No moment

"... the lesson of the moment is that moments cannot be seized. There is no now, there is only the intersection of past and future, both of which poses the curious charm of not existing."
- Jed McKenna


That is so brilliant. It's clear to us that the past does not exist, and the future neither. And it's also clear that the "now" is a dimensionless line where the two are touching. So what does that make the whole universe?

Discipline or flow?

A famous success guru said: "Do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not. There are 999 other success principles that I have found in my reading and experience, but without self-discipline, none of them work."

What a life. Sentenced to spend your whole life doing things you don't want to do, all in the name of "success". I'm sure it has made a lot of rich, bitter old men.

Like Jed McKenna talks about, and like I've experienced in my own life, if you start "going with the flow" and let the higher mind guide you instead of forcing your egoic desires on life, you will more and more get into a sort of life where you never do anything you don't feel like.

Think about it: if you're in touch with the Universe's wishes, and you're going in the right direction, what needs doing will also be something you're interested in and you feel like doing, n'est-ce pas?

Doing that more and more will also help undoing the ego (because only the ego struggles against the Flow), so it's not a painless process, but it will get you more and more into a true effortless existence.

Becoming an un-fish

"There seem to two kinds of searchers: those who seek to make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish (as though you could make a fish unfish), and those who understand that all such attempts are just gesticulation and play-acting, that there is only one thing that can be done, which is to disidentify themselves with the ego, by realising its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal identity with pure being."
- Wei Wu Wei

This author seems really interesting, and I've just ordered one of his books. I went for All Else Is Bondage: Non-Volitional Living, because going with the flow is something which really hits home with me right at this moment.

A Hard Crust

"You are nothing but consciousness, everything that tells you more than that is like a built-up crust of hard-packed emotional energy that has formed around you like a shell. All true growth and development is first and foremost a process of chopping away this crust."
- Spiritual Warfare page 100

Yes, yes, f***ing hell.
And the reason it takes so much work and time is because it is so incredibly hard-packed and many-layered.
It continues:

"Ego sends us searching in the direction of learning, of becoming more and adding on to ourselves, but everything we claim to seek lies in the opposite direction; of unlearning, of letting go, of reducing."

No breaks

Once I worked for a boss who was testing a new kind of personality analysis test for recruiting. One of the questions was: "do you ever exert yourself to the utmost?" I commented to him: "heck, I always do that."
He laughed and said "come on..." and I can understand that, because outwardly I'm sure I seem like a nicely relaxed person. But it's really true, only in the ultimate sense: spiritually.

I don't know any other gear but top gear, and I don't know any other destination but All The Way.

Creating something real

I've made a discovery:

Trying to create something real is an awakening-process.

They tell us, and I believe them, that nothing is real besides God/Oneness/Source. So I'm sure you can't really create something real. But that's besides the point. The point is the trying.

I do it by art, but I'm sure it'll work with anything, like trying to create a "real family" or trying to build a "real boat", both of them as opposed to the fake ones you get handed from others.

I don't know how it works. Maybe it's simply that when you keep reaching for something real, you get something real, in the end.

Inspiration

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self- consciousness. -- Aaron Copland

Julie's words

More from Jed's second book (said by Julie)

"There's not a singly thing that matters about the dream except that you're in a dream. Wake up!"

"I understand fear now, I know what it is, how total it is. You can look at yourself and not see it because you don't see anything that's not it. I know that I wasn't afraid, I was fear."

I think if one really understands those two statements, they are tremendously important.

Update: Another interesting thing she said is that all human feelings stem from and are variations of fear. It's like a human is a prism which takes the incoming white light of fear and creates a rainbow of seemingly varied feelings from it.

On fear

"Depression is fear with hope removed."

"Denial of fear is the motivation underlying all activities in which humans engage."

Both by Jed McKenna

His books are really outstanding. Apart from DU, the most uncompromisingly non-dualistic ones I've read. And like DU, exceptional in being clear despite this. Other non-dualistic books I've tried to read have been nebulous at best.

No big or small

I had a sudden insight at one point which confirms the unreality of the world:

There is no big or small.

If you consider an object as divorced from all other objects, can you judge it's size? No you can't. Size is meaningless without other objects to judge it against.

If a concept demands relativity and relations to make sense, can it possibly be real? Of course not.

And, to me at least, this makes the whole universe meaningless and therefore non-existent, because sizes and relations is everything in this world.

Exhilaration

McKenna talks briefly about a phenomenon of the person who is "breaking free", who is on his way to awakening: elation. An occasional wild, intense, boundless elation. "King of the world, Ma!"

I'm happy to hear it, because I've felt it sometimes for many years, and I've even mentioned it to a couple of spiritual consultants, only I called it exhilaration. It's what has made the hardship of a collapsing ego bearable. The vivid, inner exhilaration I feel by my contact with Source.

New documentary

I've added a second documentary to YouTube:
The Story of a Course In Miracles.

It is tricky and long to chop up 65 minutes' worth of documentary, encode them correctly, and upload them, but the first one had such great reception I wanted to put up this one too.

These seven parts are the first half-part, I hope to do the second half soon.

Update: all 16 parts there now. 

Buy the DVD at ACIM.org!

This Contracted Life

I just had a delightful conversation with A Course In Miracles luminary Judith Skutch Whitson. She told me a story which I found very inspiring. She had been communicating to her sister who had died in an accident. And her sister seemed to be in an "everywhere" space and seemed very peaceful and relaxed about the whole thing. Her sister used the term "diffused" about the state, and she said to Judith that she ought to be aware of the great number of souls who are clamoring to get into the contracted state of life on Earth, to take advantage of the intense Forgiveness Lessons this gives.

Life as a human is tough, and many of us curse it sometimes. But there is much evidence that it was not created by accident: it really is a greatly accelerated course for spiritual progress.