using terminology I use, we can compare the levels similarly:
1) Brahman, pure existence and preexistence
2) Creation: first impulse, divine love
3) Celebration, God in form, saints & sages. What Dante called Primum Mobile in Paradisio.
4) Universe construct – sometimes confused with creation due to similarities – as above, so below. Deva lokas.
5) expressed world

I typically break this down to correspond with the higher states of consciousness (what we awaken to) or the higher levels reflected in the chakras (ie: in 7).

It should be noted that we’re not talking about debated philosophical constructs, theories, and beliefs. We’re talking about experiencable values of existence. Subtler values of reality seen in different ways.
Secondarily, I was surprised to know that Baha’u'llah spoke of Hermes and said he was also called Idris and by special names in other cultures like Enoch of the Bible. You may have heard of the Emerald Tablet Hermes wrote. It was illustrated in the film The Secret, for example.

It was also suggested that Hermes was three different people. His “last” name “Trimegistus” means “thrice born“. This can also suggest what others call “twice reborn” or twice awakened, a way of describing someone in Unity.

I suggest this because awakenings can be experienced like being reborn or born anew. (permanently) In Self Realization, for example, there is a complete change in who one experiences one “is”. God Realization is a waking to an external reality, Thou art That, so is less a change in who one is. But it may also be experienced as being ‘born into God’ if it happens post unity. Unity itself is the typical second rebirth, awakening from creation into oneness. Of course, these are generalizations. Some experience only one or even all three as ‘rebirths’. As I’ve spoken prior, Awakening is without Rules. As product conditions suggest, “your experience may vary.” (laughs)

He also said “Know thou that every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet it own creatures, whose number no man can compute.” They’ve recently figured at least 80% of stars have planets. Science is still catching up with what seers have seen for eons.
Davidya

In a recent discussion over on Takuin’s blog, several people talked of not reading spiritual books for a time. Being in a place where such concepts no longer appealed.

I went through a similar phase, although partly this was simply the stage of life with a family and such. Spiritual life as a whole became more background for a while – present but not in the form of books and discussions and such.

Typically, I tend to be the kind of person who has a number of books on the go at any one time. Mostly non-fiction over a wide range of subjects. The Internet has meant that while I read more, I have less time for book reading. This means that my reading pile languishes and I buy fewer books now. And it means it can take awhile to finish one.

Recently, I’ve had the chance to come back to Constance Kellough’s book The Leap. I’ve quite been enjoying her ability to state things plainly but cover it well. A good skill and a good editor.

Last night, I read Chapter 8, Noble Intention. A great exploration of the subject. A few quotes to stimulate the connections:

“Intention is conscious creation through focused thought energized by feeling.”

I describe intention as directed awareness which stimulates thought and feeling. The key is noticing the intent rather than the thoughts and feelings effects so that we can recognize what we are asking.

“Often people feel that if they visualize something, they are creating it. But visualization is only a tool, not the creative source. The same is true of prayer, whether it is uttered verbally or silently. Indeed, both visualization and prayer are fostered by and flow from intent.”

“Intent is an expression of faith. It is something strongly held but not controlled by will, mental effort, or manipulation. Although intent holds to an end state, the intent is not specific in detail and has its own characteristic feeling-signature.”

“Although there is a thought component to intent, it is not mental energy that is required but heart energy.”

“While all intention is powerful, intention can arise from two different sources. The effect in each case is also quite different.”

“Ego-based intention, no matter how positive it may appear, is actually rooted in the negative emotion of fear.”

Sometimes we have the “right” thoughts but we’re intending those thoughts for reasons that cause other results than the thoughts reveal. Guilt is a common motivator of helping for example. The intention is thus distorted.

“When intention is based in ego, you may accomplish a great deal. …[but it] bears the hallmark of a voracious vacuum sucking into itself. …the good it can achieve is restricted by the boundaries of self-interest.”

“Instead of being motivated primarily by money, fame, or power, noble intention is love-based and flows from your heart. You come from a higher consciousness, and your intentions are simply an expression of the goodness within you.”

“Your intention, the initial stage of creativity, is an extension of your true Self. Because its accomplishments are the fruit of love, they bring about lasting good for your and for all concerned.”

She goes on to give examples of how Jesus taught noble intent. How prestige and affluence may result, but as they were not the motivating drivers, they are only positive and will not lead to attachment.

“…when others are blessed, the one who holds the intention is also blessed.”

