Understanding Oneness

“In the stillness of your presence you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form.  You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature.  You can look beyond the veil of form and separation.  This is the realization of oneness.  This is love.” – Eckhart Tolle

Beyond all the thoughts we have about ourselves, beyond all the concepts and ideas that shape our personal identity exists the core of who we really are.  The formless and the timeless reality grounds itself in the soul of each person and every creature.  When the mind is still you can feel this energy, the formless and the timeless reality, moving through you.  This is the awareness of source energy.  Yet, the vast majority of people seldom become aware of source energy.

Generally we tend to focus our awareness solely through the mind.  This blocks our awareness from sensing the presence of our own being.  Therefore, when we focus our awareness purely on our thoughts we minimize our ability to function optimally.  To be a seer into one’s life, to see your path clearly, requires an awareness that transcends the limitations of repetitive thinking.

The thoughts that we identity with make up the relative self.  The relative self only comes to know and understand itself through comparison and judgement with other people and things.  This is the basis of duality.  Of course everyone is differentiated in the sense that we all have special talents, unique physical attributes, and specific weaknesses which to transcend, but when this sense of relative existence all what we identify with a formula for inner and outer conflict arises. 

In the isolation of our own minds we lose sight of the formless and timeless reality that holds all of life together.  When awareness is filtered solely through our mind’s concepts and abstractions we diminish our ability to connect with the flow of life and create with life in the way that life itself operates.  Life is not an abstraction.  It simply is.  Therefore, your being-ness is the same as nature and it's is-ness.  So can you be with what is as opposed to being with what you think is?  Can you be more like nature?

The restless mind, with all if its constant analysis, comparison, and judgment, keeps our focus purely in the relative world.  This is the core of human suffering because in our isolation we seek out salvation by judging our selves as superior to another.  Or we mask our illusory inferiority and the pain derived from this sense of lack through addictive and self-damaging behavior.  Yes, it is damaging to incriminate yourself on the grounds that you could have done something better, or that you feel as if you are not as good as someone else, etc.  You did as only you knew how in that given moment…Nothing more, nothing less.  Self-forgiveness is an access point into your enlightenment.

Beyond the mentally defined and operated world is a sense of perception that transcends relativism.  Beyond our self-imposed isolation is our true nature…it is a feeling that we come to through pure awareness uninterrupted by the mind.  This sense of self cannot be judged.  It can only be experienced. So therefore, simply experience your life and stop trying to judge it.

Eckhart Tolle consistently states that only within a state of stillness, when we feel the self beyond the mind, will we come to know true love and peace. 

What does Eckhart mean when he speaks of the unmanifested life that animates your physical form [from the opening quote]?  What is he trying to convey when he states that this is something we can feel? 

What I believe he is saying is that there is an energy that resides within us that contains the source of unlimited potential to make manifest what it is that we are intending to become.  He states that this same energy that resides within us also resides within everything.  This is the unmanifested because it is the energetic all that has yet to be.  It is the all will be.  All aspects of existence flow through life together, evolving together, whether we see this or not.  This is what it means to see past separation.  He does not mean that you necessarily see this with your eyes, although this unity is something you can see, and in actuality it is all that you do see, but he means that we can see through feeling.  To feel with your eyes…

Judda Krishnamurti, one of my favorite philosophers of all time, posed the question.

"When we say we see a tree or a flower or a person, do we actually see them? Or do we merely see the image that the word has created? That is, when you look at a tree or at a cloud of an evening full of light and delight, do you actually see it, not only with your eyes and intellectually, but totally, completely?"

I believe that this is type of perception that Eckhart is talking about.  Both Eckhart and Krishnamurti emphasize seeing life without the interference of mind identification.

I will close this piece on one more of Eckhart’s insights.  He states,

“What is God?  God is the eternal one life underneath all the forms of life.  What is love?  Love is to feel the presence of that one life deep within yourself and within all creatures.  To be it.  Therefore, all love is the love of God.” 

So I ask you, for the sake of your own peace, to seek stillness.  Give yourself the space and time to get to know the real you.  In your stillness observe the mind, but do not give thought and abstraction your clinging awareness.  Do not let it become your identity.  If only for a moment seek to feel the life energy that brews within you.  That is the real you…And maybe then you will remember that you are already everything you need to be and become.  Maybe then you will remember that you are life…why not create your life from the sensation of self that is uninterrupted by the mind?  Create your life in the flow of your experiential experience in this moment and this moment only.  The mind cannot know the unmanifested and the energy contained within you, but your heart sure can.  This is were faith comes into to play.  Trust your heart.

Realize the oneness within you and all around you.  This is what love is.  How then would your life change if you walked the path of life with this realization in your heart? 

What is Truth?

If there were an absolute truth, something undeniably real that exerts natural law over existence, what would it be?  Would it be God?

