“Attachment is bondage. Attachment disappears with the elimination of the ego.”
~ Ramana Maharshi
“You must choose between your attachments and happiness.”
~ Adyashanti
“Attachment is the strongest block to realization.”
~ Neem Karoli Baba
“Everything you attach yourself to in this world, person, place and thing keeps you back. You have to become totally non-attached. You have to become totally free of attachment to your body, to your mind, and to others.”
~ Robert Adams
“The soul that has attachment to anything, however much virtue it possess, will not attain the liberty of Divine union.”
~ St. John of the Cross
“If you want to go all the way, throw all away. …Throw away your attachments, your desires, your needs and immediately you are in a state of total freshness. Total wholeness.”
~ Mooji
“I reached in experience the nirvana which is unborn, unrivalled, secure from attachment, undecaying and unstained. This condition is … to be realized only by the wise.”
~ Buddha
“Pray to God that your attachment to such transitory things as wealth, name, and creature comforts may become less and less every day.”
~ Ramakrishna
“Those who surrender to Brahman all selfish attachments are like the leaf of a lotus floating clean and dry in water. Sin cannot touch them.”
~ Bhagavad Gita
“Let go your attachment to the unreal and the real will swiftly and smoothly step into its own. … With this will come great love which is not choice or predilection, nor attachment, but a power which makes all things love-worthy and lovable.”
~ Nisargadatta
“The senses and the ego will flow towards your attachments. To make them move in a different direction, you have to give up these attachments.”
~ H.W.L. Poonja, “Papaji”
“Her heart is full of joy with love, for in the Lord her mind is stilled. She has renounced every selfish attachment and draws abiding joy and strength from the One within.”
~ Saint Teresa of Ávila
“To attain to perfect purity one has to become absolutely passion-free in thought, speech and action; to rise above the opposing currents of love and hatred, attachment and repulsion.”
~ Gandhi
Greg ? R. Danforth
Several have asked me recently about the term “shadow self,” and what that term actually means. I will try but it’s hard without sounding like total psycho-bable:)
The shadow-self is the disowned part of self that we are unwilling to acknowledge as “me.” This denied image may be very negative or very positive. The negative-self we deny because it’s too bad to ever be me and the positive-self is too good to ever be me. Let me also say that in reality there is no such thing as a shadow self, you are one as He is one, but the shadow represents the part of us, that we don’t want to acknowledge. We just use the term “shadow” to shine a light on something well hidden and this terminology helps us see through our blindness. Carl Jung, an analytical physiologist first coined the term in the early 1900’s.
Since we deny and disown these shadow parts, we project them onto others and encounter them as things we despise about another. One of the best ways to recognize our shadow and get to know it, is to look for the things that we find most annoying, irritating or upsetting.
Our first response will usually be “that’s not me!” “I am not like that!!” However a failure to embrace one’s shadow compromises all subsequent development possibilities. Like Peter, it’s easy to say “I will never deny you,” until you do. This smallness has been part of Peter all along, he just denied it by presenting himself as the “bad-ass” disciple. Peter had refused to listen to Jesus all along the journey as Jesus pointed to this shadow-self within Peter. Jesus knew exactly what was the other face of this man, and that the “I will never deny you!” was revealing a hidden and very weak man.
Many who confront their shadow never move beyond it because they seek only to eliminate it, as opposed to acknowledge its actually part of them. We tend to choose the easier issues of our life to focus on which prevents wholeness. Because we view these problems as things to be eliminated, or personal issues we keep running up against, we never recognize how these issues represent real parts of us so we don’t learn the lessons they can teach us.
Until we acknowledge our shadow parts, we will not awaken to the fact the shadow is being cast from us, not onto us. Until we recognize this, we will continue to struggle with anger, bitterness, and depression for we will we will not recognize the face of our disowned self nor the consequences of this ongoing investment in denial and avoidance. I’ll continue tomorrow.
The further into divine awareness we go, the more futile our efforts to define that journey goes. But this doesn’t mean it’s not genuine and divine. Our ego often wants to define it by words because it has no ability to embrace mystery. In choosing to explain it by words, our egoic self wants to reduce it to an intellectual knowing as opposed to an ongoing and expansive divine awareness.
Part of the reason we do this is we honor the mind more than the soul. The soul is a perspective not a “thing.” The soul is the interpretive space between a person and the events of his or her life. The soul allows us to transform these events into awareness that makes life eternal and abundant.
The soul is also the place where we learn to hold experience and not simply define it and explain it. The soul thrives in reality but withers in religious denial. The soul finds the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary because the soul is tethered to heaven and earth, “in the world, but not of it.” Where the religious mind wants to separate the two, the soul holds the paradox of both and interprets all from an ascended perspective. This is the only way to experience abundant life where we are as opposed to where we want to be or think we should be.
