The way of passion (A Celebration of Rumi) by Andrew Harvey,  CH1: The journey to Love  (pg 12 – 17)

“Every complete human life has four stages.  The first stage is childhood where each of us has an experience of clear ecstasy, a sustained, often luminous, and sometimes directly disturbing experience of union with reality. I believe if we all rediscovered our childhood, we would be aware of moments of divine grace, moments when we were aware of being the substratum of the universe, and of the universe being a magical field for our delights and our energies.

But childhood is also the source of wounds, of humiliation, of abandonment, the source of the first terrors. And around those wounds, terrors, and abandonment, and around the conventions of the culture and the expectations of our parents and of our world, stage two arises.

Stage two can be thought of as the creation of the false self, the creation of the unreal self, the self that identifies itself with biography, with duties and conventions, with the desire to succeed, with the hunger to dominate experience and dominate the world. The false self is invariably erected around the wounds of childhood as a kind of scaffold to protect them, and is also a response to the convention of the world, to the expectations of everyone around us. So it is a hybrid, rickety, jittery, unsatisfactory structure which ignorance of any alternative keeps us wanting to prolong. Most people, unfortunately, live their entire lives in stage two as victims of this creation of their own panic and of the communal hallucination that we call society. If you are very lucky or desperate, you will be driven in stage two to search, to quest, to long for something other than the anxiety, panic, despair, and unsatisfactory joys that seem to fulfill the life and expectations of the false self.

The tragedy is if you think you are happy in stage two. The tragedy of our culture is that it is a stage-two culture designed to keep people trapped there and designed to keep them exactly at the pitch of panic and desperation at which they will go on fulfilling all the false needs of the false self and dancing its death-dance of ignorance.

When you really see what our culture is, how unprecedented it is in its brutality, how unprecedented, too, in the brilliance of the weapons that it has placed in the hands of this brutality and its will to deny and destroy all possibilities of transcendence, then you realize how profound are the obstacles that prevent us from ever getting out of stage two. Nervous breakdowns, schizophrenia, outbursts of paranoia, drug addiction, and desperate love affairs are all symptoms of a hunger to escape stage two. All of these desperation and hungers are symptoms of an unacknowledged and hidden need to escape from the prison the modern world has become, this godless worldwide high-tech concentration camp of reason that we are in.

What happens, then, to take somebody from stage two into stage three? Often, a breakdown occurs. If you are lucky, that breakdown will happen early because the pain of childhood or the painful contrast between your inner self and the outer world will become so great that you’ll be haunted by fears of suicide or driven really to look at all the facts of your life. The tragedy is when that does not happen, when people drift into middle age and suddenly have a midlife crisis in which they realize that they have done nothing in their lives, have written nothing meaningful, nor spoken one authentic word out of what they imagine to be their minds. This is terrifying but it is what this culture prepares for almost everybody: a good nervous breakdown when it is too late to be of use. So my best wish for you is to have your breakdown when young. It is best, I think, to squeeze it into the last days of your twenties and make it prolonged. So prolonged, in fact, that you will have to begin the search for another reality, seriously and passionately. And this will take you into stage three of this journey.

Sometimes stage three begins with a series of visions, or a series of dreams which you cannot deny because of their intensity and strangeness. It can also begin by an extraordinary meeting. If you are lucky, it is with somebody like Shams or Ramana Maharshi. This is a moment of terror, shock, and ecstasy, when you know, because another human being is incarnating it in front of you, that everything you have understood about the world, about identity, about the nature of reality, is a stupid fiction of your false self. The world absolutely falls and fades away and you are shocked to the core of your being by a possibility so outrageous that no words have ever been able to describe it adequately. Even the greatest mystic poets fail to describe this possibility, which is nothing less than being a part of the Godhead itself radiating in experience. You see truth enacted in front of you in a human being who, through many signs and many powers, shows you that he or she is in a Reality which you did not even imagine. Then you enter the whirlwind of divine transformation.

