AsEsm retweeted
"Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you."
~ Lao Tzu
“Every seeker after truth must remember one thing: that the first step in the path of truth is to become true to oneself.”
Hazrat Inayat Khan
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AsEsm retweeted
Q: What is renunciation?
Ramana Maharshi: Giving up of the ego.
Q: Is it not giving up possessions?
Ramana Maharshi: The possessor too.
Talk 164
"We are caught in our own entangled web waiting for an end when we might be free, when we already are."
"To see a thing is no more than the perception of a mind gazing out from itself and perceiving a surface on which to rest when none really exists. Even the light from the stars is unseen in the vastness of the great ocean of the deep until it touches a thing we call surface, and then it becomes. This becoming is no more than the great mind creating a shore on which to laps its waves of thought. How else will it see itself without the vast mirror of solidified things?"
forgottenlanguages
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AsEsm retweeted
Like a balloon, an inflated ego is always ready to pop. Like a tower of cards, someone who thinks highly of themselves is always ready to fall. This is why pride is actually neurotic. The more prideful someone is, the more they need to control everything around them. They have more to lose, more to worry about. But a humble mind is a healthy mind. It’s grounded and realistic. It’s at peace with what is. It doesn’t need to know everything.
Complex thoughts scatter our mental energy. But simple thoughts collect our mental energy. They make our minds strong and focused. And if we focus only on God, and not ourselves, we’ll eventually heal our traumatized and fractured brains. God loves us as we are. We don’t have to hide our sins from Him. The problem is, because we have pride, we can’t see ourselves as bad people. So, we hide our sins from ourselves.
We repress the memories and shove them into the subconscious, which is like a basement. And every so often, the basement floods, forcing all those memories back up at the same time, resulting in a mental breakdown. But the saints don’t have a subconscious anymore. God has reunified their broken brains with humility. Humility fills up the basement with concrete. There is no where for repressed memories to go.
This is because a humble person repents, and repentance is a light that illumines the darkest parts of our minds. The saints can clearly see all their own subconscious habits and patterns. They aren’t afraid to look at them because they accept they are sinful. And since they are watchful over themselves, they can deal with these problems right away by bringing their focus back on God. This is the whole spiritual war!
It’s against ourselves. It’s a battle for true psychological and spiritual health. It’s a fight for freedom from our own anxious egos and demanding desires. Our neurosis convinces us liberation is found in getting what we want. But this only feeds the parasite that is the false personality. This only enslaves us to ourselves even more. The demons want us to think external things are the problem. They want us distracted and delusional.
They want us puffed up so they can pop us! So, true humility isn’t self-hatred. It’s actually spiritual protection. It’s divine dignity. It doesn’t justify itself or defend itself. The only validation it needs is from God. It doesn’t beg to be understood or seen. It respects itself by respecting the image of Christ within. It doesn’t desecrate the temple and pollute itself with sin. So, holiness isn’t a religious thing either. It’s just God offering us wholeness!
The saints say man is mud that God commanded to become a god. We are made of both dirt and the divine. So, we shouldn’t get any big ideas about ourselves. But we shouldn’t doubt ourselves either. Self-doubt is fake humility anyways. It’s still too focused on itself. A healthy and humble mind is also a balanced mind! It can’t be tossed to and fro, and swayed back and forth. Like a balloon, it doesn’t get lost in the clouds. It’s not entitled. So, it can’t be disappointed. In fact, it sees itself as deserving of nothing but Hell. But it doesn’t despair either, because it hopes in God’s infinite mercy.
AsEsm retweeted
The first obstacle to spiritual development is the overcoming of egotism.
And much of this egotism operates unconsciously.
We are so accustomed to measuring ourselves against others that even our spiritual development can become an extension of our desire for superiority.
We want to know more.
We want to progress further.
We want to be more advanced than those around us.
But this attitude prevents us from developing.
The development of the higher self must begin with an entirely different relationship toward our fellow human beings.
We must first cultivate an infinite trust in another person when they tell us about their experiences of a higher nature.
This does not mean blindly accepting everything another person claims to have experienced.
It means overcoming the ego's tendency to dismiss another person's experiences simply because we have not experienced the same things ourselves.
Why?
Because we must learn to seek the higher self not only within ourselves, but also in other human beings.
Our lower self experiences separation.
It compares, distinguishes and constantly measures its position against others.
But the higher self is not separate.
At the level of our higher nature, the boundaries that divide us lose their ultimate significance.
The higher self of another human being belongs to the same universal spiritual reality.
When someone stands before us who has progressed further along the spiritual path, we must overcome the feeling that this person possesses an advantage over us.
Instead, we must learn to regard that person with the same reverence with which we would regard our own highest nature.
Our instinct is often to question or find reasons why another person cannot possibly know something that we do not.
But spiritual development demands the opposite.
Try to live yourself into this feeling until it penetrates the most intimate fibers of your soul.
Until the impulse to compete with or feel inferior to another human being gradually disappears.
"Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."
The child possesses something that the adult often loses:
the capacity for genuine veneration.
