Susan Hawkins – Page 4 – David R. Hawkins

Life is a Precious Gift

When one has chosen the spiritual pathway, the question arises of how to proceed through ordinary human life now that one has a different overall motivation. … the degree to which one values one’s own life determines the answer. Those who see it as a precious gift do not wish to waste it on that which is trivial and transitory, for the demise of the physical body as an inevitable certainty. The pleasures of life can be accepted as a gift while rejecting becoming attached to them.

… the inner process is primarily one of de-energizing illusions rather than one of acquiring new information. Awareness is predominantly revealing in nature rather than a private acquisition. The Self is already aware of Reality and does not need to learn more about it.”

From Discovery of the Presence of God p. 213-214

Enlightenment via Nonduality

The spiritual practice of seeking Enlightenment via nonduality is the consequence of intention and commitment. Its practical practice is not so much a matter of ‘doing’ but a way of ‘being’ or aligning with the subjective awareness of life. … Attention is aligned with the field/context rather than the customary focus on content and details. … Also, spiritual work is more like noticing and becoming aware rather than ‘doingness’ per se.

Attitudes that may just seem merely ‘nice’ to ordinary mind become very powerful tools when aligned with spiritual intention and commitment. For instance, to strictly live by the dictum of ‘good will to all life’ is transformative when energized by the Spiritual Will. The decisions to ‘be kind to all of life’ or to respect the sacredness of all that exists are powerful attitudes in spiritual evolution, along with the virtues of compassion, the willingness to forgive, and seeking to understand rather than to judge. By constant surrendering, perceptions dissolve into discernment of essence.

From Discovery of the Presence of God: Devotional Nonduality p. 62

Acceptance

Acceptance is the great healer of strife, conflict, and upset. It also corrects major imbalances of perception and precludes the dominance of negative feelings. Everything serves a purpose. Humility means that we will not understand all events or occurrences. Acceptance is not passivity but non-positionality. The development of a spiritual ego can be avoided by the realization that spiritual progress is the result of God’s grace and not the result of one’s personal endeavors.

From The Eye of the I, ch. 9, pg. 196

A Simple Way to Undo the ego

Q: Is there a simple way to undo the ego?

A: Yes. By commitment to inner honesty, it will become apparent that the underpinning of the ego’s responses is the pleasure that is derived from them. There is an inner satisfaction that is the payoff of self-pity, anger, rage, hate, pride guilt, fear, etc. This inner pleasure, as morbid as it may sound, energizes and propagates all these emotions. To undo their influence, it is merely necessary to be willing to forego and surrender these questionable inner secret pleasures to God and look only to
God for joy, pleasure, and happiness.

Everyone gets a secret pleasure from resentments, from being the martyr or the victim, and from feeling misunderstood, unappreciated, etc. Society and the law even reinforce these benefits with legal and monetary rewards so that one can be compensated for ‘having their feelings hurt’, for being ‘slighted’ on the job, for enduring ‘stress’, for ‘feeling uncomfortable’, etc.

When the payoff is no longer valued, these feelings disappear. They persist only so long as they serve a purpose. When this ‘ego juice’ is abandoned, it is replaced with inner peace.

from I: Reality and Subjectivity, ch. 18, pg. 417-418

The less one thinks, the more delightful life becomes

A useful decision or choice is to decide to stop mentally talking about everything and refrain from interjecting comments, opinions, preferences, and value statements. It is therefore a discipline to just watch without evaluating, investing worth in, or editorializing, commenting, and having preferences about what is witnessed. One then sees the rising and falling away of phenomena and the transitory nature of appearance, which, with ordinary mentation, is conceptualized as a sequence of cause and effect. It is an informative practice to ‘pretend’ to be stupid, and by the invocation of radical humility, Essence shines forth. All thinking, from a spiritual viewpoint, is merely vanity, illusion, and pomposity. The less one thinks, the more delightful life becomes. Thinkingness eventually becomes replaced by knowingness. That one ‘is’ does not really need any thought at all. It is helpful, therefore, to make a decision to stop mental conversation and useless babbling.”

from Discovery of the Presence of God p. 88-90