Devotional Non-Duality

Devotional nonduality means the love for God is enough that you’re willing to surrender everything that stands in the way of the realization of the presence of divinity, which turns out not to be an “other” but the Self.  You thought it was going to be out there later.  It’s the source of one’s existence, to come to the realization, the radical reality of subjectivity.  We take subjectivity for granted.  We take the field for granted.   We take consciousness for granted.  This (Silence)  is what we take for granted.  This (content) is what we think is important.  This is what’s trivial and irrelevant, and this (Silence) is what you are.  We ignore what we are and return to focusing on that which we are not.

At this very instant, 99 percent of your mind is silent.  The reason you don’t notice it is because you’re focused on the 1 percent that’s noisy.

 The Highest Level of Enlightenment: ch. 8, pg.77  (New!)

You’re Being Pulled by Destiny

How doe one transcend this identification with the ego?

First of all, merely to hear the truth already has an impact, whether you know it or not.  …The Buddha said to have even heard of enlightenment, you will never be satisfied with anything less, never; through all your lifetimes, you have heard it.  Everyone in this room has heard it, or they wouldn’t be here. It’s the future that’s  creating your present.  You think it’s your past that is propelling yourself from the past, that you’re being pushed by your past.  No, you’re being sucked into your future.

You’re being pulled by destiny, because by an act of the will you have already chosen your destiny, and now this is the unfolding of what is required to reach it.  That’s all.

The Highest Level of Enlightenment: Ch. 8, pg. 75

How Do We Cultivate More Love?

How do we cultivate more love or get more love in our life?  We can’t.

What you do is remove the obstacles to love, because love is the essence of that which you are.  …War is not the opposite of peace.  Peace is the natural condition when falsehood is removed.  So lovingness is the automatic condition when the obstructions to it, which are false and fallacious, are removed.  So lovingness becomes a way of being; love is not an emotion – It goes from here to there.  You can’t lose love.  Somebody can’t run off with love.

New! The Highest Level of Enlightenment, Ch. 12, pg. 120

How Can You Let Go of the Propensities of the Ego?

…Why does the ego hangout with shame and guilt, fear, all that stuff – with greed, with desire, with lust, with hatred? Why? Because it gets a payoff. The ego mulches negativity, and it gets juice out of it. The ego survives by virtue of the juice it gets.

…The willingness to surrender to let go of the payoff of the ego allows you to let go experientially as it arises.  The willingness to let go of the payoff of grief, anger, resentment, hatred. So, what do you surrender to God in the way of surrender?  What does devotion mean? “I love thee, oh Lord, greater  than I love the glee I get out of my hatreds, my wickedness, my shame, my guilt, my revenge.” Either you love God or you love your revenge.You can’t have them both….so it’s always really a choice.

Am I willing to surrender this for the love of God or not?

New! The Highest Level of Enlightenment, Ch. 10, pg. 92-93

Human Consciousness is Intrinsically Innocense

The willingness to surrender life to God, of course, is one of the most profound spiritual tools. So people ask which spiritual tools are the most powerful. I always say humility, the willingness to surrender life, to let go wanting to control it, to let go wanting to change it, the willingness to surrender how you see things to God, then, or to some higher spiritual principle, because God is not a reality. It’s just a word to most people, a hoped-for reality but not an experiential reality to most people, until they become more spiritually advanced and begin to experience the presence of the field itself and intuit its enormous power.

And then they reverence God because they respect the infinite power that they begin to intuit. So what we can do on a practical level, then, is become the best person we can become. I’d say to become kind toward all of life in all of its expressions, no matter what. And that includes one’s self, to be willing to forgive one’s self, to see the limitation of human consciousness. I always feel that the more educated you are about the quality of consciousness, the nature of consciousness, the easier it is to follow spiritual principles. If you understand that human consciousness is intrinsically innocent and cannot control that which it’s programmed by because it can’t tell truth from falsehood, you begin to feel compassion automatically. …Once you understand the intrinsic innocence of human consciousness, you instantly are able to forgive people.

New! The Highest Level of Enlightenment, Ch. 9, pg. 88-89