The other day my friend and I were cracking up at fact that various words can be both good or bad, valid or invalid, true or untrue depending on how they’re used…
As I look out into this world, I see a number of things happening:
As we become lighter and lighter, we begin experiencing our bodies as less physical and more as pure light. Quite literally. It’s really cool… It’s as if we actually have light bodies, as if the physical becomes more and more clearly just light appearing as clumps of physicalized matter.
In this light, you find some energies happen to be compatible while others are not. Energies that vibrate in harmony with light include those that are open and pure, honest and real. The energy of lies and deception simply has no place in the light.
Truth, Joy, Love and Light. That’s it.
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.
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.
What is your story about yourself? Your name, your job, your history, the highs and lows of your life, the roles you play, what you enjoy doing, what kinds of trouble you got into as a little kid…
Go ahead and tell yourself the story about you.
[Pause for storytime.]
Now notice that everything that was said is simply thought arising Now. It’s thought that has been identified with as part of some sort of a “me.” It’s “my” story. Yet the story is not who you are. It’s just a collection of thoughts that exist within awareness.
Our stories are told because we have a yearning that by telling them, we’ll get what we’re looking for.
It’s a game that can be played for lifetime after lifetime, and indeed it has been.
Stories can certainly be entertaining. They can be full of excitement or full of horror, encompassing the entire emotional spectrum, yet they are not the Truth of who and what we are. They are true in the limited sense that they describe our perception of experiences, but they are not true as the final Truth of our being.
Who we are is everpresent, eternal, and unchanging. We are the space in which the story arises.
The essence of your being can never be contained in thoughts or in words. If you dropped your story altogether, who would you be? What remains without the thoughts about “my story?”
As long as you are telling your story, you can not experience the Truth. When you are experiencing the Truth, you can not continue telling your story.
It’s possible to see that a story is just a story and to stop following it as if it was something real. Our stories, however long we’ve been telling them and however many people have been telling them throughout our cultural history, they’re still just stories.
The key here is to simply stop following the story and stop feeding it with attention. This doesn’t mean to suppress or push against the story, to play the role of a “spiritual seeker” who has gotten rid of the story. Simply stop. Stop trying. Stop pushing. Withdraw awareness from the story naturally and find what’s left. What is here, now?
Can Presence ever be a story? Can Presence ever be a thought?
Today we will be starting a multi-part series of Ariel’s conversation with Abraham that took place Oct. 25, 2008 in Atlanta, GA. Some of the discussion will be based on answers Abraham gave directly in response to Ariel’s questions and some of it will be based on information that came during other parts of the talk. No matter when the answer was given, the context for this whole series will be comparing the, and this is totally the wrong word but for lack of a better word, ‘philosophy’ of enlightenment and ‘philosophy’ of the law of attraction. Together we will be looking at different ways of being in the world and comparing and contrasting them, exploring whether they are really saying the same thing from different angles, whether they are appropriate for people at different levels, or whether they actually conflict in some way. Due to copyright, I can’t just transcribe word-for-word all of what was said and so instead I’ll paraphrase what was said and share the central ideas and nuggets given in the workshop. A copy of the full recording is now available here.
For more information directly from Abraham regarding the Law of Attraction, check out their books The Law of Attraction, Ask and It Is Given, The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent, The Astonishing Power of Emotions, and Money and the Law of Attraction.
With that said, let’s dive right into it!
The way I (Ariel) define Truth is more from an Absolute sense in that everything is what it is. Nothing more.
Whether we call something a potato or a triceratops, it still is what it is. All the labels and meanings we apply to things are literally things we’re making up and then agree upon. They’re not inherently true in and of themselves. When we stop labeling things and overlaying the mind’s idea upon what something is, what then opens up is a direct realization of the essence of All That Is rather than the appearance of it. We call this awakening, or more commonly, enlightenment. Essentially the veil drops when we quit buying into the mind’s games and we remember who we really are beyond name and form. Everything we see “out there” is recognized to be the One, not just intellectually or because we heard some guru say this is how things are on some mysterious mystical level, but we actually experience the dropping of the veil of illusion and the direct realization of the Unity of All That Is.
Abraham’s usage of the word “Truth” seems to be a little more common-place in the sense that “It is true that so-and-so said XYZ to me.” or “It is true that I don’t have all the abundance I desire.”