“There is a difference between creating a goal and setting an intention. Goals originate in the human mind…”

“Willing an intention into being is just another form of the mind trying to be in control. A noble intention has to come from the heart…”

She goes on to explore this process in some detail. This is very important to understand. We are intending all the time, but often not consciously. Thus we are creating our world unconsciously. Becoming aware of the intention that underlies thoughts and feelings is a powerful way to gain insight and settle the drama and suffering. It is the seeds of a much happier and fulfilled life. A very noble intent.
Davidya

Sometimes, problems can be a real problem. (laughs) In fact, so much so that I’ve seen people die over problems and dashed expectations.

But the real problem with problems is perception. The ego has an ingrained habit of making things wrong. When we run into a barrier or things don’t work out the way we want or expect, we see a problem.

Lets start by exploring a saying - if you want to get something done, give it to the busiest person. This is partly because action has momentum. When you put something in a fast moving stream, it goes forward faster. But another aspect is that the busy are people used to getting things done. They are used to making decisions rather than seeing problems.

Of course, there is also the saying that every problem is an opportunity – that’s one way to shift perception.

Difficulties that arise can also be a signal that something needs another approach or that greater energy is required. Keep in mind this flow. If things are static, there is inertia to overcome. If things are moving but in another direction, there is momentum to overcome. Action can sometimes be like changing the direction of a massive boat.

Thus, one should not be discouraged if some further effort is required for success. But pay attention to how it feels more deeply. Is there a need for more energy? Or is this a marker to say no, this is the way the flow is going, please join us. Or are you stubborn enough to want to change the trends of time? (laughs)

Another example is a person stuck. Typically, they’re faced with only a few issues. Maybe even just one. But their own perception and inertia are keeping them stuck, seeing the problem and no solution. This has the effect of magnifying the issue, making it seem bigger and worse. You’ve probably met people completely stuck on something you would consider trivial.

When we hold something as a problem, we see it as difficult. People will use extreme words to express this, like always and never. Can’t or won’t. Must or shouldn’t. Seen however as a challenge, we reframe it as something to work through. We shift it from a wall or barrier into a process or path. We shift from resistance to the way life is.

The key is of course intention and attention. Attention or awareness is the creative source. Intention gives it direction, moves it. When we focus on whats not working, we make not working real. When we focus on moving forward, we make that real instead.

From the energy and emotions we bring to it, we activate the laws of nature in support of that intention. We engage cooperation. But what cooperation are we engaging? The laws of inertia?

If we get mixed results, we may be giving mixed messages, chasing something we don’t really want, are unclear on our intention, or simply have no focus. A surprising number of people drift along unfocused, then complain they’re not getting results.

Another example I see regularly. If we have a fear of technology, when our computer hiccups, we’re unlikely to be able to do anything about it. It’s this annoying mysterious box that makes us feel bad. (well -that’s occasionally true for everyone) We defer the issue to someone else who’s more knowledgeable. But why are they knowledgeable? Lots of geeks are not pros at all. They’ve simply done it. Rather then going into the resistance, they’ve looked into what to do about it. Stepped past the fear. Do that a few times, and they get to know how to get things working. Or to find out how. (Doncha love Google?)

Sometimes we’re put in a position where the problems are not ours but we have to deal with them. A difficult family member or co-worker for example. Just remember – it takes 2 to tango. Try to avoid engaging the problem. Be present with what is true for you and solutions may appear. Worst case, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had a saying – See the Job, do the job, stay out of the misery.

Unfortunately, there’s another aspect to the ego. If someone is invested in a drama, they’re actively inclined to “collect” problems. They actually invite difficulties into their lives. This may be through finances, relationships, behaviour, gossip, even feeding on the news media as a source of things to be upset about.

Some people thus unintentionally live for problems. Their life is so involved in their story that they have to find constant ways to tell it and reinforce it. Without their story, there is just empty fear.

This is not to say we shouldn’t care. But there is a big difference between compassion and self-induced suffering. Between helping and stressing over things you can do nothing about.

So much drama and suffering. Our world is full of it. For what? Why would we choose this? It’s a kind of blindness. The story is self-reinforcing. All for want of an understanding of whats really going on and how we influence our own reality.

It’s rather like a large stage play began but the actors went so deeply into their roles, they forgot they were acting. The play was designed to be fun and entertaining but we’ve made it difficult and painful. We’ve forgotten the world is a stage.

All we have to do is see and our problems begin to end.
Davidya