Milk – again

Don’t look for it outside yourself.
You are the source of milk. Don’t milk others!

There is a milk fountain inside you.
Don’t walk around with an empty bucket.

You have a channel into the ocean, and yet
you ask for water from a little pool.

Beg for that love expansion. Meditate only
on THAT. The Qur’an says,
‘And He is with you’

The Essential Rumi, p 255

Rumi teaches me again

(What is it with these guys? They are dead for centuries and they just can’t leave us alone. They insist on coming back and giving us their 2 cents about all kinds of stuff. Maybe they just never realized they died, or something.
Weird characters, these saints…
And then he calls me a moth. Now how flattering is that!)

So here that’s what he told me:

JUDGE A MOTH BY THE BEAUTY OF ITS CANDLE

You are the king’s son.
Why do you close yourself up?
Become a lover.

Don’t aspire to be a general
or a minister of state.

One is a boredom for you
the other a disgrace.

You’ve been a picture on a bathhouse wall
long enough. No one recognizes you here, do they?

God’s lion disguised as a human being!
I saw that and put down the book
I was studying, Hariri’s Maqamat.

There is no early and late for us.
The only way to measure a lover
is by the grandeur of his beloved.

Judge a moth by the beauty of its candle.

From Rumi, for you

Held like this, to draw in milk,
no will, tasting clouds of milk,
never so content.

For you

What delays the ascent of consciousness
And the descent into the heart
Is the judgment of any moment we are being lived.

To take ownership or claim knowledge
About the movement of God as all form
Is delusion.

The hand of God is always close by,
Waiting to guide us as itself back to itself
Through the movement of God.

This movement is the divine compassion,
Which responds most readily
To the innocence of a child.

Be that child today.

Here is one from Katie:

“The worst that can happen is over.”

Do you have any comments?

Love

Ram Giri

The Importance of Love

The heart is the most fundamental organizing principle of creation. Love is the force that allows ‘the world’ to arise.

When you are in love, you are in training to be a lover.

You are not meant to be a consumer of love, or to become dependent on your beloved, but to experience your heart as the center from which the formless, exquisite power of love permeates and enlivens the world. By this you can become aware of your existence as the creator, maintainer and destroyer of your world.

You are the Father (the formless Godhead), the Son (the incarnation and realization in form), and the Spirit (the pervasive divine consciousness).

The access point to this realization is in the heart. It dissolves all boundaries of ignorance by dissolving the need to know. In the heart lies the key to Being, which reveals the truth of everything in the essence of love.

Existence arises from non-existence by the power of love.

Consciousness crystallizes in Existence by power of love.

Non-existence reveals itself to Consciousness by the power of love.

Existence dissolves itself in Non-Existence by the power of love.

Sacred Relationships

This morning I woke up to some thoughts about relationship.

All relationship is sacred – if we have an awareness of that sacredness.

I realized that all my relationships revolve around awakening and using the “Skills for Awakening”. That’s what makes them sacred.

I don’t always know how the person I’m with experiences our time together, but I can know for myself that all relationships I have are sacred relationships.

That includes my children, the store clerk, the homeless person, as well as the lover, the politician I disagree with – and most of all: me.

Can I have a sacred relationship with me? What does that mean?

Increasingly it means for me to live out of my heart, to let the heart shakti[1] flow into every part of my body and being.

As I do that my whole life is transformed, my relationships, my thinking, all the way to the way I eat, breathe and sleep.

How do I get there? Of course by dissolving my perceptions of anything as merely mundane, or as a problem. All the ways I am still involved in a hot or cold war, inside or outside of me.

When peace breaks out in me, all is revealed as sacred.

And only then can I fully participate in the glorious way of life of gratitude and of each moment as a tribute to the magnificence of creation, and its creator, by whatever name.

Please remember our Tele-satsang on Thursdays, at 8 pm Eastern.

Call (712) 775-7000, Access Code: 87-16-76#

‘See’ you there!

---

[1] Shakti is a Sanskrit word that means the combination of power and love

Never give up – tele-satsang tonight

Please remember our Tele-satsang tonight at 8 pm Eastern.

Call (712) 775-7000, Access Code: 87-16-76#

‘See’ you there!