Not blind obedience.
Not intellectual submission.
But an openness to recognize something greater than oneself, with a reverence that arises from the innermost heart.
This is where spiritual development begins.
Not with visions, secret knowledge or the desire to acquire supernatural abilities.
But with a transformation of our relationship toward other human beings.
The overcoming of egotism.
The cultivation of trust.
And the rediscovery of reverence.
The greatest obstacle to finding our higher self is our inability to recognize it in others.
In Castaneda’s system, impeccability is not perfection. It is the proper use of energy.
The new seers believed we leak energy through self-importance, fear, resentment, routine, and internal dialogue. Impeccability means reclaiming that energy and using it deliberately.
Once can you reach it, but not once and for all. It starts with one premeditated, precise, continuous act and becomes a lifelong discipline.
Why do it?
* Because a life of impeccability creates sobriety;
* sobriety moves perception beyond the ordinary;
* and that movement is the path toward freedom.
The old seers wanted power. The new seers wanted freedom. Impeccability was their method: not becoming better than others, but becoming impossible to enslave by one’s own ego.
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AsEsm retweeted
The Mirror of the Heart
Al-Ghazali develops this idea further through another image: the heart as a mirror.
The heart also has the capacity to receive and reflect divine light. But like a mirror covered in dust and rust, it can become obscured by disordered passions, resentment, harmful habits, and attachment to worldly things.
A clean mirror reflects clearly. A tarnished mirror distorts what it receives or fails to reflect it at all.
The work of spiritual purification is to remove what prevents the heart from receiving and reflecting it.
This is the deeper meaning of the alchemy. The base metal represents the heart obscured by its accumulated impurities, while the gold represents the heart transformed through purification.
Prayer, dhikr (remembrance of God), fasting, self-examination, and the discipline of one’s appetites all contribute to this transformation.
The tradition calls this spiritual striving mujāhadah: the effort to resist the domination of lower impulses and cultivate the qualities necessary for a rightly ordered soul.
As the mirror becomes clearer, the heart becomes increasingly receptive to the knowledge of God.
On synchronicity, awareness, and the unexpected doors life opens.
I'd love to hear how you see it.
#Synchronicity #Mindfulness
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AsEsm retweeted
There is a phase on the spiritual path that no one talks about.
The phase where nothing seems to happen.
No visions.
No inspiration.
No revelations.
Only disciplined effort.
Most people expect spiritual development to feel rewarding.
They expect signs of progress, confirmation that the work is paying off.
But often the opposite happens.
The old sources of satisfaction begin to lose their power, while higher perception has not yet awakened.
The student finds himself between 2 worlds.
No longer fully nourished by the old life.
Not yet able to perceive the new.
The ego immediately begins asking:
Am I progressing?
Is this working?
Why am I experiencing nothing?
Yet this is often where the deepest work begins.
Dr Steiner repeatedly warns that impatience has a deadening effect on higher development.
Why?
Because impatience always demands.
It wants results.
It wants certainty.
It wants the spiritual world to reveal itself according to its own timetable.
But the student can prepare himself without being able to command the result.
Like a farmer preparing the soil and planting seeds, he can create the conditions for growth, but he cannot force the seed to sprout.
Spiritual development follows the same law.
The task is to study, meditate, observe, and refine oneself without constantly asking what will be received in return.
Eventually even the motivation must change.
The desire for experiences must give way to a genuine Love of truth itself.
Patience is not simply waiting.
Patience is remaining inwardly awake when nothing appears to be happening.
It is continuing the work when life feels completely ordinary.
Many abandon the path here because they mistake the absence of stimulation for the absence of growth.
But a seed underground appears inactive.
A tree in winter appears lifeless.
Yet both are undergoing invisible preparation.
The soul is not different.
The silence is not necessarily the absence of development.
The absence of reward does not mean the work is without value.
Higher faculties cannot be forced into existence.
They emerge gradually as the soul becomes capable of bearing them.
Do not mistake the desert for failure.
Sometimes the most important work is the work you cannot yet perceive.
AsEsm retweeted
There are just two kinds of people;
The ones who think that they are the victim of the world, and those who understand that they are the world.
-Alan Watts
Some thieves take your gold. Others take your attention—and leave you believing their thoughts are your own.
The Dervish and the Thieves of the Mind
1
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AsEsm retweeted
I used to be a language lawyer. In the late 80s I _studied_ the ARM (Annotated Reference Manual for C++). I knew the language cold, inside and out. I could make it do backflips. I shipped a lot of code using it. A LOT.
I’ve attacked other languages with a similar intensity and depth. Until recently, that was simply the only way to become adept at building software systems.
I now consider the deep understanding of a language to be a supreme waste of time and effort. I don’t want to learn Rust, or Golang, or Typescript, or any of the thousands of other languages out there. I’ll leave that to my agents.
What I need now is to understand the high level gestalt of the system. I want to see the systems and subsystems. I don’t need to inspect the cogs. If I truly need to understand a detail at the cog level, I’ll interrogate my agents. I’m not going to pretend to be a language expert anymore.
