Do you really think that the way you treat yourself and others escapes Notice?

Do you really think that nothing matters? That you can act with impunity? As if what you think, say and do has no meaning or consequence?

This essay is designed to demonstrate how every single thing we do and don’t do expresses our not so hidden assumptions.

For example:

If I assume I am a separate thing, a body/mind/person who came into this world (instead of from it), like a leaf which doesn’t realize it comes from the tree, operating on my own 20 horsepower, then guess what?

I become a caricature of myself, a presumptuous and vain overlay of arrogance onto innocence. Its a default position, barely alive.

Let me explain.

The very moment you identify exclusively with the content of your experience, your body/mind/self and all its perceptions and perspectives. that’s the very moment you abandon the Awareness which makes the whole experience possible in the first place.

Does the Screen of Awareness need the Image of the Body/mind/self/universe to Exist?

No.

Does the Body/mind/self/universe need the Screen of Awareness to exist?

Yes, the Image is made up entirely by the Screen, 100%.

The Image exists entirely by the ability of the Screen to pixelate, to refract its Clear Light into color, shape, space and time.

When we identify exclusively with the Image, we overlook the Screen and subject ourselves to the limitations of the Image.

This produces fear and suffering, competition, strategies and techniques designed to ensure our survival, an impossibility.

But, when we face Reality and the Primacy of Awareness as our True Identity, it doesn’t matter if Images appear or not. The Screen Exists independently of the Image.

Imposing our temporary, impermanent, mortal identities upon the Eternal Presence of Life is understandable, yes, but it is still a monumental error.

Unless the Image understands itself to be one with the Screen, exquisitely intimate and not separate from it, then a terrible fear and a desperate angst in inevitable.

The character on the stage is made entirely of the actor and his costume. He does not lament when the play is over, nor does the actor who goes home after the show.

Were the character to create an identity for himself, independent of the actor, he would suffer.

He has no identity apart from the actor. The actor and the audience make an agreement to tell a story, to enact roles and to forget that the character is an agreed upon fiction.

Unless the character is seen as an enjoyable and highly entertaining fiction, there will be suffering.

The suffering is a signal to Understand, like pain is a signal to take your hand out of the fire.

The refusal to face the Obvious, the insistence of a prosaic and provincial belief over the truth of our actual experience as Consciousness first/Image second is what creates egoity.

It’s a kind of sin, a crime against ourselves.

I call this spiritual pedophilia, a molestation of the Sacred by the Profane.

This is a very difficult admission to make, but I admit it.

Please see my essay Confessions of an Egoholic for more detail.

by robert cinque

Reality is Paradise. Existence is ecstatic. Life is Love. Bliss. Happiness Itself.

In the absence of this realization human beings have erected Scarecrows at the Gates of Paradise instead of Laying Down the Red Carpet and Shouting for all to Enter

This is completely understandable, predictable, and inevitable. It is also unnecessary.

The Scarecrows exist in the absence of our intimacy with our Actual Identity, our Actual Condition at Infinity. They are  Gargoyles that have replaced the Virtues and Heroes of the Heart.

As a born being, you are a dot in an infinite expanse of space and time.

As the Presence of Awareness, you are That Which holds all space and time and everything in them, including the dot we call you.

This Spaciousness, this Living Awareness is what Exists.

You are That. You are not separate from That.

The dot does not need to go looking for God or happiness because God and Happiness are not lost.

That Which we call God, and idolatrize in our favorite conceptions and religious beliefs, is your actual Nature, now.

God did not create the world. God is That out of Which the world, and everything else, is created. God is the Condition of Existence, not a parent or creator. Parents and Creators, and everything else, arise in the Blissful and Free Radiance of the God of Light and Love.

We dots like to think of God as a Really Big Dot. That’s projection, assumption, belief.

God is Presence, in and AS all things.

Every living heart knows this to be true and feels the Bliss of this Infinite Radiance.

That’s why we cling to the body and don’t want to die, because we love Life and we Know how Precious it IS.

The great Good News is that Awareness doesn’t end, or even change, when the dot dies.

To Awareness, death is just another cloud dissolving in the Sky. The cloud did not leave the realm of the Divine Radiance, it just dissolved into it.

Therefore, love Awareness, not just the dot’s personal viewpoint of it.

God is before your beliefs, is the Awareness of your beliefs.

God is Awareness. All Pervading Conscious, Living Awareness.

God is not a thing, an object of Awareness.

God is Awareness and all of space/time phenomena are arising spontaneously as a response to this Glorious, Unspeakable Brilliant Presence Of Life.

DNA is made out of photons, not just atoms. It holds the Endless Eruptions of Living Light in endlessly changing patterns.

Jesus said, Love God. Love all the other dots as yourself. Be intimate emotionally with the Living Current of Being. Stop contracting. Stop withdrawing. Stop imagining that you have been abandoned, rejected, fallen. Stop missing the mark. Stop sinning against the Truth of God. Of Reality. Realize the Truth. That’s the Original Gospel and that’s what got him killed.

In this Christmas Season, there are extremely many sincere people who are passionately ardent about the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth.

