Place Faith and Trust in the Love of God…

The core of all the great spiritual teachings and teachers can be surmised in a few simple paragraphs:

Choose to be easygoing, benign, forgiving, compassionate, and unconditionally loving towards all life in all its expressions, without exception, including oneself. Focus on unselfish service and the giving of love, consideration, and respect to all creatures.

Avoid negativity and the desire for worldliness and its greed for pleasure and possessions. Forego opinionating, the judgment of right versus wrong, the vanity of being ‘right’, and the trap of righteousness.

Seek to understand rather than to condemn. Venerate the teachers of these basic principles and ignore all others. Apply these principles to one’s view of oneself as well as of others. Trust in the love, mercy, infinite wisdom, and compassion of Divinity that sees through all human error, limitation, and frailty. Place faith and trust in the love of God who is all-forgiving, and understand that condemnation and fear of judgment stem from the ego. Like the sun, the love of God shines equally on all.

The Eye of the “I”: Ch. 5, Simplicity, pg. 65

Glamour and Our Goals

If we look at something that we want, we can begin to distinguish between the thing itself versus the aura, patina, flash, and attractive magnetic effect of a quality that can best be described as “glamour.” It is this disparity between what a thing is in itself, and the glamour that we have attached to it, which leads to disillusionment. So often we have chased some goal and, then, when we have achieved it, we are disappointed. That is because the thing itself does not coincide with our pictures of it. Glamour means that we have attached sentimentality or we have made it bigger than life. We have projected onto a thing a magical quality that somehow leads us to believe that, once we acquire it, we will magically achieve some higher state of happiness and satisfaction.

…Emotional goals are also glamorized by sentimentality and emotionalism. A certain excitement is projected onto the emotional event (e.g., a reunion, a first date, or being elected president of one’s class). It is made to seem more important than it really is in the overall course of events. After the event passes, life goes on the same and disappointment ensues…

The mind protests: “Do I have to give up all that glamorous excitement? Do I have to let go of my pictures of emotional gratification and excitement?” The answer is obviously “No.” We don’t have to give them up at all. And we can achieve the goals effortlessly and easily once we are conscious of what we are choosing. We can have them directly. We can be attractive, but we won’t get it in a fake way such as driving a certain style of car. We will get it by letting go of our smallness and owning our greatness, thereby reflecting it out into the world.

Letting Go: Ch. 7, pgs. 114-117

To Realize the Highest Levels of Truth and Enlightenment

What you hold in mind tends to manifest. Therefore, if you hold reverence for God and truth as radiance from divinity, if you align yourself with that which is verifiable truth and integrity, moral integrity, and intellectual integrity, then because you’re holding that in mind it will tend to manifest within your life. Out of nowhere arise things that increase your certainty about the validity of that which you are pursuing. Verifiable spiritual truth. There is no higher objective or purpose in living than to realize the highest levels of truth and enlightenment.

The various more-advanced spiritual states are so incredibly rewarding that whatever effort it took to reach them was more than repaid. To live in a state of gladness,  to live in a state in which you feel a compassion and a love for everyone is its own reward. So you hear the saying that virtue is its own reward. That’s really what it means – as your consciousness level advances, your degree of happiness increases. In fact, it relates level of consciousness with percentage of happiness. And the two of them are absolutely and directly related. The higher the level of consciousness, the higher the rate of happiness.

The higher the rate of happiness, the less you need from the world or want from the world. And finally you reach a state of relative independence of the world.

At times there may be a self-examination, wondering, Am I truly going in the right direction? Is a higher level of consciousness something I actually, really want? Or is it just trendy? Everybody’s into being spiritual nowadays. You’ll confront whether or not your spiritual consciousness is genuine.

In the World But Not Of It: Transforming Everyday Experience into a Spiritual Path, pg. 75-77

 

 

 

 

 

The Real Self is the Field of Silent Awareness Underneath All Thoughts

When letting go, it’s not helpful to “think” about the technique. It’s better, simply, just to do it. Eventually it will be seen that all thoughts are resistance. They are all images that the mind has made to prevent us from experiencing what actually is. When we have been letting go for a while and have begun experiencing what is really going on, we will laugh at our thoughts. Thoughts are fakes, absurd make-beliefs that obscure the truth. Pursuing thoughts can keep us occupied endlessly. We will discover one day that we are right where we started. Thoughts are like gold fish in a bowl; the real Self is like the water. The real Self is the space between the thoughts, or more exactly, the field of silent awareness underneath all thoughts.

We have had the experience of being totally absorbed in what we were doing, when we scarcely noticed the passage of time. The mind was very quiet, and we were simply doing what we were doing without resistance or effort. We felt happy, maybe humming to ourselves. We functioned without stress. We were very relaxed, although busy. We suddenly realized that we never needed all those thoughts after all. Thoughts are like bait to a fish; if we bite at them, we get caught. It’s best not to bite at the thoughts. We don’t need them.

Inside of us, but out of awareness, is the truth that “I already know everything I need to know.” This happens automatically.

Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender, Ch. 2, pg. 23-24

The Source of Happiness is Within Ourselves

Out of the recognition of who we really are comes the desire to seek that which is uplifting. Out of it arises a new meaning and context for life. When that inner emptiness, due to lack of self-worth, is replaced by true self-love, self-respect and esteem, we no longer have to seek it in the world, for that source of happiness is within ourselves. It dawns on us that it cannot be supplied by the world anyway. No amount of riches can compensate for an inner feeling of poverty. We all know of the many multimillionaires who try to compensate for their inner sense of hollowness and lack of inner worth. Once we have contacted this inner Self, this inner greatness, this inner completion, contentment, and true sense of happiness, we have transcended the world. The world is now a place to enjoy, and we are no longer run by it. We are no longer at the effect of it.

Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender: Ch. 3, pg. 48-49

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