“If you haven’t discovered who you truly are, your assumed competence is just a wall of sand against the oncoming tide.”

                                        —Tarthang Tulku (qtd. in Limitless Mind by R. Targ)

     “As much as our ego hates to admit it, the truth is that those times in our lives when we have experienced the greatest happiness, which means the deepest sense of peace, are those moments when we have ceased to want—when for some reason or other, and it doesn’t matter why, we wanted absolutely nothing from the world or from anyone in it.”                                             
                                        --Andrew Cohen, The Promise of Perfection

     “I have discovered that all human evil comes from this: man's being unable to sit still in a room.”                                 
                                        --Blaise Pascal, Pensees

“If you would deny the ego and scorch it by ignoring it, you would be free. If you accept it, it will impose limitations on you and throw you into a vain struggle to transcend them. To be the Self that you really are is the only means to realize the bliss that is ever yours.”

                                        --Sri Ramana Maharshi

Meditation is one of those things that cannot be forced. You just have to make yourself available and then see what happens. All any of us can do is make ourselves available, and we do that by being still, being at ease, and paying attention. The depth you are looking for comes from letting go, not from “pushing deeper.” But in any case, you shouldn't be concerned with how deep your experience is. Consciousness is infinite. You could have a more powerful, more profound experience of it, but it's still the same infinite current that you are speaking about. That is why, when we try to describe the experience of consciousness, words always fall short. We might use words like “powerful,” “beautiful,” “profound,” or “deep,” but the words are only a metaphor, a quantification of infinity—of that which cannot be measured. A little bit of infinity or a lot of infinity—it's the same thing.

Andrew Cohen

For everyone who reads this blog with rapt attention, I apologize for my recent absence.  But after many, many words and many, many Red Bulls, I have successfully completed my feature article for the next issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine.  It's a review of Ken Wilber's new masterpiece, Integral Spirituality, among other things . . .

It'll be out to subscribers in early June and on newsstands in early July . . .

Goodnight.

from a back issue of The Onion:
___
January 25, 2006
Issue 42•04
Your Horoscope
Cancer

Always on the lookout for more challenging games and puzzles, you'll meet your match next week after the release of the new Rubik's Tesseract, a brainteaser that's impossible to solve in our four-dimensional space-time.
___

Ah, that's funny.  And if you're interested in tesseracts (uh...), check out the novel Factoring Humanity by one of my favorite sf writers, Robert J. Sawyer, whom I interviewed for Issue 30 of WIE. 

How's that for a smooth segue and self-promoting plug?  Blogs'r fun.

Is George Lucas a mystic?  Sure he is!  He's probably had a bigger spiritual influence on Generations X and Y than anyone else, right?  Heck, he may even be more popular than Jesus!  (Uh-oh.  Now I'm in trouble...)  So here it is, Mystic Quote number 9...number 9...number 9...number 9:

"I think there is a God.  No question.  What that God is or what we know about that God, I'm not sure.  The one thing I know about life and about the human race is that we've always tried to construct some kind of context for the unknown.  Even the cavemen thought they had it figured out.  I would say that cavemen understood on a scale of about 1.  Now we've made it up to about 5.  The only thing that most people don't realize is the scale goes to 1 million."

--George Lucas, from a TIME interview with Bill Moyers, April 1999

And now, a word from Adi Da on transcending the self-contracted state:

     “There is no Enlightenment, no evolutionary entrance into the truly Spiritual Condition of human existence, without ego-death, or transcendence of the mind.  There must be the literal death of the separate and separative consciousness.  In this moment, you are holding on to your sense of separate consciousness as if it were something tangible and material.  You possess yourself through a great contraction of body and psyche.  By virtue of this gesture, you have become rigid, mediocre, deluded, relatively loveless, self-possessed, and isolated.  To be without an inner consciousness is, for you, unthinkable.  To be incapable of feeling yourself as a separate consciousness is, for you, a terrifying prospect.  Nevertheless, that is precisely the realization with which you must become completely comfortable.”