The agonies of the false self are small compared with the agonies of the spirit. The agonies of the false self are paltry, suburban melodramas; the agonies of the spirit are played out in the immense theater of the Divine and they mirror the struggle between good and evil in the universe, the struggle for the victory of Light in this dimension and in matter. So they have a terror, a range, a splendor, and a goal greater than anything that can be imagined until you are being whirled about in their fire.

What happens in stage three is that the false self is burnt alive. The false self is mocked, derided, lacerated, opened up by visionary ecstasy, by dreams, by unmistakable moments of shattering insight, by immense joy and immense griefs, by the sudden penetration into the heart of all the pains of the world and all the joys of the world, by becoming as you walk down the street the flower on the curb or the old woman in front of you, or the windshield of the passing car, without any meditation, without any veil. Stage three is also marked by the collapse of all the games that kept stage two going. If you are a writer, you probably fall silent. If you are an actor, you see the obscenity and the idiocy of what you are doing. If you are a professor, every dreary word which comes out of your mouth will literally look like a dead butterfly. The exposure is total. In this stage everything is taken away from the false self so that it dies. All its hiding places are unnervingly opened up and dissolved.

But while this savage and often hilarious destruction is going on, and simultaneously with it, the Divine Light comes up in the mind and knowledge is born of an unmistakable, irreducible identity with that Light that is bliss, peace, and awareness. This does not and cannot happen quickly. It happens in bursts, in swells, in trials, in spirals, and is often accompanied by other forms of breakdown, temptation, or desolation, which the searcher has to experience for himself or herself within the terms of his or her own self which is being transformed, of his or her own personality. Very few people ever get to the end of stage three. This is because stage three requires – and the word is requires – total surrender to the higher Path. It requires total abandon to the Beloved. It requires total faith in the divine power of the divine Master, because nothing can get you through the ordeals of stage three but that faith. You are in a completely new field about which you know nothing. It is vaster, more immense, more majestic, more terrible than anything the ego-mind can even begin to imagine. In this field of total novelty – abrasive, wild, completely foreign – you have only one recourse and that is to grasp the hand of the divine Master for absolute dear life. Unless you are holding the hand of the Beloved in abandonment and humility, you can only fall over the cliff of the mind and be shattered on the rocks below. That shattering can take dramatic forms: it can be madness, it can be real schizophrenia, it can be extreme inflation of the self, because the experiences in stage three can lead you to imagine that you have completed the entire experience, and so identify yourself with Christ and the Buddha. The West is now full of people identifying the spiritual experiences that happen in stage three with the completion of the Path, with enlightenment. This is nonsense; these experiences in the whirling fire of stage three are just the beginning.

Very few people get to the end of stage three because very few people are prepared to suffer enough. That is the truth. Who is prepared to give up everything for the Beloved (awareness-based relationship)? Who is prepared to give up every area of their life including the most secret, the most deliciously pornographic, the most elaborate, the most cherished, to the unspeakably searching eye of the Divine Light? Who is prepared to try and wed every moment of their daily life, every breath they take, every thought they have to the Light? Transformation is a huge task, hugely beautiful and hugely difficult.

Stage three ends – and the mystical traditions agree on this – with the direct vision of the divine nature of Reality and the divine nature of the Self. And this is a direct vision of the Divine Light, seen normally, ordinarily, permanently, as a state of grace and nature. You know that you and the Light are one, and at any moment in which you focus or still yourself, the divine Light appears, literally. It is a white Light, it is colorless, manifesting everything. It is the Light of the Divine Mind. It is the Light of the Self, and at the end of stage three, that Light comes up forever. Nothing can ever eclipse it.

This most extraordinary moment is not dramatic. It happens in a blink and suddenly  you realize that you are not looking out, but looking in, and all the barriers between you and the world, you and the world and others, you and the world and others and the Light, are dissolved.

This is an enlightenment experience. But it is not the end of the journey. I think it is important, at this moment in our culture, to make it clear that this illumination is not enlightenment. Stage three ends with this illumination, the coming up of the divine Light, and with it the coming up of the most important stage of all. Stage four has its own subtle agonies, but fortunately at stage four something else has entered the picture and it can only be described as a massive sense of humor.

