Dear Ones, We started our get-together with this exchange between Annamalai Swami and Ramana Maharshi: A S: "You have reached the heights of Spiritual life, you are at the top of the hill while I am still at the foot. Please help me get to the top.” R M: “If you give up the thought, "I'm down the hill," that's enough. If you get there, there will be no difference between us. It is only your thoughts that persuade you that I am at the top and you are at the bottom. If you can let go of this difference, everything will be fine.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No one can do this for us but us. It is a basic question of trusting the message from the “sages”, contemporary or not. It is about seeing for ourselves, as if we played a “Vastness game”. We then went on with the powerful suggestions to listen to ourselves deeply with these inspirational quotes, all inspired from a traditional story told by Papaji and retold here by talented Paul Hedderman, the one of the lion and the sheep: “If you are a lion, you don't need to become like a lion.” “Entertain the actual possibility, right here, right now.“ “Act as if you are already are it.”
Paul Hedderman Advaita w/ Are You a Lion or a Sheep? - YouTube ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Together we "entertained" first hand/direct recognition - in our own life - of the following description: Are There Stages of Realization? - Rupert Spira – YouTube ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We then noted that when Clarity comes, any attempt to describe with words fail miserably, any description becomes useless second-hand information to be immediately disposed of.
“Life has no centre. In the place where you once believed a separate entity lived, all you find when you look with fresh eyes, is space, vastness, consciousness, whatever word you want to use. It is not about words... All you can really find is “life happening”:
Jeff Foster Advaita w/ Life Without a Center – YouTube
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Alan Watts:
“By being aware of being aware, by being able to represent what goes on fundamentally in terms of a system of symbols such as words, such as numbers, you put it as if it were two lives together at once, one representing the other, the symbols representing the reality." “If you awaken from this illusion, you can feel yourself not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep deep down, far far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.”:
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As Fred Davis likes to tell us, an awakening experience does not constitute enlightenment. It remains an awakening experience of a unit.
“Enlightenment is the abidance whereas the default position is that of “Oneness” and no longer that of a unit called Fred, for instance. There maybe Fredness, but there is no Fred. And certainly no awakened Fred.”
Oneness is Oneness whether it appears as Fred or not, vastness or not. All these are vain words to cast away.