Author: Veritas Administration

Q: How can contemplation be instituted, started, or learned? It is a decision?

A: It is only a matter of awareness.  It is really nothing new and therefore does not need to be learned but only given attention.  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, ch. 4, pg. 88-89

The separation from the source of happiness is not only in space, but it is also in time, so it is something that is going to come into our life tomorrow, or the next day, or the next week, or the year after, or when we finally graduate, or when we reach middle age, or when we get that big house or Cadillac. Because it is always in the future, we are always separated from the source of our happiness and never feel complete. The realization that we are the source of our happiness, and that we can create it at any second, gives us a sense of completion.

… Joyfulness accompanies the experience. There is no tomorrow about it because of the sense of completion. If someone enjoys the presentation, so much the better. That is only frosting on the cake because it is not essential.

What one does in the world has to be accompanied by the sense of completion in the doing of the thing itself. The payoff is not something that is an aside, something that is outside or separate from the doingness; it is the experience of it in this moment. The completion is with the experiencing right now, not something separate from it. In that, one is then aware of the lovingness of all experience. That is the way one is with experience. It is the loving of life in all its expressions, including its disappointments. It is the ups and downs, the continual learning process of making the mistake and learning from it, so it is nothing but a mistake.

One might say that depression is nature’s way, God’s way, and our own psychology’s way of saying to us that the way we look at our life is not okay. It is our psychological, biological, and spiritual way; it is our body, mind, and spirit saying, “Look at what is out; look at what needs to be fixed. Please understand me out of your compassion; heal me; heal all of it.” The defect is an inner sense of separation that we will not be complete and whole unless we become united with something ‘out there’ or in the future. The ego moves from incomplete to complete. In contrast, the Self moves from complete to complete. True happiness is always in the ‘right now’ of this moment. The ego is always anticipating completion and satisfaction in the future “when a desire gets fulfilled.”

From Healing and Recovery p. 385-387

Q: How can one stay detached from such human catastrophes?

A: …Detachment from positionalities, and especially the positionalities occasioned by labeling, leads to serenity, freedom, and security.  Greater serenity arises from relating to the context of life rather than to the content, which is primarily a game board of interacting egos.  This broader style of relating to life leads to greater compassion and emancipation from being at the effect of the world.

It is well to keep in mind at all times that the ego/mind does not experience the world but only its own perceptions of it.  The media exploit emotionality and sensationalism in images and languaging to elicit sentimentality, or outrage, or to satisfy prurient curiosity.  When seen for what they are, these invitations to reactivity can be declined.  All life ebbs and flows.  Everyone is born, suffers afflictions, and dies.  There are happiness and sadness, catastrophe and success, increase and decrease.  The stock market rises and falls.  Diseases and accidents come and go.  The karmic dance of life unfolds in the karmic theater of the universe.

From I: Reality and Subjectivity, ch. 11, pg. 259-260