Posts Tagged ‘God’
Here’s a wonderfully hilarious and yet insightful pointer into the nature of the illusion. A poem by Iranian mystic and poet Hafiz.
You are the sun in drag.
You are God hiding from yourself.
Remove all the “mine” – that is the veil.
Why ever worry about
Anything?
Listen to what your friend Hafiz
Knows for certain:
The appearance of this world
Is a Magi’s brilliant trick, though its affairs are
Nothing into nothing.
You are a divine elephant with amnesia
Trying to live in an ant
Hole.
Sweetheart, O sweetheart
You are God in
Drag!
-Hafiz
Today’s guest post is brought to you by Father Peter Bowes who shares with us his take on how to have a direct experience of the Divine.
Many say they believe in God, but believing in God is not the same as having a direct experience of God. Direct means first-hand, not second-hand. It is not hearsay or conjecture. Direct means something happens to you. You go through something, and then you can say you have had an experience. Throughout history, belief in God has resulted in people gathering for worship in churches, mosques, and temples. All over the world people still congregate based on similar beliefs about God. But how many can really say they know God?
Love and faith are the two most important qualities that make a substantial relationship with God possible. Love pulls you to the Divine Being; faith expects that something real will happen. Love connects you and God together; faith brings trust that God will respond to your hopes. Love creates the opening for something genuine to occur in relationship with God; faith reaches out beyond what is comfortable, stretching you to feel and see what you long for with your whole heart, mind and soul.
A direct experience of God requires love and faith, both of which play integral roles in preparing you to meet God. With love and faith, you let the Divine Being know you care enough so that God will come and give you God’s Self. You have to silence the mind and the emotions, and develop a stillness that can wait for a response from God. With meditation and prayer, a person can clear the mind of the world and the distractions of the senses in preparation for this meeting with God. God will come when you have cleared away all the other gods in your life, and this takes work, patience and diligent effort.
The initial phase of this preparation can be somewhat discouraging because the most dark and detrimental parts of your nature show up for review. You just can’t ask God to come into a place soiled with dirt, confusion and negative energy, so you will have to make a clean and wholesome space before you invite God to reside in you. Often you will need a Teacher – someone who has had a direct experience of God, who can see what needs to be drawn out of you – to help you clear the space within you.
All the mystics and saints have described direct experience of God in much the same ways. Each describes experiencing the love of their life in the embrace of God’s kiss and God’s presence. No fear can exist in the presence of God since God is all love and light. God is inside you and is loving you with every ounce you are willing to receive, and this experience will move you from belief to knowing. When you come into a direct experience of the God at the center of your being, it will change you completely, and you will know a profound peace that cannot be disturbed by the confusion of the world.
About The Author
Father Peter Bowes is a Master Teacher, priest and co-director of a mystical Christian order with spiritual centers in 15 cities called the Centers of Light. EnlightenNext Magazine named Father Peter among the “Top 10 Internet Gurus,” between Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle. To learn more about Father Peter Bowes, visit FatherPeter.CentersOfLight.org.
There seems to no longer be a sense of separateness or oneness. There is no thing that could be separate or one. It is all just That. No labeling, no comparison, no judgment, no nothing. Just pure existence itself.
Oneness and Separateness are not two. They’re not even one. They are both That. Enlightenment is Unenlightenment. Separateness and Oneness coexist simultaneously as really the same thing, yet totally not.
Heaven is Hell. Heaven is not Hell. All is valid for All Is That. That Is All. All That Is is That.
You are That. I am That. This moment is That. You want the Truth? This is it. This moment. This is That. Since God is omnipresent, what people call God is simply another word for All That Is. All That Is is That. It Is All That.
How can you not see the Truth when it is all That? It’s as clear as seeing what’s right in front of you, without labeling it as this as opposed to that.
Since everything is already the Supreme Buddha Nature, where are you going to find it?
-Adyashanti
The search for God seems silly when everything is God. Every idea, every object, every person, every non-thing. Nothing is God. Everything is God. There’s no duality between the two.
Truth vs. Falsehood
People want to say that this is true and that is false. This is “The Truth” while that is not. Let’s seek out “The Truth!” and with this, the philosophical debates and spiritual journey can begin.