I feel that I am left with such confusion over the matter because I know that my mind cannot fully grasp the eternal, god, or the infinite cosmos.  Yet, there is still something within me that wants to know, with certainty, what this thing we call life is all about.

Is it possible that life, in its ambiguous nature, could simply be a mystery to which we will ponder for eternity?  Could it be that the more we come to understand life we come to realize that the act of “understanding reality” only expands infinitely?

Of course, throughout our of years inhabiting this planet we have gained great knowledge and insight into the nature of life.  Mathematics, the language of the universe, has allowed us to peer deeply into the hypothetical realm of realization.  Science has enabled us to look deeper into the roots of our existence.  Science has also allowed us to develop great technologies that aid civilization.  We have discovered a lot about the world around us and the world within us through these mediums.  Yet, it seems that there is still something so fundamental to life that eludes us…

It is very sad to acknowledge the fact that wars have been fought over one group’s declaration of their truth over another group’s truth of what "God" is.  Relationships have been squandered, progress has been deterred, and unity has been thwarted all because different segments of our society hold their “truth” as superior to another’s.  I am not here to have a debate about religion, but I am here to observe that maybe God after all is not something to be statically defined but rather that the understanding of God eludes linguistic definition.  Maybe the truth is that there is only an experiential understand of God – meaning that we can only perceive this beacon of creation through our sensations.  I am trying to imply that we cannot fully understand God with the mind, but rather we can better understand creation [God] through our feelings.

Imagine the social implications if the masses stopped to find truth and clarity in words and concepts and started to seek truth through pure perception and feeling? 

We would be very egotistical to think that cognitive understanding is the peak of universal consciousness.  Could there not be an entity that perceives and experiences life with a greater aptitude to “understand” what life is really all about?  Maybe that entity is in some other part of the cosmos, in some other civilization across the sphere of the infinite universe, or maybe that entity is within us, waiting to be realized and realized again as human consciousness evolves into higher plains of perceptual understanding.

If it were true that human beings can evolve, consciously speaking, it would hint to the possibility that there is no end to realization, no end to the expansion of perceptual consciousness.  If this is true than what are we here for?  We are now trekking into the unknown, the aspect of reality beyond our grasp, but maybe it is possible that within the realm of the unknown lies are potential?  The realm of experience beyond the mind...

Maybe the truth is that there is no truth but the truth we call our own.  Would I be so brash to say that God is an individually sacred concept and that each individual's declaration of what God is is true? Could the experience of God be a subjective one?  Could absolute truth be subjective?

Our declarations of truth influence the way we co-create life.  Maybe thats what is so fundamental to life.  Maybe that is what connects all of life together. It seem that every unit of consciousness exerts a degree of control as to the way life unfolds.  Therefore, if the human experience occurs within the realm of creation itself and that we are co-creating our lives and thus influencing the outcome...are we not then God's - aspects of God existing within the infinite sphere of creation [of God]?

So in my realization of the greatness that is life I find a feeling, a subtle feeling, a feeling not bound by the limitations of words, that empowers me.

Without the mental concepts as too what "God" is or what "absolute truth is" I now realize I know less than I thought I knew.  But in that realization I am awoken to the perception of something greater than the ego centered person I have come to know.  This seems to me to be what ego transcendence is all about.

Peering Beyond the Shadow

The shadow of fear casts its influence upon us in ways that have shaped how we create our lives and subsequently our society. The light of love creaks in, but only to the degree to which we allow ourselves to bask in the glory of our interconnection with each other, with the Earth, and with Source. Fear is the shadow which keeps us within thought paradigms that led us to conform our intentions to patterns of existence that are already prescribed for us.

When we stay in the shadows we keep walking in circles. Lost without light to guide us...

Fear keeps us hiding behind the authority that decides for us how we shall live. Love is the feeling, as opposed to thought, that pushes us out of the darkness and into the conscious awareness to where we make our own decisions out of untainted feeling. When we live from thought we live in a repetitive unconscious way, when we live from sensing and feeling we live from love. The feeling of love, as subtle as it may be at times, brings us into awareness of the energy all around us.

Feeling brings us higher truth, conformist thought brings us already known truth. Yet can feeling bring us a new organic thought paradigm?

While we are sensing and feeling at the purest level, thought paradigms do not filter our experience, and we access the feelings we feel from the heart center. From this place the heart casts its energy outward grappling the energy all around. The feelings of another and the feelings of the world and beyond can be perceived. To me, this is what brings us higher truth for it enables us to sense the community, the Earth, and the ALL. Everything else is simply an abstraction of the "what is."

I state that fear is a shadow because it is the shadow which represents the darkness, the vision-less, and the ignorance, that becomes a part of our experience. There is nothing inherently evil about the darkness, nor is there anything "wrong" with ignorance, yet these are aspects of our existence that need to be observed and transformed into something we become conscious of (that is if we want to grow and evolve). For if we are to grow we need to become conscious of what we are not conscious of. Yet, bless the darkness (the duality) for it has granted us the opportunity to know what it is to experientially grow. And this brings me to the question: What is it really to evolve and grow?

