Awaken2Now (Nothing To Figure Out)

Awaken2Now

There are three stages in one’s spiritual development,” said the Master. “The carnal, the spiritual and the divine.” “What is the carnal stage?” asked the eager disciples. “That’s the stage when trees are seen as trees and mountains as mountains.” “And the spiritual?” “That’s when one looks more deeply into things—then trees are no longer trees and mountains no longer mountains.” “And the divine?” “Ah, that’s Enlightenment,” said the Master with a chuckle: "When trees become trees again and mountains, mountains.” I was looking at a sunset last Friday evening. An old man came up to me and said, “What are you looking at? You seem all enraptured.” I said, “I’m enraptured by the beauty.” He came back for two weeks more and saw me looking again last evening. He said, “I see the sun and the clouds and the trees but what is this beauty?” I said, “Beauty isn’t a thing but rather a way that you will come to see everything. Even the cracks in the sidewalk on a crowded street. Your society taught you what to look for but not how to see. Love sees through what hate looks at.”

  1. Institutionalizing Guilt Disorganizes Truth -Alan Watts

    04/09/2019

    Institutionalizing Guilt Disorganizes Truth -Alan Watts

    The Bible is blasphemous whenever it is used as caselaw and even the Word of God — which is a flat rejection of the Holy Spirit. Can’t jam Infinite Love inside any book. Not until 1850 did Protestants in Alabama suddenly demand this book be deemed inerrant. An inerrant book written by men? Even Jesús scolds in John 5:39-44 literalism and people who parochially refuse relationship with Him over “constantly having your heads in the Bible but refusing to SEE Me in front of you....” Look at what such narrowness of thinking has done (not because people always believe or love God who they CAN in a less literal sense SEE but won’t SEE) but solely because of individual cowardly narcissism just to be sure they “don’t burn in hell.” This isn’t love but terrorism. Think about it — you place a gun to the head of the preciously and infinitely loved little heads of children and tell them they better hate “certain people OR groups” and beat their children because that’s the only language they understand, and they’ll hardly become human beings capable of charity beginning at home or beginning within themselves. Rather, this same aberrant fear will actually create all manner of evil, self-preservation, self-absorbing megalomania and other highly ephemeral avarice and perversion. Christianity as the “religion” doesn’t espouse a love for and from God for ALL people — rather as merely another exclusive “religion” It unwittingly promotes living a life of fearing hell and hating this God and this threatening tyrannical caricature the church fabricated for dualistic confusion and socioeconomic control. Having said that, debating hate and love and especially the existence of God as a word and trying to force ideas on anyone will cause pushback. Until and, not if but when, a person is able to SEE and RECOGNIZE the divine in ALL PEOPLE— especially those they have been trained to hate not based on reality and truth and grace and truth — but with the very peculiarly arcane approach of actually EXCLUDING first and INCLUDING a very few individuals if anyone (which is ultimately self-banishment) as one’s life goes onto and INTO eternity. Life is living us. Things are improving. America’s history of preferring word-worship and highly superficial and spoon fed programming has created an unstable passively-aggressive kind of undulating conformity that has been largely without any lovingly lasting transformative experiencing as human beings. Forced love is at best, highly unconditional hatred. This has been proffered as stemming from the noun and conceptualized word — God, but any conceptual and airily abstract notion of God as anyone or even anything akin to an infinitely loving agent is all showroom but no storeroom. Just smoke and mirrors and a cheapened part of speech and an unbelievably unworkable textual rule book. A theologically lifeless topic and object of pseudo-scholastic discussion and debate, but sorrowfully little else. It might be becoming increasingly obvious to humanity that humanity is from love and infinite love has all the timelessness in and out of this world to restore to Her original state of sanity. Original sin, logically, demands that the originating Source of sin starts and stops this seemingly endless “missing of the point” not by creating the 16th century atonement conditions for His/Her creation to yet again fail to meet, but by This Creator having ALREADY removed the human convention (illusion) of finitely loving conditions that infinite Love would never impose on His/Her very own divine inventions. (There was nothing to remove but the damnable idea of sin and the blame gaming). What was the problem with Jerome’s Bible? It was heavily influenced by Latin hell-inventing theologians like Tertullian and Augustine. Many of the words used in the Vulgate, such as eternal, redemption, justification, sanctification, sacrament, perdition, punish, torment, damnation, etc., were coined by Tertullian and his contemporaries and came to be associated with concepts foreign to the original Greek. The Latin Church’s emphasis on fear-based dualism was reserved for three great Carthaginians, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine, so to influence the Latin Church it deflected and declined