Commenter Ismaelia recently asked an awesome question about the Tony Robbins relationship videos. Basically the question was whether or not we’re supposed to drop all our stories to get to enlightenment.
Read More …
…unless you enjoy to, of course! 
Something I’ve always found amusing is how things seem to get this air of mystique when you make them sound really old and Shakespearean.
Somehow “Thou shalt not kill” sounds more “Godly” than “Don’t clock people upside the head.” Have you noticed that? Heck, even “Don’t kill people” sounds less like the official word of God.
It’s like if God came down to earth today, he’d somehow be behind the times and wouldn’t be speakin’ our language. I guess God somehow got stuck in the land-of-hundreds-of-years-ago and forgot to upgrade his personal vocabulary. Someone get God an up-to-date dictionary! Is anyone here an english teacher?
Does the Divine really only come in that one way? Are we really gonna limit the ways in which the Infinite can express itself? Can the words we need to hear not come from a song lyric, a billboard, or a random phrase that jumps out at you when sitting at Starbucks?
What if God appeared in what we consider to be totally normal and mundane?
What if the extraordinary expressed itself extra-ordinarily?
Happy Thanksgiving to you All!
It is such a joy to interact with all of you, to hear from you, and to see you all truly being yourselves.
You are the Divine and it is such a magnificent experience to witness the Divinity within you all expressing itself.
Thank you God, the same God that is within you and within me, for it is really all the same God since we are all One. The appreciation I feel is not something that necessarily needs to be sent “out there” for there is no out here. This appreciation I feel is sitting right here, resonating with me, being me, for it is me.
I am immensely appreciative for each and every one of you choosing to be yourselves and realizing more and more who you really are.
I am simultaneously grateful for the acceptance and openness you all have given me in allowing me to be myself around you.
Thank you for your Love, for your Beingness, and for your Time and Energy.
Playing with each and every one of you is such a wonderful gift and for this I am most appreciative.
My Unconditional Love to you all. 
So if God is just another name for All That Is in Creation, he must be pretty fricken’ huge! The universe is infinitely large, and there are an infinite number of universes. Yikes! That’s mind-boggling!
Yet there actually is no reality outside myself. I am the entire Universe, in a sense, folded in on itself. That would make the universe infinitely small. Nowhere, really. Here where I am, but nowhere else. Distance is an illusion based upon the dualistic idea of two separate objects with a measurable distance between them, a here and a there.
Is the universe everywhere or nowhere? Both seem to be correct.
Another paradox! Awesome! That’s a sign that we’re onto something!
How do we see through the paradox?
Even if we were to intellectually hear the “solution” to the riddle, it wouldn’t be enough. It isn’t until you become the paradox that it will truly click.
Spiritual awakening shows us that, “Oh yeah, of course this is the case.” That which we’ve heard many times finally makes sense. It clearly is the case. The way to understand the paradox is to raise your consciousness.
So I’m going to ask you. How big is God?
One of the main aspects of spiritual growth is the realization that you actually ARE the reality you previously thought you lived IN.
For example, at first, we feel that we find love by getting it from other people. When we feel loved by others, that is when we experience love.
Then we can move to a state where we are literally “in love” with someone. It’s literally like you and I are bathing within the warm glow of love itself.
And then we find that this Love can actually be experienced with everyone and everything. This Love then becomes unconditional. We become “in love” with it All!
Yet once we start inquiring as to where this Love actually comes from in the first place, we realize that it’s not coming from outside of us at all! It’s actually coming from within. The Source of Love is within.
Dive down even further and you’ll realize that not only is the Source within you, but you actually ARE this Source. You ARE Love itself. Everything you say, everything you do, and everything you are is simply a physical expression of the Love that you are.
Ascension is realizing that you actually ARE the reality you previously thought you lived IN.
You don’t exist in physical reality. Physical reality exists WITHIN YOU! You ARE physical reality!
There really is no reality outside of you. You actually ARE All That Is. It is all you. You are that.
What we perceive in physical reality is nothing more than a collection of props, a projection of the mind, a big illusion.
What is real is the EXPERIENCE you’re having, not the props that appear within the experience.