To evolve is to be awoken...to raise your awareness...and nothing more...for awareness can always evolve...

When we shed the light of the awakened spirit amongst the shadows of our existence we move closer into the light of love, for we come to know experientially what we are: we feel in our hearts that we are the light of creation itself (try to feel this as opposed to think it). Because when we are "awake" we feel without thought filtering the experience and in this experience we can come to the awesome realization that you "are." When we hold light and love in our hearts we are creating by simply being around darkness and illuminating it through our being. Even as we walk down the street in pure awareness, light, and love, those who walk near you will feel your energy and their energy may be altered just by walking past you.

We accelerate our evolution process when we realize to greater degrees that this experiential feeling of being awake is the basis of evolved creation. This realization has the power to influence how we are to live for it influences our choices in profound ways. I mention "to greater degrees" because we are always evolving and growing, the process never stops.

God too is always evolving... and God is always evolving towards the light of awoken consciousness for God seeks to create love and harmony...are we than not aspects of God? We evolve consciously as we realize that we are God creating God within the realm of conscious manifestation. This is the evolution of consciousness...But what is it that keeps us from creating a world of harmony?

I am going to make a bold statement here...that the overwhelming majority of people, if not everyone, down to their cores wants world peace (and world peace is not just the end of wars, but it is the end of the socio-economic hierarchy and the end of ethnic and cultural segregation). We may not think about this daily, nor may we live lives that actively pursue this goal, yet deep down I believe we all want this. But because we have no idea how to even envision this we claim it is impossible for this to be...and of course, world peace could never be if the majority of people could not envision it. Remember from the last article (the meta-physics of consciousness), that thought is pre-manifested reality. Thought is creative in nature and if the majority of us hold the notion that world peace is impossible to attain and will never happen we, as a world society, will never see world peace. The universe is a "copy" machine that broadcasts to our reality exactly what it is that we believe, think, know, and feel. The universe is our canvas of creation, and how we experience so shall the portrait be displayed.

We believe that there will never be peace in the "middle-east," or peace between the "Israel" and "Palestine," or peace between "blacks" and "whites" (I put quotations to exemplify how these cultural categories are simply devised by thought). We believe that our nations separate us, we believe that skin color separates us, and we believe that differences in our belief structures divide us. Now, the division in all these cases occurs because of our thoughts about them. Is a nation not a piece of Earth that is divisible only by some imaginary border line? All the while a culture develops within these boarder lines that makes us believe we are different, and yes culturally, in many ways we are, but are we not all connected at the heart level? Do we not all feel the loves and pains of the human experience? Are racial differences nothing more than differences in physical traits (of which occurred through peoples adaptation to certain ecosystems)? How are we to attribute real, soulful differences between these people if we are not to adhere to some conforming thought paradigm that states that these people are a certain thing, and act in a certain way? Do we not ourselves take on the socially prescribed notions of how we are to racially and ethnically be as if this is our imminent inheritance? I ask, are our actions prescribed to us? Are we not unconscious to a varying degree in this sense? Are we not hiding behind the shadow of fear, too timid to show our true colors of unity and love with all those who appear to be different?

Do beliefs that are dogmatic and rigid separate people? I would say so, for so often we execute our lives through thought as opposed to pure feeling. Remember, we are soul's inhabiting bodies...we are more than what we physically are, we are what we feel we are... It goes without much questioning, but we feel, for example, that because you are a Hindu and I am a christian we will never understand each other, we are different and all that superficiality (did anyone react to the fact that Hindu is capitalized and not christian...if so realize the automatic unconscious reaction that occurs.

Seek how we may do this in other parts of ours lives: remember that the shadow of fear is often out of our conscious awareness - yet seek to be aware and things which were once unconscious make there ways through into the perceiving mind.

Do we not see how we are locked into these thought paradigms. For the religious minded people, we FEAR that the only way to God is through this Dogma, for the social conformists, we FEAR that we will not feel as if we belong if we do not conform to a social paradigm that prescribes division, dependence upon a leader, and prescribes a way of being that is inherently out of touch with the movements of the Earth and the Cosmos.

If we are living from the mind we are out of touch with pure source feeling. It may be difficult to decipher whether or not the feelings we feel come from the mind or if they come from source. But if there is a hint of confusion, a hint of ego, or a hint of segregation, than you know it comes from the mind. The mind can be used to understand feelings, yet do not try too hard to fit these feelings into already existing thought paradigms. Let your feelings create a new perspective. The thoughts will follow. Words are limited, but perspective is ever expanding. Be patient with this new understanding. But be brave enough to step into the unknown of your own experience and seek to understand the world, relationships, and yourself beyond words...You just may find that feeling...You just might tune into source...