It is from this differing context that Abraham suggests we don’t get “hung up on that ‘truth stuff’” because there are a whole lot of things that are true in our lives that we don’t want activate in our vibration and there are many things that we do want activate in our vibration.
So how would Abraham suggest we interact with Truth?
Let’s explore this topic first.
We tend to think that there’s an objective world out there and that we can affect and are affected by this outside world. There is a world “out there” that we are born into and interact with.
If we like the interaction between us and the outside world, we call this “good.” If we don’t like it, we call it “bad.”
The above drawing (awesome, I know, thank you 
) is how we typically perceive the world.
Notice that there is a “me” independent of the outside world who is perceiving what’s happening in the outside world. There is a sense of separation.
What’s actually going on is quite different. Let’s take a look.
Dear Ariel,
You said that the mind have has absolutely zero capacity to know absolute truth.
Is that an absolute truth?
The law of non-contradiction is the foundation of all truth. Any statement that contradicts itself (such as yours here) is obviously not truth.
MS.
Hey MS,
You have found the fundamental flaw of using a dualistic tool such as language to attempt to verbalize a nondualistic Truth such as God has no opposite. There is no opposite to Truth.
How would you describe color to a blind person? You could try to describe it, but no matter what you say, your descriptions and explanations will always come up short. The best thing to do would be to show the blind person how to see, to experience the colors for themselves. Then no explanation would be needed.
The original statement I made above is an attempt at verbalizing the direct experience of Oneness, an experience which is utterly beyond description. It is truly an experience out of this world.
When one experiences this, it becomes stunningly apparent how REAL Allness/Nothingness is and how unreal this whole world of form is. This world may feel real, but it’s like a dulled out bland dream compared to ultimate reality. I promise you.
I can not convince you of what I say, nor is my desire to convince you that I am “right.” Why? Because even if you DID believe me with all your heart, it would still just be another belief, another layer of the egoic onion, and beliefs are a poor substitute for knowingness and experience.
In order to understand absolute Truth, one must rise above the level of consciousness that allows for duality in the first place, the level where we can have two opposing beliefs such as good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, religion vs. science, and experience higher levels of consciousness in which nonduality, the level beyond opposites and the only True Reality, is one’s complete and total experience. It is only from this place that one can stand and look back at the world and fully recognize illusion as illusion.
In order to do this, one must completely transcend their own ego and see through the lie that says the mind is a valid tool to discern ultimate Truth. Truth can never be understood by attempting to going through the mind. The mind, plain and simple, CAN NOT KNOW TRUTH.
Thanks for your question.
The mind that we have has absolutely ZERO capacity to recognize absolute Truth. People blindly put their faith into a tool which is fundamentally flawed.
The mind is designed to look at appearance not essence, and as we all know, appearances can be deceiving. From a technical standpoint, the mind works only in the dualistic domain of beliefs, not in the non-linear domain of infinite knowingness. To give you an example, the ego/mind can look at a piece of food and guess if it looks healthy or not depending on various characteristics and past experiences, but it can’t determine without a doubt, for SURE, whether or not this particular piece of food is ACTUALLY “good” for you.
The mind is designed to assist us in creating illusory realities, as mentioned previously, not in actually determining Truth.
You see, all thinking IS the ego. Thinking then uses thinking to support itself because it has no fundamental foundation holding itself up other than itself.
It’s a lot like trying to reach back and lift yourself up by the back of your shirt. The illusion is that you can actually lift yourself up off the ground, that the arm has the ability to lift up the body, that our supporting beliefs are supported by something solid and can therefore support other beliefs thanks to the solid connection to the ground.
Each of our beliefs are supported by other beliefs which are supported by yet other beliefs which, if you trace them all the way back to their roots, aren’t actually supported by anything at all!
To actually prove this to yourself, use the How Do You Know Method and the Arguing Both Sides Method, both of which are discussed in the book The Most Direct Means To Eternal Bliss, a book that focuses on a direct path to enlightenment without all the fluff.
Stop and run through both of the exercises now. I assure you that you will get MUCH more value out of actually doing those two exercises for yourself than simply agreeing or disagreeing with anything I have to say here. Read More …