                            —Da Free John (Adi Da), Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House!, p. 171

Check it out, yo.  I blurbed this guy in the latest issue of WIE, and before the issue came out, he had already taken the world by storm.  Matisyahu's about my age, but a thousand times cooler.  A beat-boxin', reggae-rappin', rockin' Jew who became an honest-to-G-d full-bearded Hasid a couple of years ago--and then decided to save our spiritually bereft generation through the medium we love best.

The latest vid making the rounds on MTV...

Quicktime:
http://www.matismusic.com/video/Matisyahu_Youth_VidFull.mov

RealPlayer:
http://www.matismusic.com/video/Matisyahu_Youth_VidFull.ram

Here are the lyrics:

“Youth”

by Matisyahu

some of them come now
some of them running
some of them looking for fun
some of them looking for a way out of confusion
some of them don't know what to be
some of them don't know where to go
some of them trust their instincts that something's missing from the show
some don't fit society,
insides are crying low
some of them teachers squash the flame before it had a chance to grow
some of them embers do glow
them charcoal, hushed and low
some of them come with the hunger suppressed, not fed
them feel a death blow, yo

chorus:

young man, control in your hand
slam your fist on the table and make your demand
take a stand
fan a fire for the flame of the youth
got the freedom to choose
you better make the right move
young man, the power's in your hand
slam your fist on the table and make your demand
you gotta make the right move

"youth is the engine of the world" x2

storm the halls of vanity
focus your energy
into a laser beam
streaming shattered light
unites to pierce
between the seams
and it seems
tear the world open, peer in the children, see rapid fire for your mind. half the truth is just a lie, they rub me the wrong way, they say their way or fall behind. seven subjects disconnect, left out the concept as to why there's a spiritual emptiness, so the youth them get vexed, skip class and get wrecked, fill with beer and cigarettes to fill the hole in their chest!

{chorus}

you got freedom to choose
better make the right move
you got the freedom to chooooose

{chorus}

 

Twenty years ago today, my teacher, Andrew Cohen, discovered the secret of Enlightenment through the guidance of his teacher, an Indian mystic named H.W.L. Poonja (who, in turn, was a student of Sri Ramana Maharshi).  Within weeks, Poonja encouraged Andrew to begin teaching, spreading the fire of his awakening far and wide....

This afternoon Andrew gave a public talk in Copenhagen, and tonight there's going to be some serious partying happening, with students from all over the world having flown in to join in the celebration.  But while I'm here at home (Lenox, MA) trying to help finish the summer issue of What Is Enlightenment?, the magazine Andrew founded nearly fifteen years ago, I thought I'd share with y'all a quote of Andrew's that nicely sums up the basic message of his teaching:

     “The ego creates the deadening illusion that we are separate entities, islands unto ourselves that literally have no connection to the world around us.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The ultimate spiritual realization has always been that all is One.  The more profound our realization of that absolute fact the more significant will be the positive impact that we will have upon this world that we are all creating together.  The more we realize how big an impact we are actually having, whether we're conscious of it or not, the more our conscience—our spiritual conscience—will be awakened.  The realization that all is One is the essence of enlightenment, and the actual experience of that realization is the recognition at the level of consciousness that there literally is no other.  If there is no other then there is only you.  That means you are that one unified creative impulse that chose to initiate the evolutionary process fourteen billion years ago.  As you become more conscious of that fact, you realize that it's up to you to drive that process forward in this very moment.  The awakening of spiritual conscience means that the future literally depends upon you—not metaphorically or theoretically but actually.  I'm talking about a living realization—that's what radical, impersonal, evolutionary enlightenment is all about!”

                                —Andrew Cohen, August 2005 (Montserrat Retreat)

All I can say about this one is... Amen.

"The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints."

                    —Will Durant

      “If false thinking suddenly stops for an instant, and you see through your own mind, the vastness of its original perfect light, the purity of its original state, no thing in it at all, this is called awakening.  There is nothing to be awakened or cultivated other than this mind."
                                        --Zen Master Han-shan

     “I am the Light that is over all things.  I am all: all came forth from me, and all attained to me.  Split a piece of wood, and I am there.  Pick up a stone, and you will find me there.”
                                        --Jesus of Nazareth, The Gospel of Thomas, saying 77

      “There is a Light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond us all, beyond the heavens, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens.  This is the Light that shines in our heart.”
                                        --Chandogya Upanishad