1. The 'Handful of Sand' in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.
The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us- these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road- aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of [details] we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
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at any given moment in time, your conceptions/physiological reactions to a situation can be altered. your perception is a mere slice of the various possible realities. It is malleable. it's just a matter of scooping up a different handful of sand. when you feel discouraged or frustrated or defeated, remember: these feelings are fragments of ONE, SINGLE handful of sand amidst ...an infinite, boundless landscape of awareness. what blissful freedom it is to realize that you dictate your own reality.
when one believes his/her handful of sand to be the whole of reality, there is disorder and disease. in this culture, it manifests as sacrificing ecosystems (i.e. life), relationships, and balance to maintain a story, to maintain a grip of this handful of sand. the next phase in human consciousness is arriving: releasing these grains of sand and exchanging them for something new.
2. Loving Unconditionally
Love everything the way it is. The universe is perfect in every way; it only needs your unconditional acceptance and love to manifest itself as what it really is: the beautiful, essential relationships of beingness. Be free in your head, act out of love, and do what feels good. There is no action that is always right or wrong: the only true variable is the love with which you act. As you open your awareness, life will improve of itself, you won't even have to try.
The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at ever moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people- eternal life. It is not possible for one person to see how far another is on the way; the Buddha exists in the robber and dice player; the robber exists in the Brahmin. During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman. Therefore, it seems to me that everything that exists is good- death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding; then all is well with me and nothing can harm me. I learned through my body and soul that is was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it.
Siddartha, Hermann Hesse
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Love as much as you can from wherever you are. You may not want to love what you feel or see, you may not be able to convince yourself that you could love at all. But just decide to love it. Say out loud that you love it, even if you don't believe it. And say, 'I love myself for hating this.'
Love it the way it is. The way you see the world depends entirely on your own vibration level. When your vibration changes, the whole world will look different. It's like those days when everyone seems to be smiling at you because you feel happy. The way to raise your vibration level is to feel more love. Start by loving your negative feelings, your own boredom, dullness, and despair. You take yourself with you wherever you go. As they say in Zen: If you can't find it where you're standing, where do you expect to wander in search of it? The direction of change is this: getting deeper into what you are, where you are, like turning up the volume on the amplifier.
Love yourself. Much of what we think of as ourselves- our bodies, our minds, our emotions- involves billions of other beings. When you love your self you are in truth expanding in love into many other beings. And the more loving your are, the more loving the beings within and around you. In another sense, loving yourself is a willingness to be in the same space with your own creations. How contracted would you become if you try to withdraw from your own ideas?
-The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, Thaddeus Golas
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God is Love. And Love must love. And to love there must be a Beloved. But since God is Existence infinite and eternal there is no one for Him to love but Himself. And in order to love Himself He must imagine Himself as the Beloved whom He as the Lover imagines He loves.
Beloved and Lover implies separation. And separation creates longing; and longing causes search. And the wider and the more intense the search the greater the separation and the more terrible the longing.
When longing is most intense separation is complete, and the purpose of separation, which was the Love might experience itself as Lover and Beloved, is fulfilled; and union follows. And when union is attained, the Lover knows that he himself was all along the Beloved whom he loved and desired union with; and that all the impossible situations that he overcame were obstacles which he himself had placed in the path to himself.
To attain union is so impossibly difficult because it is impossible to become what you already are! Union is nothing other than knowledge of oneself as the Only One.
- The Everything and the Nothing, Meher Baba
3. The 'Surrender' in Power of Now and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
Q: You mentioned "surrender" a few times. I don't like that idea. It sounds somewhat fatalistic. If we always accept the way things are, we are not going to make any effort to improve them. It seems to me what progress is all about, both in our personal lives and collectively, is not to accept the limitations of the present but to strive to go beyond them and create something better. How do you reconcile surrender with changing things and getting things done?
Response:
To some people, surrender may have negative connotations, implying defeat, giving up, failing to rise to the challenges of life, becoming lethargic, and so on. True surrender, however, is something entirely different. It does not mean to passively put up with whatever situation you find yourself in and to do nothing about it. Nor does it mean to cease making plans or initiating positive action.
Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is. Inner resistance is to say "no" towhat is, through mental judgment and emotional negativity. It becomes particularly pronounced when things "go wrong," which means that there is a gap between the demands or rigid expectations of your mind and what is. That is the pain gap. If you have lived long enough, you will know that things "go wrong" quite often. It is precisely at those times that surrender needs to be practiced if you want to eliminate pain and sorrow from your life. Acceptance of what is immediately frees you from mind identification and thus reconnects you with Being. Resistance is the mind.
Surrender is a purely inner phenomenon. It does not mean that on the outer level you cannot take action and change the situation. In fact, it is not the overall situation that you need to accept when you surrender, but just the tiny segment called the Now.