Stan Tyra
Was with a group of buds just now
in the Stillness when suddenly I could see
difficult people as the Transfigured Christ.
Not mortals at all but beams of light!
Yes that was their place in my life.
Not an enemy but a huge bright Light.
For where I desired to go spiritually
every shocking wake up call was
exactly what I had needed.
Now when difficult memories invade
I’ll know they were and are necessary lights.
Wondering though why the Christ-man is not seen more universally as a body-less, irradiance of unending Light.
This “universe” is a dream state. But very very few people have the slightest inkling what that means. People who live in the dream experience rainbows and earthquakes, sublime scenery and horrific ones. They are all “I” and will never die. But in their dream state, death, taxes and i guess reincarnation are as real as the sleeping dreams they have every night.
THE END OF YOUR LIFE DRAMA
Most of the “bad” things that happen in life are due to unconsciousness. They are self-created or rather, ego- created. I sometimes refer to those things as “drama”. When you are fully conscious, drama does not come into your life anymore. Let me remind you briefly how the ego operates and how it creates drama.
The ego is the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher. The ego believes itself a separate fragment in a hostile universe, with no real inner connection to any other being, surrounded by other egos which it either sees as potential threat or which it will attempt to use for its own ends. The basic ego patterns are designed to combat its own deep-seated fear and sense of lack. They are resistance, control, power, greed, defense, attack.
Some of the ego’s strategies are clever, yet they never solve any of its problems, simply because the ego itself is the problem.
When egos come together, in personal relationships or in organizations or institutions, “bad” things happen sooner or later. Drama in one form or another, in the form of conflict, problems, power struggles, emotional or physical violence and so on. This includes collective evils such as war, genocide and exploitation – all due to massed unconsciousness.
When you reconnect with Being and are no longer run by your mind, you cease to create those things. You do not create or participate in drama any longer. But even if you live totally alone, you may still create your own drama. When you feel sorry for yourself, that’s drama, when you feel guilty or anxious, that’s drama. Most people are in love with their particular life drama. Their story is their identity. The ego runs their life.
When you live in complete acceptance of ‘what is’, that is the end of all the drama in your life.
-The Power of Now, Eckart Tolle, pages 150-151.
THIS IS A PERFECT DESCRIPTION OF WHAT I’VE BEEN TALKING AND WRITING ABOUT Re. HEALING DISEASE, SUFFERING, POVERTY, DISASTERS, ETC., ETC. THIS APPROACH CAN AND DOES HEAL. REMOVING THE NEED FOR HEALING
-I-S-
HEALING:
“Greater Works
What work, do you suppose, could be greater than the healing [of] disease and suffering? It would be to understand how to live without need of healing, to be ever conscious of Wholeness, Completeness, Happiness and Abundance.”
Lillian DeWaters
I don’t believe in the devil.
But let’s not have that conversation.
I do recognize a HUGE RESISTANCE
To anything Truly Beautiful and Good
On the part of the WORLD MIND.
Oh that mind (!!!) thinks it’s got
The world by the … power points
But it ain’t got squat.
(It’s not the devil coz he’s not a ‘real’ entity
Out there.)
Tried all morning to enter the stillness.
All I heard was yap yap yap yap yap!
Sick & tired of all that yapping!
Sounds just like the devil ‘cept for one thing
I’m gonna see its total non-existence.
Actually I see it clearly now – already!
I saw my self in the stillness
Watching myself struggling with the
Yap yap yapping!
OMG, got me a chuckle that time!
Been wanting to give Rowland some kind of
Non-lame report
On the Substance of my great mediations
But coming up short. :'(
God told me loud and clear
He’s/It’s here INSTEAD OF
All the yammering, all the fuss
Darn! The eyes are moist again!
Dear God, let me stay here this time.
Only the Divine Self of you does the Will of the Father. Humanly you cannot do the Will of the Father, you are in a separate will. To do the Will of the Father you must be Divine. And so you must accept your Divinity. For the Will of the Father is only done in Divinity. You can never cling to a human sense of self and do the Will of the Father. You will be doing your concept of what you think is the Will of the Father.
You’ll be running to your neighbor to do a good deed, because you think that’s the Will of the Father, but you won’t recognize the Christ of your neighbor, and that is your Father’s Will.
You’ll see evil in the world and try to make it good and you’ll think that’s the Will of the Father, but it isn’t. The moment you have seen evil that must be made good, you are looking out of a human mind.
There is no evil in the Kingdom of God. And that is all there is: The Kingdom of God.
Where you have seen evil it is because you are in the sense of a second self.
In your Divine Self you will not accept evil, because there is no evil in the Father’s Kingdom, where I am.
~ Herb Fitch