They deeply believe that Jesus was a ransom for their default on themselves and that his blood cleanses them and walks them through the Gates of Paradise.

The deeper story is that his Liberating Message of Love and Freedom was so inflammatory and so Outrageous and threatening to the Pharisees and Romans that they strung him up as quickly as possible. Pilate respected Jesus. His wife had a dream and warned him to set Jesus free. Pilate capitulated to the Pharisees.

It was the ecclesiastical and political intelligentsia who murdered Jesus and then used him for their own propaganda about separation from God, Original Sin, and the need for vicarious Blood Sacrifice of the Innocent to Atone for the Sins of the World.

This is a belief, an idea generated from the separate self.

Jesus hated blood sacrifice. He said the Kingdom of Heaven is like a Treasure buried in a man’s field. The man was already rich, he just didn’t know it. That was his Point.

This Message led directly to his grisly torture and murder.

He didn’t die for the sins of the world, he died because of them.

Jesus was the Appearance, the Incarnation, the Perfect Realization of Love/Intimacy/Unity with God.

It’s high time we started following the Teachings of Jesus Christ and stop creating division, separation, and suffering.

He called us to repent from the sin of imagining separation from God.

Such arrogant presumption is an insult to God.

Who are you or me to say what God is? And, who are you or me to say we are somehow separate from Life? If God is Infinite how could anyone say anything about God anyway that was truly comprehensive?  All space/time perspectives on the Infinite are inherently limited and just cannot be comprehensive enough to be the authority in all cases.

That’s why we need to stop molesting Life with our puny little concepts. Ultimately, all concepts that are imposed onto Life is spiritual pedophilia.

You hate pedophiles, right? That’s how Jesus hated the sin of imagining separation and imposing labels on others and turning them into objects to be manipulated.

Jesus washed the feet of the beggar.

Jesus saw his unity with God and every living thing.

His Message is that Love is the Truth and his demand is that we start noticing this, and end our emotional withholding of love.

Personally, I am Sick Unto Death about the way Jesus’s Holy Message is used like a club and a bomb.

Arrogant people use the Truth Jesus revealed not as the Sacred Beauty it Is, but as a weapon to dominate and destroy others. I am also Sick Unto Death about the way this is paraded as religious piety and devotion to God.

My Christmas wish for all of us is that we really get the Message of Jesus and stop creating and tolerating imagined divisions in the unity of  Life.

There are no divisions in the Light that shines in every heart.

Only this Heart Exists

The Living Heart of Light and Love.

When this realization replaces the present assumptions ruining Planet Earth about separation and division, the world will be transformed.

By the way, it’s important to note that the ancient Gnostics said that the idea of separation from God leads directly to Armageddon.

That’s because, when you slice the One up into many separate parts, you need a plan of salvation to restore unity and fight the final battle between good and evil, Armageddon.

Create imagined dichotomies. Then, try to reconcile them with the same bonehead thinking that created the problem in the first place.

That’s the problem we have on Planet Earth today. Imagined divisions and fake solutions.

What works is pre-empting the imagined problem by not making false assumptions and slathering them all over Paradise.

We start at home, with our poor little selves.

We build a world based on love and freedom, just like Life.

What Are We?

What is most basic to human existence?

The fact of awareness.

Awareness is more fundamental than body, more fundamental than emotion, more fundamental than mind.

Most fundamental is not what we are aware of—but the simple fact that we are always aware.

That constant reality of awareness is what Adi Da calls “Consciousness Itself”.

Not consciousness of anything—such as a bodily sensation, an emotion, or a thought, or a person or thing in our environment—but Consciousness Itself.

In fact, Consciousness Itself is our real identity—we are Consciousness Itself.

Because Consciousness Itself is the reality that pervades all of human existence, Adi Da calls it “the True Water of life”—the deep well of Truth that is the real Source of our living.

To know that we are Consciousness Itself grants sanity, freedom, and happiness to the heart—despite the trials of our mortal existence.

And the reality that we are Consciousness Itself is a message that Adi Da wanted all human beings to receive.

Adi Da’s communication here is his gift to you.

_____

The Truth of What We Are

Adi Da summarized his gift of Truth in a single sentence.

He wished to give this gift to every human being, so that knowledge of this Truth could be the foundation of every human life.

He even wished that all children could hear this Truth from their youngest days, so that their lives could be guided by it from the beginning.

He says that this Truth is the case “no matter what arises”.

In other words, this is the Truth regardless of what the body is experiencing, regardless of what emotions may be coming up, regardless of what thoughts we may be having, and regardless of what appears to be happening in the world.

And he also says that this Truth is the case even if there are no bodily sensations or emotions or thoughts happening in the moment.

This Truth, he says, is “always already the case”.

To communicate this Truth most fully, he states it in two different forms.

No matter what arises, or does not arise,
you are only Consciousness Itself.

No matter what arises, or does not arise,
there is only Consciousness Itself.

Become A Participant In The Real World

Fundamental experience is not the experience of “things”.

Fundamental experience is the experience of Being Itself, of Consciousness Itself.

The self-aware pleasure of existing is the fundamental gift, the Divine gift, the persistent gift that you are tending to ignore.