You are consciousness experiencing consciousness, awareness becoming aware of awareness, the Self realizing the Self.
The one who seeks enlightenment is the enlightened one seeking itself.
The experience we call Life is God experiencing God.
You actually ARE everything you think you live IN.
This realization is so profound that one of Nisargadatta’s excellent books is titled I Am That. (You can find excerpts and highlights from the book here.)
You are not within anything, including physical reality. You ARE physical reality.
You are not IN love. You ARE Love.
You are not IN God. You ARE God.
You ARE All That Is.
I AM That, I AM.
Let’s get into the heart of Non-duality itself.
What does Non-duality mean in the first place? It means that there are “not two” different things. Really it is all One, even two seemingly separate and different things. In essence they are truly One. Completely. Totally.
In the Buddhist tradition, Nirvana is basically the state of enlightenment, heaven, oneness with God. It is karmic completion to where you no longer need to embody here on earth.
Samsara is the unenlightened state of consciousness whereby you continue to reincarnate and play here on earth to realize who you truly are.
Nirvana and Samsara are the same, but only identically the same.
-Zen Koan
Of course they’re the same. There IS nothing else!
Becoming One
We start by living in a world of separation in this lifetime and seek, through various religious or spiritual practices, to attain a true sense of Oneness with God.
There are numerous ways of doing this. The path I personally advocate is through withdrawing attention from the illusion (thought and the external world) and surrendering it all away to God, as discussed previously. Negate the validity of the mind and focus on the Self, for what you focus on expands.
Realize the Self with a capital S. This is called Self-realization.
The world is then recognized to be totally an illusion and unreal. This physical world feels limited and finite due to the limitations of the mind, yet beyond the illusory dream of physical reality lies the Infinite, the boundless and unlimited Reality which is the Truth of your being. In Hinduism, this infinite reality is called Brahman.
There is a perfect saying which I’m going to paraphrase, which really gets to the heart of non-duality.
The world is illusion.
Brahman alone is real.
The world is Brahman.
It sounds paradoxical, and it is, yet this is how existence is structured.
What Is The Illusion?
The world we see is totally an illusion and there is an infinite reality completely beyond space and time, yet it is this infinite reality which expresses itself in this world of the relative. Thus the illusion of this world is actually Absolute reality in physical expression. The world of the relative is a playground where we get to be who we truly are and reintegrate the reality of the Absolute within the illusion of the Relative.
The world functions as a mirror that reflects back to us who we’re being and shows us where our beliefs are in or out of alignment with our true nature.
So appreciate everything in the Universe for every one and every thing you see actually IS God. Not just an aspect of Divinity or a part of Divinity, but literally the same infinite Love of Creation itself. Everything you see is God, appearing to express itself as this or that.
This physical world, just like the human ego that we all have, is not something to be escaped from, nor something to be destroyed, but something to simply disidentify with.
The Process
We first learn to disassociate from everything that is not us including thoughts, ideas, our body, our history, and so on, only to ultimately loop back around and realize that it is all “you”. It’s not that you are either this OR that, but rather this AND that. There is nothing ‘else’ in existence but you for it is all One. There can not be anything other than you. This is the essence of non-duality.
Even separateness and oneness themselves are “composed” of the same one thing.
So do not seek to become One with God or to become enlightened, for you already are. You can’t become enlightened.
Stop seeking and just be.
To be honest, this whole site is starting to seem like a humorous joke, just like everything else in duality, as well as all other beliefs.
The content of this post is not anything to be believed in or not believed in. It’s just a hint of what’s to come if you choose to drop all beliefs entirely. ALL beliefs.
Rest in the mystery of the unknown, the silence, the infinite nothingness beyond name and form.
A Personal Note
I don’t expect anyone to believe this, nor do I actually want anyone to. I’m sitting here laughing at the absurdity of duality.
Without giving attention or thought to the outside world, it feels like everything is starting to fade once again from physicality to oneness. Everything that’s looked at is the One. Separateness is Oneness. It’s true non-duality. This is starting to come up BECAUSE the beliefs are all being let go of, as well as all attachment and clinging. It’s pretty wild…
Words feel like they’re of no use, no value. It’s more like resting back in a silent bliss. 