into a system of dogmatic hierarchy and spiritual despotism. But Tertullian was the individual who set this current in motion. This, then, is the man in the hollow of whose hands lay the clay which was to be molded into concrete Latin dogma. This is the man in whose hands reclined the fate of the word eternal. Augustine, who later outdid Tertullian and his doctrines, maintained that the whole human race was “one damned batch and mass of perdition” (conspersis damnata, massa perditionis), out of which a few are elected to salvation, while all the remainder are lost for ever. He beheld evil as a force integral in a universe apart from God, while Origen believed that all is out from God, even evil, which God must undo and banish. As the centuries went by, the Bible was translated and retranslated into Latin (mainly from Greek), and more than twelve centuries later translated into English (from Greek and Hebrew) with the advent of the original King James in the 1600s. It’s not hard to see how morphing Church beliefs and language changes influenced each Bible version that came along. When King James gave the translators instructions for working on his King James Authorized Version in 1604 (a seven-year project), he intended to make sure that the new version would “conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its belief in an ordained clergy.” Since then, it has undergone over 400 more years of translator interventions and theological interpretations. When you think of how many people, opinions, doctrines, misunderstandings, language barriers, as well as political and theological agendas may have worked into the mix in 2,000 years, it’s hard to believe (and shouldn’t be believed) that the Bible has maintained inerrancy or complete adhesion to the original intent. Sin wasn’t humanity’s idea nor God’s allowance for the concept of sin that the church created to control and confuse. The thermodynamic energy that animates your being that IS within you (known as the Holy Spirit) has been flatly rejected and opportunely so by the church. Why? As long as you perceive yourself and, therefore others, with a rather worthless and intrinsically defective sense of identity, the simplicity of this infinitely knowable inner wholeness will by default seem confusingly complicated. Now, these heady abstract antagonists understood perfectly clear how to train word-worshipping Westerners towards dualistically divisional and extreme mental programming. And, because they did, they took advantage of the majority’s illiteracy and fearful dependency and thus, described both God and sin with their conceptualized explanations that were neither creatively freeing nor remotely explicable to the culture at that time. But, in spite of the current day literacy of Western society, both the Catholic and the Protestant career clergymen remain, for the same ephemerally selfish and passionless reasons, determined to take advantage of rigidly fearful and fervently religious people by portraying the church as an externally greater authority than the Spirit of Truth within ALL humanity. Moreover, as long as these church leaders can continue to hoodwink Western society into believing that they must pay the churches’s amateurishly ignorant “professionals” to explain God’s nature to them, oratory rhetoric will continue to hypnotize humanity as objects, discouraging humanity’s grasping their true and original identity as sons and daughters of Infinite Love’s Creator. And, while this can (for a limited time) continue to hinder individual’s knowledge of their inner authority and true identity via unconditionally loving experience, it will never detain this infinite LOVE’s Author and Creator as some diabolically separated Being who has been intentionally portrayed as an unapproachable cosmic tyrant as purposefully maligned as read inside the bindings of the Bible. You didn’t need anyone to explain unconditional love to you UNTIL religionists diabolically developed their own self-seeking conditions of dogmatic beliefs whereby they almost got away of what has gone on till only very recently. This being the early churches’s theologians and socioeconomic religious politicians desire to institutionalize guilt as its ephemeral goal so as to possess all of the gold. Put another way, the Golden Rule as the early church translated it swiftly became an aberrant abomination of Jesus’s extremely simple and easily applicable definition of this Golden Rule. Rather than, “Do unto others as you would want done unto you,” the church’s pyramid scheme was based on, “He who has the most gold, rules.” When Jesus said, “You cannot serve mammon and God both,” a simpler translation is, “You can experience Infinite Love within you and as you but never by studying this experience as merely a lofty concept inside of a book.” Jesus made this perfectly clear in John 5:39-40. No one believes truth, they recognize and know truth again as they knew truth before they became the physical manifestations of Infinite love. Soul. That’s even in the Bible- Psalms 139. God, as a concept, can appear to hate you as long as you project the hatred you have ONLY momentarily felt and observed from the very men who pretend or seem to appear to be like the God none is able to conceive of. Conceptions are deceptions. Just as saying the word water is a horrible attempt to explain the experience of actually being wet. Even if I could freeze an ocean wave, my bringing it to you in a box and placing it on a table would not