Here is a quote by HH the Dalai Lama that was just sent to me by my friend Lama Surya Das:

Never give up
No matter what is going on
Never give up
Develop the heart
Too much energy in your country is spent
Developing the mind instead of the heart.
Be compassionate not just to your friends but to everyone
Be compassionate.
Work for peace in your heart and in the world.
Work for peace and I say again
Never give up.
No matter what is happening,
No matter what is going on around you,
Never give up.

~His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Announcing: First Thursday Night Tele-satsang Tomorrow

In case you haven’t heard:

We’ll have our first Thursday night tele-satsang tomorrow.

Please join us at 8 pm (Eastern) for an hour of hanging out with each other, the Skills, and our wonderful spiritual essence.

Call (712) 775-7000,  Access Code: 87-16-76-#

Satsang is the companionship of truth, spiritual community in the virtual space, a way to get to know each other or just listen quietly, a time to feed the longing of the heart.

If you have any questions or want to do The Work or Open Attention (or anything else for that matter) with me, that’s your chance. Please take advantage of it. These calls will live or die from ALL our contributions (and questions can be priceless).

I am planning to do these free calls most Thursdays from now on. I really wanted to have a free forum to be in touch with you. Please let me know if you have specific ideas of what you’d like to do or experience during these times.

Thanks!

Hello again

It’s been a while since I last wrote. My mother died recently. It was a quick and painfree death at 96, so it was not unexpected. She died in a state of deep peace and for that I am very grateful. Thank you to so many of you who expressed your condolences.

I have to say it’s a little strange to explain to people who are not doing the kind of inner work we do what an experience like a mother’s death is like when you deal with it with the Skills. It is just very strange to them because they cannot fathom the kind of freedom that comes with the Skills. I am glad I can speak freely to you.

Of course a mother’s death is a very big and important event, and yet there is no grief. (Grief could only come if I believed that anything should be different than it is). There is instead a deep, shared joy. An awe of the way of it all, a profound learning as parts of the psyche become available for review and clearing that have been hidden before.

One thing I see very clearly is the difference between the old way of looking at life and the new way. Let me be straight, my mother was my ‘problem’ parent. She suffered from an angry edge and from some low self-esteem, and as a child I got to experience some of that. So from the point of view of psychology I’d say she caused me some problems in the way she expressed these unpleasant emotions. She ‘gave me’ some of the issues that I have been dealing with in my life. That’s the old way. When we look at it this way, we can then do some psychotherapy, family work etc. and clear these issues – this will make life more comfortable for me but it won’t set me free of the basic delusion of being a separate being, an ego in a bag of skin. I’ll just get to be a more comfortable ego for a while.

Here is the new way of seeing it all: She was exactly the right mother for me. She helped me come face to face with exactly what I had to face. If my world is my projection (and it is), I manifested exactly the right mother for me. That leaves me free to love her unconditionally, because now there is no place for blame. Instead I am finding gratitude that she enabled me to become who I am, to find my unique way to God/myself/the truth. Freed from blaming I can appreciate her for all the love and care she gave me. These wonderful qualities are no longer covered up by what my stress-producing mind focuses on.

Needless to say, the second view is not only more peaceful, it offers to me the possibility of dispelling my old issues (without extensive psycho-analysis), and with them my delusion of being a separate self. It leaves me free to experience the joy of this miraculous world where we all get exactly what serves us, even a mother with the right mix of easy and challenging features.

Here is how I looked at her for the last several years: I saw her as this enlightened being, who came into the form she took in order to serve me. She served me with her love and her criticism, with her kindness and her anger. In her transendent kindness she sacrificed her own comfort and took on the delusory beliefs she acted out in order to hand me the right lessons. What could I feel toward such a pure bodhisattva but extraordinary gratitude?

At first such a shift of perspective may feel somewhat artificial. after looking deeper however you may find that it is exactly true. Are we not all manifestations of the one enlightened Self? Are we not all drops out of the ocean of God? And so was she. What is more important for me, to see her somewhat conflicted psychology, or to see her purity of soul? That is an easy choice.

Shifting your point of view can have great consequences. It can open the door to unconditional love. This is what I feel for my mom.

PS: I’d love to hear from you what you think about this and if you have examples of such sifts in perspective.