By stage four you know beyond any doubt that the person suffering is an illusion, that the false self is constantly tempting you to dance into new shapes. You know that. You can be trapped and caught and humiliated again and again by shadows and desires, but  the game is so obvious, the illusion so transparent, that  you start laughing even as you fall.

There is tremendous sense of humor that helps you through the various ordeals of stage four. Stage four is the integration of the divine Self with the human self, of the absolute with the relative, and that work of integration has to go down eventually into each cell of the body. So it is a work of bringing the entire human experience up to the level of the divine Light, of letting the Light come down and soak all the way through the body, heart, and mind and then letting the heart, mind and body flower endlessly in that Light.”

The Sanskrit word Yoga means an experience of union.

Your Pain Body Is Very Seductive  

by Eckhart Tolle:

Who is watching the violence on TV, news, in movies?

The pain body.  Who is financing them, produce them, pay to watch them, loved them… creating whole industry to watch violence on a screen: ‘Oh, that was a good scare!’

Can you  watch your own drama and realize, it has a story,  a mind created  fiction designed to give  you  a sense of  identity  in the absence of true sense of  identity.

Ok, I will hang on the ‘miserable one’… Madness of our civilization, when seen clearly,  turns into a tragicomedy.

When  you see  your own drama  as  illusion,  then you either laugh or smile.

 And then  you smile a lot more, when  you see it  a lot  around you.

Pain bodies do not  like to be seen,  to have attention put directly on them because they strive in non-attention (unawareness).

They strive in and through unconsciousness.

When  you become conscious and  look at the pain body directly  it shrinks, and tries to withdraw, often becoming dormant as if  it is not here anymore.

Yet, it is waiting for a better moment to show its aliveness.

“I bless the world because I bless myself.  Never forget you give but to yourself.

Who understands what giving means must laugh at the idea of sacrifice. Nor can he fail to recognize the many forms which sacrifice may take. He laughs as well at pain and loss, at sickness and at grief, at poverty, starvation and at death.

He recognizes sacrifice remains the one idea that stands behind them all, and in his gentle laughter are they healed.

Illusion recognized must disappear. Accept not suffering, and you remove the thought of suffering.”   ACIM

Poem by

St. Catherine

of Siena, 

  translated by

  Daniel Ladinsky

IF SOMEONE

CRIED

IN HEAVEN

If you cried in heaven,

Everyone would

Laugh.

For they would know

You were

Just kidding.

Soul Nursery

Is

An Idea Of Recognized

‘Magnitude of Oneness,

All Minds United

As One.

Light Of Awareness

Shining Through

Us All,

As Spirit Of Love

Energizes

Its Own Reflections

Into

A Conscious Existence’

Light of awareness can never be contained or eclipsed.

Who recognizes it within himself must give it.

And the means for giving it are in his understanding.

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain.

Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way.

There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression.

No one but yourself affects you.

There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail.

But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are.

As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs.

The world you see does nothing.

It has no effects at all. It merely represents your thoughts.

The world may seem to cause you pain.

And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause.

As an effect, it cannot make effects.

As an illusion, it is what you wish.

Pain is the thought of evil taking form, and working havoc in your holy mind.

Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free."

ACIM, pg. 361

What have you done that this should be your world?

What have you done that this is what you see?

Deny your own Identity and this is what remains.

You do not see what you have done by giving to the world the role of jailer to what you are.

You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this:

All power is given unto you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do.

You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you. Yet when you accord it mercy, will its mercy shine on you.

Deny your own Identity, and you assail the universe alone, without a friend, a tiny particle of dust against the legions of your enemies. Deny your own Identity, and look on evil, sin and death, and watch despair snatch from your fingers every scrap of hope, leaving you nothing but the wish to die.

Yet what is it except a game you play in which Identity can be denied?

Pg.363-4

The mind without the body cannot make mistakes.