    14 min
  2. Aloneness and Going thru With it - Adyashanti

    11/26/2018

    Aloneness and Going thru With it - Adyashanti

    Has it ever occurred to you that you can only love when you are alone. What does it mean to love? It means to see a person, a thing, a situation, as it really is and not as you imagine it to be, and to give it the response it deserves. You cannot love what you do not even see. And what prevents you from seeing? Your concepts, your categories, your prejudices and projections, your needs and attachments, the labels you have drawn from your conditioning and from your past experiences. Seeing is the most arduous thing a human being can undertake. For it calls for a disciplined, alert mind, whereas most people would much rather lapse into mental laziness than take the trouble to see each person and thing anew in present moment freshness. To drop your conditioning in order to see is arduous enough. But seeing calls for something more painful still. The dropping of the control that society exercises over you; a control whose tentacles have penetrated to the very roots of your being, so that to drop it is to tear yourself apart. If you wish to understand this, think of a little child that is given a taste for drugs. As the drug penetrates the body of the child, it becomes addicted and its whole being cries out for the drug. To be without the drug is so unbearable a torment that it seems preferable to die. Now this is exactly what society did to you when you were a child. You were not allowed to enjoy the solid, nutritious food of life: work and play and the company of people and the pleasures of the senses and the mind. You were given a taste for the drug called Approval, Appreciation, Attention, the drug called Success, Prestige, Power. Having got a taste for these things, you became addicted and began to dread their loss. You felt terror at the prospect of failure, of mistakes, of the criticism of others. So you became cravenly dependent on people and lost your freedom.

    14 min
  3. Authentic Transformation - Richard Rohr

    11/25/2018

    Authentic Transformation - Richard Rohr

    Think of the sad history of your efforts at self-improvement, that either ended in disaster or succeeded only at the cost of struggle and pain. Now suppose you desisted from all efforts to change yourself, and from all self-dissatisfaction, would you then be doomed to go to sleep having passively accepted everything in you and around you? There is another way besides laborious self-pushing on the one hand and stagnant acceptance on the other. It is the way of self-understanding. This is far from easy because to understand what you are requires complete freedom from all desire to change what you are into something else. You will see this if you compare the attitude of a scientist who studies the habits of ants without the slightest desire to change them with the attitude of a dog trainer who studies the habits of a dog with a view to making it learn something. If what you attempt is not to change yourself but to observe yourself, to study every one of your reactions to people and things, without judgement or condemnation or desire to reform yourself, your observation will be non-selective, comprehensive, never fixed in rigid conclusions, always open and fresh from moment to moment. Then you will notice a marvellous thing happening within you: you will be flooded with the light of awareness, you will become transparent and transformed. Will change occur then? Oh, yes. In you and in your surroundings. But it will not be brought about by your cunning, restless ego that is forever competing, comparing, coercing, sermonizing, manipulating in its intolerance and its ambitions, thereby creating tension and conflict and resistance between you and Nature and exhausting, self-defeating process like driving with your brakes on.

    6 min
  4. Springtime Forever (Getting the Drug Out) -Anthony de Mello

    11/23/2018

    Springtime Forever (Getting the Drug Out) -Anthony de Mello

    When an archer is shooting for fun
He has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
 Or sees two targets –
He is out of his mind. His skill has not changed,
But the prize divides him.
He cares
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting –
And the need to win
Drains him of power. I feel good because the world is right. Wrong. The world is right because I feel good. What? I am here to be love not to become lovable. The truth makes one free and then hated by everyone who cannot accept this one’s breaking away from this need to be needed, this craving to be craved, this seeking of approval that cannot find peace. An infant is lovable until it cries too much. How does an infant cry too much? It cries and laughs because it is what it is. Only when brainwashed adults tell the baby and child that because they don’t like the feelings within themselves (but they’re so unaware they cannot see this), that the baby or child is responsible for the adults negative emotions. It’s like going to the doctor, explaining your emotional problems and then the doctor writing a prescription for the next door neighbor. The same rain that produces weeds in thickets produces roses in the garden. A rose remains a rose regardless of being called something else by using another name. Don’t mistake LOVED for condition. Nor NEEDED for addiction. Nor BLESSED for a historical one time miracle. The rain that disturbs a picnic doesn’t disturb a picnic but only my programming that the picnic should have been without rain. Do you see this? Whether you can or cannot, there’s nothing to SCREAM at.

    41 min

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About

There are three stages in one’s spiritual development,” said the Master. “The carnal, the spiritual and the divine.” “What is the carnal stage?” asked the eager disciples. “That’s the stage when trees are seen as trees and mountains as mountains.” “And the spiritual?” “That’s when one looks more deeply into things—then trees are no longer trees and mountains no longer mountains.” “And the divine?” “Ah, that’s Enlightenment,” said the Master with a chuckle: "When trees become trees again and mountains, mountains.” I was looking at a sunset last Friday evening. An old man came up to me and said, “What are you looking at? You seem all enraptured.” I said, “I’m enraptured by the beauty.” He came back for two weeks more and saw me looking again last evening. He said, “I see the sun and the clouds and the trees but what is this beauty?” I said, “Beauty isn’t a thing but rather a way that you will come to see everything. Even the cracks in the sidewalk on a crowded street. Your society taught you what to look for but not how to see. Love sees through what hate looks at.”