For example, if you were stuck in the mud somewhere, you wouldn't say: "Okay, I resign myself to being stuck in the mud." Resignation is not surrender. You don't need to accept an undesirable or unpleasant life situation. Nor do you need to deceive yourself and say that there is nothing wrong with being stuck in the mud. No. You recognize fully that you want to get out of it. You then narrow your attention down to the present moment without mentally labeling it in any way. This means that there is no judgment of the Now. Therefore, there is no resistance, no emotional negativity. You accept the "isness" of this moment. Then you take action and do all that you can to get out of the mud. Such action I call positive action. It is far more effective than negative action, which arises out of anger, despair, or frustration. Until you achieve the desired result, you continue to practice surrender by refraining from labeling the Now.
Non-surrender hardens your psychological form, the shell of the ego, and so creates a strong sense of separateness. The world around you and the people in particular come to be perceived as threatening. The unconscious compulsion to destroy others through judgment arises, as does the need to compete and dominate. Even nature becomes your enemy and your perceptions and interpretations are governed by fear. The mental disease that we call paranoia is only a slightly more acute form of this normal but dysfunctional state of consciousness.
Not only your psychological form but also your physical form- your body- becomes hard and rigid through resistance. Tension arises in different parts of the body, and the body as a whole contracts. The free flow of life energy through the body, which is essential for its healthy functioning, is greatly restricted. Bodywork and certain forms of physical therapy can be helpful in restoring this flow, but unless you practice surrender in your everyday life, those things can only give temporary symptom relief since the cause- the resistance pattern- has not been dissolved. There is something within you that remains unaffected by the transient circumstances that make up your life situation, and only through surrender do you have access to it. It is your life, your very Being- which exists eternally in the realm of the present.
If there is no action you can take to improve an unsatisfactory life situation, and you cannot remove yourself from the situation either, then use the situation to make yourself go more deeply into surrender, more deeply into the Now, more deeply into Being. When you enter this timeless dimension of the present, change often comes about in strange ways without the need for a great deal of doing on your part. Life becomes helpful and cooperative. If inner factors such as fear, guilt, or inertia prevented you from taking action, they will dissolve in the light of your conscious presence.
Would you choose unhappiness? If you did not choose it, how did it arise? What is its purpose? Who is keeping it alive? You say that you are conscious of your unhappy feelings, but the truth is that you are identified with them and keep the process alive through compulsive thinking. All that is unconscious. If you were conscious, that is to say totally present in the Now, all negativity would dissolve almost instantly. It could not survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence. You keep your unhappiness alive by giving it time. That is its lifeblood. Remove time through intense present-moment awareness and it dies. But do you want it to die? Have you truly had enough? Who would you be without it?
4. Residing in the Realm of Quantum Realities
What a journey it is to realize that you are creating the external reality before you. Your brain is receiving these sensory signals (taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight, etc.) and transforming these signals- electrical pulses that travel along neural fibers- into a comprehensible, palatable perception/insight of reality. This is an understanding that we can relate to given our limited capacity to grasp the full extent of what is (taking n dimensions of reality and filtering it down into n-1 dimensions). You are literally creating the world. Every vibrant shade of color, every ripple of sound, every subtle scent, every nuanced texture is manufactured within your self (both culturally and biologically created self) and generated as your own 'reality tunnel'. We are not operating in some unfamiliar, alien world of uncertainty- this world is indeed you and you are indeed it.
See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dpRPTwsKJs (On Quantum Theory)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVC0FcSRxL8 (Robert Anton Wilson on subjectivity of reality)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk2DeTet98o&feature=related (Waking Life trailer)
5. Seeing yourself as the Universe and the Universe as You.
This is a stone, and within a certain length of time it will perhaps be soil and from the soil it will become plant, animal or man. Previously I should have said: This stone is just a stone; it has no value, it belongs to the world of Maya, but perhaps because within the cycle of change it can also become man and spirit, it is also of importance. That is what I should have thought. But now I think: This stone is stone; it is also animal, God and Buddha. I do not respect and love it because it was one thing and will become something else, but because it has already long been everything and always is everything. I love it just because it is a stone, because today and now it appears to me as a stone. I see value and meaning in each on of its fine markings and cavities, in the yellow, in the gray, in the hardness and the sound of it when I knock it, in the dryness or dampness of its surface. There are stones that feel like oil or soap, that look like leaves or sand, and each one is different and worships Om in its own way; each one is Brahman. At the same time it is very much stone, oily or soapy, and that is just what pleases me and seems wonderful and worthy of worship.
Stone becomes soil; earth becomes flesh and bone; flesh becomes soil again- everything existing as a continuous cycle of unified matter and consciousness, constantly dying and becoming reborn as the same fundamental entities. Life is like a flowing river-all is everlasting, perpetuating itself and manifesting as distinct but similar parts... unique undulations and patterns in an infinite, unyielding mosaic of cohesiveness and oneness. As Bill Hicks says, "All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration; we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves."
Type 'Alan Watts' into Youtube.
"But I will say no more about it. Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another."- Siddartha
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