The Chalice of Wisdom - Part 1

Saraswathi 'The Light no medit mov ff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGa-0PkYwbc


Love Always
mudra

A young psychiatric patient, known as Lili, is having a profound effect on both fellow inmates and medical staff alike. As she begins to unravel the truth of her hospital admittance, she persuades her sceptical psychiatrist, Katherine Kolinsky, to begin a search for Truth in her own self.

Thousands of miles away in eastern Canada a young fisherman, Averi, is about to be capsized, both in the sea and in the heart. At first troubled and resistant, Averi surrenders at last to the inner journey, coming to see through the loving guidance of his friend and confidante, Nyx, the Reality of his own existence.

As Truth unfolds and falsity is wiped clean, so it becomes clear that Averi and Lili are not separate, that the former lives in the mind of the latter, an alter ego and a signpost to Self-recognition. It shall take the delicate unpicking of a densely woven tapestry to cut through the layers of ‘psychosis’ and delusion. Only then shall Katherine the psychiatrist be convinced that ‘madness’ is not all as it seems.

Love Always
mudra

Even when 'my life' falls apart
who you truly are
can never fall apart.

Even when relationship breaks up
who you truly are
never breaks up with relationship.

Even when the end seems certain
who you truly are
remains eternally open.

And even when the body ceases
who you truly are
never dies.

Life itself
is never a conclusion -

only a beginning.

Jeff Foster

Love Always
mudra

Meeting What Is - by Mike Jenkins

This past week I’ve been challenged to meet emotions, thoughts, sensations and story lines that usually we try to escape through spiritual seeking. Seeking is so much about rejection of those feelings, thoughts and sensations that don’t fit with our idea of awakening or our idea of freedom. Freedom is so free however that it includes all the crap we don’t want to deal with. At every moment life is shaking us awake with all the variety of a dualistic world.

Wholeness has to include the painful emotions, has to include the fear of death, the panic and anxiety at the thought of disease or breakdown. And so we are asked to meet all those rejected feelings, thoughts and story lines and see that they too are wholeness. We are asked to meet the thought that says ‘I’m not awakened’ or ‘I’m not good enough’ or ‘I’m going to die soon’ or ‘I don’t want to go on’ and to see that it is not separate from the wholeness of enlightenment. Life is presenting these movies to us on the cinema screen and saying, look! There is room for all these appearances but none of them hurt or damage the screen, none of them change the changeless space of consciousness that you are.

Can you look now at what is appearing in your present experience and meet it, as it is? Meet adversity like an old friend or pain like a long lost cousin. They are all children of consciousness, all calling us home to the peace in which it all happens, to the clear and open screen of awareness on which the great variety of life’s movies flicker.

Love Always
mudra

A flower falls even though we love it and a weed grows even though we do not love it.

Dogen Zenji

Love Always
mudra

Spiritual Poetry: Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu ~ chapter 1 (Meditation about Tao)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB3PH5j6oOg


Spiritual Poetry: Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu ~ chapter 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWfrLOyhRts


Spiritual Poetry: Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu ~ chapter 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot_WKE8AWrs


Spiritual Poetry: Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu ~ chapter 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u82BstuK_g


Love Always
mudra

Eric Gross 'Liberation From The Lie' Interview by Iain McNay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOgXs7PfuuA




Love Always
mudra

When you die you go into a dreamworld that you create. There is so much space out there, that you can do what you want.

Most people are just discussing esoteric workings here and there. This is not new information and we should not draw there to leave our present life.

This would be ignorance in knowing your physicality.


There is a balance to this and the Vedas have deceived you. The lineage of Gurus have made a mistake in application and now they suffer along with their progeny not receiving the Word of God....

The Key to Happiness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23X-AfKANOE&list=UUQd3RhofSbBOzYsGcEcJgYQ&index=10


Love Always
mudra

Mudras. I once owned a set of the false moustache and nose glasses as depicted in the video above.

I can most certainly vouch that they bring happiness not only to the self but also to others.

Me as Thought

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMHgDKpxiy4


Love Always
mudra

Cultivating The Heart of Compassion ~ Ram Dass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94WZM1l0M-c


Love Always
mudra

‎"People are afraid, very much afraid of those who know themselves. They have a certain power, a certain aura and a certain magnetism, a charisma that can take out alive, young people from the traditional imprisonment. The awakened man cannot be enslaved - that is the difficulty - and he cannot be imprisoned.

