“There’s a phenomenon happening in the world today.
More and more people are waking up-having real, authentic glimpses of reality. By this I mean that people seem to be having moments where they awaken out of their familiar senses of self, and out of their familiar senses of what the world is, into a much greater reality – into something far beyond anything they knew existed.”
“The way people perceive the world suddenly changes, and they find themselves without any sense of separation between themselves and the rest of the world. It can be likened to the experience of waking up from a dream you didn’t even know you were in until you were jolted out of it.”
“Once we lose our sense of self, it’s as if we have lost the whole world as we knew it. At that moment whether that moment is just a glimpse or something more sustained – we suddenly realize with incredible clarity that
what we truly are is in no way limited to the small sense of self that we thought we were.”
“Our nature is literally beyond all imagination.
What we are is that which is watching – that consciousness which is watching us pretending to be a separate person.”
“Even if you’ve only glimpsed reality for a moment, something within you is changed forever.”
“This one question – “What do I know for certain?”
is tremendously powerful. When you look deeply into this question, it actually destroys your world.
It destroys your whole sense of self, and it’s meant to. You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think
you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions -things you believe because you were taught or told that they were true.”
“At the moment that consciousness wakes up from its dream of separation, there is a great sense of relief. That’s why some people will start laughing or crying or have some other sort of deep emotional release-they are feeling the relief of finally being outside the dream state. I sometimes refer to this moment as the first kiss. Awakening is sort of like your first spiritual kiss, your first real kiss of reality, your introduction to the truth of who and what you are. (…)
In the deepest sense, this honeymoon is an experience of complete and utter nonresistance. Within this nonresistance, life flows wonderfully and beautifully, almost magically. Things show up when they need to show up.
Decisions are made without actually deciding them; everything has a sense of obviousness.”
“Awakening itself can be very disorienting. Everything you thought was true, you now see is not. The person you thought you were, you now see you are not.”
“Reality does not need an orientation. If there is an orientation, it is the orientation of a deep sense of relaxation, of allowing everything to be. Literally, you find your orientation through not trying to find your orientation. You find your orientation by letting go totally.”
“Reality is always true to itself. When you’re in harmony with it, you experience bliss. As soon as you are not in harmony with it, you experience pain. This is the law of the universe; it is the way things are. Nobody gets out of this law. To me, this knowledge is a grace. Reality is consistent. Argue with it, go against it, and it will hurt every single
time. It will hurt you, it will hurt others, and it will contribute to the general conflict of all beings.”
“Only when we see that our thoughts, judgments, and opinions are just as true as their opposites are the polarities of thought balanced. If the opposing thought is just as true as the thought I believe, then the whole structure of thought collapses. If an opinion that is different from mine has just as much right to exist as mine does, then it’s impossible to say which opinion is real or true.”
“There is no such thing as past awakening; past awakening is past.
The only thing that is relevant is the present. Am I awake to the truth right now, and not only in my mind but in the entirety of my being? Do I actually see that the entire structure of a personal worldview and a personal self is nothing but a dream in universal mind? This is all that is relevant.”
“We cannot be true as long as we are expecting or wanting others to agree with us. That will cause to contract – maybe they won’t like what I say; maybe they won’t agree; maybe they won’t like me. When we are protecting ourselves, we are also withholding freedom from everybody else.”
“We humans spend maybe 10 percent of our time thinking about things we really need to think about. We spend the other 90 percent of our time imagining, fantasizing, and becoming involved in all sorts of internal stories and dramas that have no basis in truth.”
“When we awaken at the level of the mind, we begin to think, “My goodness, the way I saw the world was a complete fabrication, literally the stuff of dreams. It had no basis in reality whatsoever. The way I saw myself was also completely fabricated.” It doesn’t matter whether you see yourself as enlightened or unenlightened, good or bad, worthy or unworthy. Nondivision at the level of mind is to have all of these ego structures completely wiped away. It’s almost impossible for me to coherently express how thorough this destruction of the world is on the mental level. It is to see that there is no such thing as a true thought and to get that at the deepest level, to see that all of the models we create – even the spiritual models, the teachings – are literally the stuff of dreams.”
“There is no such thing as an enlightened thought. It is quite a shock to our system to see this. In fact, most of us protect ourselves from seeing this truth. We say we want truth, but do we really? We say we want to know reality, but when it appears, it’s so different from what we thought.
It doesn’t fit into our context; it doesn’t fit with our images.
It’s something completely beyond them. It’s not just beyond them, it actually destroys our ability to see the world in the old way. It renders our world rubble.”
“Sooner or later we find out that we cannot conceptualize the truth. When
we realize that, the mind becomes a tool, and it becomes useful for something other than thought. There emerges the possibility that mind, thought, and even speech can originate from a different place. What is then using the mind is Being. Thought can arise from silence; speech can arise
from silence; communication can arise from silence – from a place far beyond the mind.”
“In a certain sense, enlightenment is dying into the ordinary, or into an extraordinary ordinariness. We start to realize the ordinary is extraordinary. It’s almost like catching onto a hidden secret – that all along we were in the promised land, all along we were in the kingdom of heaven. From the very beginning, there was only nirvana, as the Buddha
say. But we were misperceiving things. By believing the images in the mind, by contracting through fear, hesitation, and doubt, we misperceived where we were.”
“When we see this moment as it truly is, we see something extraordinary. We don’t feel the need to turn this moment into anything other than what it is, because it is extraordinary as it is. When we perceive this, we have
healed the illusory split within ourselves, and we have started to heal the illusory split within the greater consciousness of humanity.
Our greatest contribution to humanity is our awakening.”
“From that moment on, life as it is, exactly as it is, has always seemed slightly magical, slightly amazing. Even if it’s insane, even when human beings do things to one another that are literally insane, still there’s always been and always is this sense that this is the only place to be.
This is actually the promised land, as it is, if only we will open our eyes and see it.”