Nothing moves that is not of God. Nothing is created or destroyed that is not of God. Nothing appears, happens, or deteriorates that is not of God.

Yet our perception of events is entirely different. The ego-mind would have us believe that we have stepped back and brought great consideration to the circumstances and events surrounding us in the moment and chosen a course of action, a path of plausible strategy.

We might even require praise for how we acted, how well we acted, how creatively and efficiently we acted. Alternatively, we may consider that we are culpable, should our actions appear awry, tardy, ineffective, and lacking in some way.

But nothing moves that is not of God.

Remove the thought that is the "I." Without this thought notice how your actions unfold, how you go about your daily tasks. In the arising of any action at all, there is a threefold process of ideal, effort, and resistance. You picture a desired and longed for event. You move toward this acknowledged goal and along with the movement and action itself comes the resistance, the opposing force, guiding you toward ennui, weakness, exhaustion, apathy. You increase your effort to counter the resistance and through the frisson between effort and resistance the desired event appears.

This may take place within the realm of delusion or Reality, within the illusion of the agency of self or the tacit surrender to the Divine action of eternity.

BLOG entry #5

Through the many veils of psycho-spiritual unfolding so many sleights-of-hand, hallucinations, and themes of change appear and disappear or reappear, you can be forgiven (you already are!) for feeling confused. Perhaps a summary looks something like this: In the beginning you want to change. You change through accepting yourself just as you are. Then you experience transformation. In the deeper existence that follows you wish to practice only love, authenticity, and compassion. Then you feel the last sand grains passing through the hour-glass as even the transformed state is about to be offered up. Letting go of all your certainties, of your ideals, and your many refined fantasies of what is really spiritual, you enter the spiritual discipline of sadhana, stripped bare of all expectations and assumptions and, now you cannot even think of change or transformation, these are exactly what occurs. Through a life of consistent burdenlessness, experience renounced for reality's embrace, you ceaselessly change while in no way desiring anything to be different until you are washed, purified, and annihilated in the flow, merged and assimilated in the torrent.

In Sacred Attention Therapy, only in the fourth state of Mahanamen can you say finally with conviction: God is, when I am not. Awakening is complete; you are no more.

Now the wonder of this—or perhaps we should say one of the wonders for there are many—is that to resort to a description in words you would think this happens sequentially. How can we say it, sing it, or dance it for we are here, already realized, blossomed, and grown.

Sometimes metaphors simply fail us, similes don't measure up, descriptions don't apply to the indescribable... all we are left with is wonder and the opportunity to sit still and quiet and merge into the formless state of great beingness, before and beyond thought and feeling and experience and anything was here, as we lose ourselves in the distraction of the great void, to the contentment of the universal womb, and enter the profound embrace of total love.

Is there ego or not? Do we have one? Is it desirable at all? What is it? Why are we so confused with the endless spiritual messages—usually negative—concerning ego?

The word ego simply means "I." It denotes the self-sense; when born a human being we participate in some identity and recognize it as our self. In western psychology it has been judged "a good thing." In eastern spirituality it has been judged "a bad thing." This is because the religions and philosophies of the east have tended to be preoccupied with transcending the world and those of the west have been concerned with preparing in this world for an afterlife. Thus, for example, Indians have a downer on ego, while Europeans tend to rely on ego for mental health. In the west we have overemphasized ego; in the east they have denied ego. One way of dealing with this twin imbalance is to synthesize east and west. Vivekananda did this when he said that Indian boys instead of learning meditation should play football.

In Sacred Attention Therapy, we clarify the process of ego by practically observing and revealing that it has a different role and function according to what stage of psycho-spiritual development we're in. For example, it does little good to say to someone in the first two stages of awakening that the ego doesn't exist—a popular shibboleth for advaita adherents today... and before I get spiritually assassinated by the advaita zealots just allow me enough breath to tell briefly this wonderful story of Ramana Maharshi, the Indian saint who perhaps more than anyone was responsible for introducing us to this profound teaching.