Every genius who has known something of the inner is bound to be a little difficult to be
absorbed; he is going to be an upsetting force. The masses don’t want to be disturbed, even though they may be in misery; they are in misery, but they are accustomed to the misery. And anybody who is not miserable looks like a stranger. The awakened man is the greatest stranger in the world; he does not seem to belong to anybody. No organization confines him, no community, no society, no nation."
- Osho

Love Always
mudra

Guardians of Being

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa3leVosBPM


Inspired by the book "Guardians of Being" by Patrick McDonnell the creator of MUTTS comic strip, words by Eckhart Tolle.



Love Always
mudra

Bentinho - Durham pt1: Introduction to the Retreat + Explanation of Individual Freedom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvdWBT5oFxs


Bentinho - Durham pt2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPai-Qgd5qM&list=PLDZ9NAmYL-5zodfuPLVUAPR0KsZXFgNDJ&index=2


Love Always
mudra

Bentinho Massaro Free Awareness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqCXTlePoqQ


Love Always
mudra

Bentinho Masaro



Link to free ebook downloads:Book I and II: http://www.free-awareness.com/free-downloads/free-books

Love Always

“Being the Stream

Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the
stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream,
so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies.
Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totally
into it.”
― Gary Snyder

Love Always
mudra

Bentinho - Service, Surrender, Love + Contemplating Beyondness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvEx5hGedww


This talk starts out with an hour long talk on BEING Service itself, and BEING Surrender, rather than being in service OF, or Surrendering TO something else. Bentinho explains how everything you're providing a service to, is not ultimately a service to 'others', rather, it is a service to 'the rest of your Self.'

Bentinho also speaks on giving yourself permission to experience love and unity directly, without waiting for some imagined objective realization to dawn on you. Enlightenment is subje

Love Always
mudra

HOW DEEPLY CAN WE MEET?

by Jeff Foster

Life gently calls us to come closer, closer, and closer still.

Each breath, each thought, each vibrantly alive sensation, each sound, each intense feeling surging through space is a little messenger of grace, whispering “do not be afraid, know that I am also life, know that I am only yourself.”

The final teaching is not to be found in books or on websites or spoken through the mouths of so-called figures of authority. Our too-clever mind-formulations such as ‘there is no me’ or ‘free will is an illusion”, our certainties and mental abstractions and word games pale in comparison to the continual awe of being witness to this eternal and mysterious dance of being and becoming echoing through eternity.

The final teacher will not be found in classrooms or at satsangs or preaching in pulpits or at conferences. The final teacher is life itself, and this living teaching only begins when we truly meet what is here with open arms.
How deeply can we meet?

Stand naked in front of me now, without the protection of your favourite philosophy, without your dusty old books, without quoting what you have read or been told, without even the familiar thought ‘who meets who?’ or ‘it’s all just a story’ to comfort you or separate us.

If you think you have found the answers, if you’re excited because you think you’ve ‘arrived’, even if you believe yourself to be ‘the enlightened one’, that’s okay, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, we’ve all been through it. And if you think you haven’t found the answers yet, if you feel lost and lonely and far from home, that’s okay too. Just stay close.

Bring to me your frustration, your confusion, your joy and your pains, your certainties and your doubts, and let us sit together awhile.

Love Always
mudra

DIVINE SUICIDE: Depressive Breakdown as a Call to Awakening

by Jeff Foster, July, 2012



‎“Take me out to Cypress Hill in my car. And we’ll hear the dead people talk. They do talk there. They chatter like birds on Cypress Hill, but all they say is one word and that one word is “live,” they say “Live, live, live, live, live!’” It’s all they’ve learned, it’s the only advice they can give. Just live. Simple! A very simple instruction…”


- from ‘Orpheus Descending’, Tennessee Williams


I was speaking recently with a woman who was planning her own suicide. She had spent the past few weeks sorting out her finances, paying off her debts, and trying to find foster parents for her young daughter, who would be left motherless after she killed herself. So many people had tried to intervene, but her mind was made up. She was definitely going to die. She had been threatening it for years, but finally it was coming true.

Her friends and family were starting to panic. I agreed to speak with her.

“That’s it. I’m done here. My time on earth is over”, she told me, point blank, at the start of our one-to-one session. Everything had become such a burden to her – her job, her so-called-friends, her failed relationships, her own brilliant but overactive mind, even her beloved daughter. It was all just too much. She was in so much pain, totally drained, fed up and exhausted from trying to help everybody all the time, and never getting anything back. She was the one who gave everything to everyone, but who ever gave anything to her? Where was gratitude? Where was love? Even her young daughter was just “take-take-take” – her demands were incessant. The only way out of this hell was death. Suicide was the logical solution to the problem of living. Her life insurance policy would be generous to her bereaved family.