Therefore, to live a truly human life is to become a participant in the real world of always already existing Reality.

You Presume You Are The Body

Your problems and your questions only arise because you forget Consciousness.

You presume you are the body—but, in reality, you are only witnessing the body.

You are aware of the body as something in Consciousness.

You do not experience the body itself as a “thing” in and of itself.

You are conscious of the body.

Therefore, Consciousness Itself is first—not the body.

Then there appears to be the body, and you identify with it, and forget Consciousness.

That is how Consciousness Itself becomes the unconscious: You presume to be the body, and you imagine Consciousness is to be found somewhere else.

You Are Not In The Position of The Body

The error in which you live is the error of presuming that the fundamental experience is that of being an individuated body—that that is birth, that is existence, that is the reality in which you exist and everyone exists, and that is what there is to be concerned about, and to participate in, and fulfill, and so forth.

You must understand: That is an error.

That is not the way it is.

You are not in the position of the body.

To presume so is your error.

What is the actual root-experience, or first experience?

What is the context of experience?

It is not the body.

It Is Consciousness—now.

You Are Not The Thinking Mind

It is commonly presumed that the (apparently individual) conscious “self” is doing the thinking.

You presume that you are thinking and that you are the “subject” of that thinking.

You presume you are the source and cause and doer of thinking.

You presume that the contents, questions, and problems of your thinking are “yours”—but this is only a presumption, or a mere idea.

That presumption is not inspected—and, indeed, that presumption is not true.

Right now, you appear to be thinking—but that thinking is not actually being done by you (as you really are).

You are not the thinking mind.

Rather, you are simply the formless and actionless mere witness of whatever is arising.

Your Real Situation

It appears that you are associated with conditions—in the states of waking, dreaming, and sleeping.

However, none of those conditions last—and, therefore, you cannot be any of those conditions.

You are that which appears to be modified in the form of all conditional phenomena—you are Consciousness Itself.

The entire waking state arises within Consciousness Itself.

The entire dreaming state arises within Consciousness Itself.

The entire sleeping state arises within Consciousness Itself.

And, when any condition in any of those three states—or (otherwise) when any one of those states itself—passes, Consciousness Itself remains.

Consciousness Itself never changes.

Consciousness Itself is always already the case.

The “Glasses” of Consciousness

Everything is seen through the “glasses” of Consciousness.

Everything is a mode of Consciousness.

Every perception, every thought, everything altogether that you call “the world”—everything in it, everyone in it, all relations, all functions, all circumstances, all instants of time, all space, all appearances, the entire universe exists only on the basis of Consciousness Itself.

That is it.

Everything appears on Consciousness as on a screen.

Everything simply passes.

But, always, Consciousness is the basis of everything appearing.

Consciousness Is the “substance” in which all passing phenomena are arising and disappearing.

Awareness Itself Never Changes

No matter what happens to the body-mind-“self” while you live, you are always merely aware.

The awareness itself never changes.

Even while you are aware of changes, the awareness itself never changes.

There are not different kinds of awareness—different colors of it or different shapes of it.

Awareness is, simply and only, awareness itself.

No matter what happens in the body-mind-complex,* awareness is merely and simply aware of the process of the body-mind-complex—and awareness itself is never affected by change.

Awareness itself does not go through changes.

Awareness merely and simply observes changes.

Awareness itself is the in-depth mere witness.

If you are not reality-intelligent in the moments of change, then, every time there is a change, you identify with the change.

“I am that change, then,” you think and say.

When the body is suffering, you think and say, “I am suffering.”

When reactive emotion arises, you think and say, “I am angry, I am sorrowful, I am afraid.”

That which—in and as Reality Itself—never changes is, in its superficial daily-ordinary state, constantly presuming itself to be changed, and to be a change.

In this moment, it is painful—in the next moment, it feels good.

The daily-ordinary ego-mind is constantly identifying pure awareness (or the in-depth mere witness) with the changes that are peripheral to it.

If you inspect awareness itself, if you enter into it most profoundly, you will clearly see that awareness itself does not change, but it is (simply and only) the in-depth mere witness of changes.

* The complex of four faculties that make up the human structure and process—body, emotion, mind, and breath.

A Way To Observe
That Consciousness Is Always The Same

If you can locate a memory of something that happened earlier in your life, a memory that is so vivid that you can feel the event again, do that and compare it to your feeling now.

Not the content of now, but the feeling of yourself now, compared to the feeling of yourself then.

It does not make any difference how much development there has been of the persona—in terms of content or years or whatever it may be.

The conscious being feels the same whether it is five years old or twenty years old or seventy years old—however many years old, it is the same.

If you clearly recollect how it was being there, if you clearly sense it again, it is the same as now.

Consciousness is always the same, now and in the past—whether the recent past or the past of long ago.

To Realize This Is Realization Itself

Even now, no matter what arises, you are Consciousness Itself.

Not the ego, not the separate “self”, but Consciousness Itself.

No matter what arises, even now, you are Consciousness Itself.

This is Absolutely True—and it is a way of saying what there is to Realize.

To Realize this is Realization Itself.