When a Moslem contractor who was harvesting tamarind at Ramana's ashram catapulted stones at the monkeys, he inadvertently killed one. The monkeys carried the corpse to Ramana in their grief and anger to gain his wisdom. After joining with them in and mirroring their distress, he said, "Death is inevitable for everyone who is born. He at whose hands this monkey died will also meet with death one day. There is no need to grieve." Pacified by Ramana's loving kindness, the monkeys left carrying the corpse.

Now, we notice Ramana did not say there is no ego, no body, no self. He didn't choose to slap sense into them. He simply met the situation and reflected the events clearly and compassionately in a way that was appropriate.

Please (this to the advaitists) stop telling all the world that there is no I, no self, no body, and so on. It can only be interpreted by many of us as a nihilist philosophy leading to despair. Some people are fragile in mind and heart, some are damaged and wounded. Some are trying very hard to build a strong sense of self, an ego, and perhaps in time they will find themselves ready to receive the teachings of no-self.... but they are not ready, not yet.

You would not teach this to a young child and many of us are still like young children... So don't catapult stones at us.

The esoteric secrets of the deepest spiritual teachings are available to us today on a keyboard click. It wasn't always this way of course. The profoundest of spiritual teachings were reserved, kept in abeyance by the teacher and only presented when the devotee was able to receive them. This delicate play or dance of preparation, readiness, and masterful timing and sensitivity was a central part of the teacher-pupil relationship. In whatever cultural clothing it appears in the historical narratives, we can witness variously how Jesus of Nazareth reserved higher teachings for his disciples, in for example the Beatitudes. Buddha created a network of grading disciples according to ability. Ramakrishna took care that he was not overheard uttering the deepest sacred truths to his most intimate disciples, and inner circles of more "advanced" devotees seem to exist in most teachers' environments.

Today the teachings are more popular than the teacher in the true sense. Spiritual seekers "sleep around spiritually," attach to several teachers at the same time, and browse a little here and graze a little there to create an individualized spiritual diet of preferred tastes and individualized "feel." The spiritual teacher however knows the problems this process inevitably leads to. He reserves the profoundest teachings for the right time, observing the pupil with insightful precision. Confusion does not aid spiritual effort, neither does bewilderment bring clarity. Part of spiritual development is the atrophying of questions. Whereas the easy availability of esoteric truths contradict, convolute, and obfuscate the teachings and are a goad to creating questions, questions on questions, question about questions and so on.

Enjoy the license we have today for indulging in the plethora of ancient and modern teachings, but please understand that the teacher gives you the teachings; you do not take them. Their truth is inherent in the teacher's transmission, not in the matter of the words or mode of expression in itself. The teachings are nothing without the teacher. You will understand but little and what you do understand will make you arrogant, afraid, or confused... or all these. But through the agency of the spiritual teacher, the same teachings will bring you to liberation, inspire you to realization, and deliver you to freedom.

Spiritual teachings are both complex and simple—at the same time. But this simultaneousness is not how you experience it. Through great complexities we emerge into the simplicity of practice and the calming of the mind and the fading of questions. The mind becomes increasingly tranquil. Finally in breakthrough the absurdity of the journey you have taken to your natural present state causes great humor and laughter, inwardly and/or outwardly. To take hold of any particular piece of this process and cling to it is merely to reveal your prejudice and the part of the elephant you can touch. Spiritual teaching is worthless, nothing, without the correct elements of delivery or transmission in place. A spiritual teacher, a community of like-minded souls, as well as the teaching are all necessary. Not only are they all necessary but they need to be in correct relationship to each other. Now the relationship between any three elements is immensely powerful but it is also complex. Why then do people insist that spiritual teaching and insight and awakening are simple? Because they are leaping on to the later experience of the realization of absurdity. Let us not oversimplify, undersimplify, or be opinionated. Let us face the truth as squarely as we can. Neither our experience nor anyone else's will define spirituality. Spirituality, if it has any pertinent meaning at all, cannot be defined unequivocally. Neither are words a method of conveying the teaching solely. These words must be spoken by a genuine teacher; then even words, like movements, intonation, and feeling are drenched in Truth.

BLOG entry #1