I let her talk and talk. She had a lot to say, and I said very little. I simply got on her side, saw and felt things the way she did, allowed her to experience what she was experiencing, and allowed her experience to become mine, intimately so. It was easy, since I have known well that place of total exhaustion, that place where “I’ve been trying so hard to save others and have received nothing back”, that desperation to die (or at least to end the burden of living), and also the sense of guilt and terrible sadness that arises from imagining loved ones trying to go on without me.

I stayed close. I did not try to play ‘spiritual teacher’, ‘expert on suicide prevention’ or even ‘therapist’. I certainly did not lecture her about nonduality, the absence of the self, the perfect perfection of perfect awareness, or the non-existence of the ‘I’. We did not get into intellectual discussions about the Absolute and the Relative, the illusion of free will or the ins and outs of Oneness. I did not try to fix her, to mend her, or even to ‘save’ her. I simply listened to her. I wanted to learn from her, not teach her or feed her new beliefs. What was it like, exactly where she was, right now?

I joined the ‘Our Lives Are Exhausting And We Want To Be Free From It All’ Club. We were the exhausted ones, the unloved ones, the ones who nobody appreciated, the ugly ones, the overweight ones, the ones on the verge of collapse, the ones who wanted to die. The ones who nobody understood. I wonder if anyone had ever truly met her there before? I wondered if everyone she had talked to over the years about her desire to die – therapists, friends, family – had just been trying to save her, to fix her, to get her to stay alive and live in the old way, rather than meeting her in her pain and desperation and validating her present-moment experience. Had anyone ever truly met her? Or had they been driven away by her self-pity and anger, or perhaps their own discomfort and frustrated desires to help?

We talked for about three hours. The more we talked, the more I simply stood in her shoes, listening and seeing things from her perspective, being with her without trying to fix her or make her wrong or even right, the more she relaxed and opened up about her true longings and hidden dreams and desires. What became clear was this: Secretly, she did not want to die at all. She knew, deep down, that who she truly is – consciousness itself – cannot die. She knew that only the false can die. Only an image of herself can die. Only dreams can die.

What she really longed for was not physical death, not the death of the body, not the end of breathing, not the cessation of the heartbeat, but the death of the false self, the death of the pretence, the death of falseness and inauthenticity. The second-hand, limited ‘self’ she was pretending to be – the Real Estate queen, the selfless giver, the one who ‘fit in’ with others, the brilliant one with the “16 track mind” as she put it – was utterly false. Her life as it was playing itself out was suffocating her, and until this point, she had only seen death, and foster homes, and life insurance policies, and psychological escape, as the solution.

It soon became clear that this woman, although ‘dying’ on the outside, had a rich, creative inner life that had simply never been given expression. On the inside, she was so very alive, so open to life, so sensitive to everything around her, so “wide angle” as she put it, so “connected to everything and everyone”. She was a force of nature, a wild and free spirit that had totally limited itself over the years, constrained itself to ‘fit in’ to some second-hand idea of what is normal, or right, or proper, or true. She had been living “the wrong life”, so to speak, a dead and deadening life, a life of money and numbers and predictability, and it was crushing this inner explorer, this adventurer, this poet, this visionary, this seer, this spiritual seeker, this big-hearted pilgrim that she was.

The limited self longed to die, and the “Big Self” as she put it, longed to break free. And although this is not my language (I rarely talk about Big Self or Being Aligned With The Universe), I knew that to truly meet her, I had to get into her world, into her language, and stay there, and not flinch for one moment.

The more she felt heard and understood, the more she was met without judgement, the more she relaxed, and the more she started to talk openly about her secret longing to travel, to explore, to ride out into the unknown without a map. She talked with increasing passion about those times in the past where she had felt free and alive and unburdened. There was a longing to return to that simplicity. There was a fire in her, a raging furnace of love that had been suffocated all those years in her attempts to ‘fit in’.

Her suicidal depression had really been a signpost to life! The pain of life-suffocation had appeared to her as the raging desire for death. But it was not really the desire for death, was it? It was the desire for life! For more life! She longed to live, to really live, to no longer suffocate under the weight of the false image. Only one who longed to live could experience such an overwhelming urge to die. She longed with every cell of her body to end the pretence and the falseness and half-lived dreams and to open up to life in all its rawness and beauty – not to die, not to die, but to live in a real way.

What would real, fearless living look like? She had a brilliant mind, and a wide-open heart, all of which had been suffocated and wasted in the business of Real Estate. We started to explore the very realistic possibility of her selling her house and setting off into the unknown with her beloved daughter (“my angel, sent from heaven”). She had always longed to travel to New Zealand, to work there, to build a life there, to live a more simple and truthful existence there, and to expose her daughter to soul-enriching people and landscapes and possibilities. Could her dream become a reality? Was that possible?