It cannot think that it will die, nor be the prey of merciless attack.

Anger becomes impossible, and where is terror then?

What fears could still assail those who have lost the source of all attack, the core of anguish and the seat of fear?

Only forgiveness can relieve the mind of thinking that the body is its home.

Yet do we need forgiveness to perceive that this is so. Without its kindly light we grope in darkness, using reason but to justify our rage and our attack.

Our understanding is so limited that what we think we understand is but confusion born of error.

We are lost in mists of shifting dreams and fearful thoughts, our eyes shut tight against the light; our minds engaged in worshipping what is not there.

Hold no one prisoner to your limited judgment. Release instead of bind, for thus you are made free.

Each time you feel a stab of anger, realize you hold a sword above your head.

And it will fall or be averted as you choose to be condemned or free.

 Pg. 366

“You live by symbols. You have made up names for everything you see.

Each one becomes a separate entity identified by its own name. By this you carve it out of unity. By this you designate its special attributes, and set it off from other things by emphasizing space surrounding it.

This space you lay between all things to which you give a different name; all happenings in terms of place and time; all bodies which are greeted by a name.

This space you see as setting off all things from one another is the means by which the world’s perception is achieved.

You see something where nothing is, and see as well nothing where there is unity; a space between all things, between all things and you. Thus do you think that you have given life in separation. By this split you think you are established as a unity which functions with an independent will.

What are these names by which the world becomes a series of discrete events, of things ununified, of bodies kept apart and names to them, establishing perception as you wished to have perception be. The nameless things were given names, and thus reality was given then as well. For what is named is given meaning and will then be seen as meaningful; a cause of true effect, with consequence inherent in itself.  This is the way reality is made by partial vision, purposefully set against the given truth. Its enemy is wholeness. Yet does this other vision still remain a natural direction for the mind to channel its perception.

Think not you made the world. Illusion, yes!  But what is true in earth and Heaven is beyond your naming.  When you call upon a brother, it is to his body that you make appeal. His true Identity is hidden from you by what you believe he really is. His body makes response to what you call him, for his mind consents to take the name you give him as his own. And thus his unity is twice denied, for you perceive him separate from you, and he accepts this separate name as his.

It would indeed by strange if you were asked to go beyond all the symbols of the world, forgetting them forever; yet were asked to take a teaching function. You have need to use the symbols of the world a while. But be you not deceived by them as well. They do not stand for anything at all, and in your practicing it is this thought that will release you from them.  They become but means by which you can communicate in ways the world can understand, but which you recognize is not the unity where true communication can be found. Use all the little names and symbols which delineate the world of darkness. Yet accept them not as your reality.

Truth has no name. All names are unified; all space is filled with truth’s reflection, every gap is closed, and separation healed.”     ACIM, pg.345

“Because you and your brother are not different, you cannot attack”   pg.483

“For what one thinks the other will experience with him.”  Pg.484

I will love what  I perceive as sinless, innocent, heavenly, resembling being Now Home.

“What Is the World?  The world is false perception.

It is born of error, and it has not left its source. It will remain no longer than the thought  that gave it birth is cherished.

When the thought of separation (from omnipresent awareness) has been changed to one of true forgiveness, will the world be seen in quite another light;  and one which leads to truth (path),  where all the world must disappear and all its errors vanish. Now its source has gone, and its effects are gone as well.

The world was made as an attack on God (Awareness). It symbolizes fear.  And what is fear except love’s absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son (Awareness) could be apart from Him. Here was perception born, for knowledge (awareness) could not cause such insane thoughts. But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely. Now mistakes become quite possible, for certainty has gone.

Fear is deception.  It attests that you have seen yourself as you could never be, and therefore look upon a world which is impossible. Not one thing in this world is true. It does not matter what the form in which it may appear.  It witnesses but to your own illusions of yourself.”   Pg.413

My mind can only serve. My mind is a server, not a creator. Today I give its service to awareness my eyes cannot see.

Soul Nursery gives its support

Internationally,

Extending the help to Sahay, India.