She loved her little daughter so much, that was clear. She wanted her daughter to live and flourish and learn truth, that was clear. If she were to put her daughter into a foster home and then kill herself – which had been her plan for years, up until now – she would be teaching limitation to the one she loved more than anything. She would teach something false, something untrue. She would teach closing-off to possibility rather opening up. She would teach death, not life. She would not be teaching the deep truth of herself.

Suicide would be a false teaching, a false way of living and not living, and she knew this in the very depths of her being.

If she did not kill herself, if she let the body live, if instead she killed this inauthentic self, and stopped pretending to be the one she was not, and left this job and this life that was crushing her spirit, and set off into the unknown, and open up to the mysteries of the universe, she may finally become the mother (and sister, and daughter, and friend, and lover) she always longed to be – the one who taught and lived fearlessness, and realness, and life, and never-giving-up, even when exhausted. She would no longer be the ‘exhausted one longing for freedom from all responsibility’. She would be totally, completely, unbelievably responsible in the full sense of the word – able to respond authentically to life, to herself, to her daughter. Able to answer the call that she had been denying for so long.

It was disregarding life’s call that had hurt so much over the years. Life will not be silenced. The longing for death, the certainty of suicide, was really life screaming at her one last time. “LIVE! LIVE!”

Would she listen to its scream, now, at the point where everything was nearly lost?

Suddenly, everything became so clear. There was no longer any choice. She knew what to do. She knew what life was telling her. She had always known. Yes, she was going to kill herself… but not in the way the mind had imagined. She was going to kill her old self, her limited self, her false self. That was the real suicide! That was the call of life! She was going to break up with a life that had become meaningless, empty, and most importantly not right for her and her loved ones – a life that had turned her into something she couldn’t bear – and set out into the unknown, with her beloved daughter, their hearts wide open to possibility. This was not a mental decision. This was not a conclusion based on fear. This was total relief. This was sinking into the deep truth of herself. This was a deep honouring of life. This was deep rest.

Her brilliant ‘mind’ had only been able to conclude ‘death’. It had thought there was a choice between ‘life’ and ‘death’, and it had chosen ‘death’. But what did it know? The truth of her being was saying only one thing: LIVE. The mind would never understand this.

There was no choice but to live.

**

The following morning, I learnt that her adventure had already begun. She was already finding herself boxing things away, making arrangements, selling unwanted possessions, preparing for a new life, a life of freedom and possibility and newness. She was no longer preparing for death, but for more life. It was still suicide, but a divine kind of suicide – the suicide of the false, by the false. She, however, had so much to do, so many plans to make, so much to sort out – much like before – but now she was no longer exhausted, no longer depressed by it all, since finally all of her ‘doing’ was truthful – she was doing what she loved, and she was no longer waiting for others to ‘give back’ to her.

Her relationship with her daughter had shifted overnight. It had become clear: her daughter was not – and had never been – an annoying “block” to her freedom, a drain on her energies, a reason for her suicide. Her daughter was her companion, her fellow traveller, part of this divine suicide! Her daughter was no longer “getting in the way” of the life she longed for – she was now part of that very life. It was no longer “my life” versus “her life” – there was simply life. This life. Our life.

I had not taught this woman anything. I had not really ‘done’ anything at all. I have no clever psychological theories. I had simply listened deeply to her, reminding her of what she had always known, reflecting her own deep truth back at her, so she could actually hear it for once. Out of devastation, out of total breakdown, her truth had been given the space to emerge.

It’s interesting that the word “depressed” is spoken phonetically as “deep rest”. We can view depression not as a mental illness, but on a deeper level, as a profound (and very misunderstood) state of deep rest, entered into when we are completely exhausted by the weight of our own (false) story of ourselves. It is an unconscious loss of interest in the second-hand – a longing to ‘die’ to the false. This longing needs to be honoured, not medicated, meditated or analysed away.

It’s amazing what can evolve naturally when depression and the desire for suicide (which is the desire for the deep rest of yourself) are truly honored, met, embraced, held, and you do not flinch from pain or turn away from it. It’s amazing what can happen when you actively listen to the one in front of you from a loving place of non-judgemental acceptance, trusting the intelligence of life itself, and allowing the divine and loving suicide of awakening to weave its mysterious magic.

Love Always
mudra

^^^^^^^^^ Brilliant! Thanks Mudra.

I'm sending a link to my sister who's suffered from depression for 40+ years. Hopefully she'll see something she needs in it, as I'm sure this is true of so many who suffer depression. I know it is for me when I was in that state.

You are welcome Sanicle

The Divine does not like to be shut up in a building. The Divine likes to be out in the open. It is right here in this very body. Each one of us is a miniature universe, a living shrine.

Morihei Ueshiba

Love for You sister

mudra