Your body is the vehicle for your spirit and, just like your automobile, the more smoothly and efficiently it functions, the more able you are to enjoy the ride. If, on the other hand, your vehicle is always breaking down and giving trouble, it is very difficult to relax and enjoy the journey. You will always be worrying about what calamity may befall you next. As a health practitioner, I …
A Dialogue with Leonard Jacobson In 1981, Leonard experienced the first of a series of spontaneous spiritual and mystical awakenings which profoundly altered his perception of life, truth and reality. These experiences revealed profound insights about the nature of the human condition and many of the keys to spiritual awakening. As a result, he found himself opening to a level of freedom, love and truth which he had not known …
“Unchanged and unbegun, Unfellowed, He, the One, The All He is, the Alone, Otherness but a dream gone on too long.” —Arthur Osborne Arthur Osborne was born in London on September 25, 1906. His father was a school headmaster, while his mother was a simple gentlewoman, as loveable as she was impractical. From her, Arthur must have inherited his bent for poetry, for she spent much of her time writing …
Since our youngest son left home we have been committed to a relationship experiment of considerable song and intensity. Having departed the town of Taos, in which we raised our three children, we moved thirty-five miles up into the vast pine and ponderosa forests of the northern New Mexico mountains. Living in near seclusion, with no phone and few distractions, we committed ourselves to an experiment in conscious connectedness. Other …
During the pontificate of Pope Paul VI (one of the most misunderstood of popes), Murray Rogers was an Anglican priest who lived with his wife in a small community in India. He had become a close friend of Henri Le Saux, during which time he had an amazing audience with Pope Paul-amazing because the entire duration of the meeting, nearly an hour, was taken up with the subject of this …
This talk is the complete transcript from the 2000 Gathering. No expectancy . . . no waiting for anything to happen . . . being completely present here. We’ll be sitting together one and a half or two hours simply to allow that state of consciousness that is free of future, free of past—a timeless state of simple presence—to emerge within yourself, because that’s why you’re here. You didn’t come …
People frequently express dismay at experiencing endless streams of thought, even after sitting (in meditation) for many years: “Am I a hopeless case?” they ask. Or, “The mind is fairly quiet and spacious here at Springwater, but when I’m back home there is new entanglement again.” Or, “How can I do it better, be more disciplined? I really have no discipline whatsoever. I lack a foundation, not having had any …
What can we expect from our meetings? To learn not to expect. Not expecting is a great art. When you no longer live in expectation, you live in a new dimension. You are free. Your mind is free. Your body is free. To understand intellectually that we are not a psychosomatic entity in the process of becoming is a necessary first step, but this is not sufficient. The fact of …
One day a six-year-old friend said to me, “Pretend you are surrounded by a thousand hungry tigers. What would you do?” I visualized the situation as he had suggested and, coming up with no viable plan of action, said, “Wow, I don’t know. What would you do?” And he replied, “I’d stop pretending.” In many ways, our usual pretending to be somebody, to prove something, to aggrandize some notion of …
Those who study hard increase day after day, Those who follow the Tao decrease day after day. They keep on decreasing until they dwell in wu-wei. What does it mean to “dwell in wu-wei” and “decrease day after day?” In a society where “more” and “bigger” are better, the path of wu-wei seems as far as the edges of a receding universe. However, as more people begin to realize that …
When we lose our sense of wonder in life, it’s a sign that we know too much! It’s true. Wonder is always the first casualty of too much knowing, while it always thrives in the rich soil of not-knowing. Unfortunately, most people, when they suddenly realize that their lives have become dull, flat, devoid of wonder, look for answers. More knowing! This approach is like using gasoline to put out …
It is a warm Monday afternoon. The rolling hills of the Kentucky countryside provide a profound contrast to the California coastal desert, which I left just a few hours ago. Motoring along the road to Trappist, Kentucky, I notice a sign inviting us to visit the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, not too far from here. As we drive the time passes quickly, for my friend’s conversation is both lively and …
This is the realization: You are dreaming, and the entire universe is your dream. Everyone else is just a character in your dream. You have made them up. You have conjured every last person and thing in the cosmos because, after all, you are dreaming it. You are alone. You have always been alone and always will be alone, because there cannot be anyone else. There is more to the …
Are you happy? When you reply with the counter question “What is happiness?” that means that you have already observed how brittle, how transient and short-lived your so-called happiness is. But maybe what you have in mind is not happiness at all, but only pleasure? “Pleasure” means the fulfillment of some desire or the removal of something unpleasant. But experience teaches us that after one desire has been fulfilled, two …
“If for example a man should come heavily burdened with goods then there must be someone to help him unload the goods, so that the assistance of someone else is imperative. But if a person should come unburdened without any goods, then there is no necessity for a helper to unload the goods. It is only when a heavy burden is carried on the head that one finds it most …
Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld was unanimously elected Secretary-General of the United Nations from April 1953 until September 1961, when he met his death in a plane accident while on a peace mission in the Congo. He was born on July 29, 1905 in Jonkoping in south-central Sweden. After his death, the publication in 1963 of his “journal” entitled Markings revealed the inner man as few documents ever have. Hammarskjöld …
I first met Byron Katie during 1996, in San Diego, California. My first impression was of her hands: they were beautiful, graceful and flowing. I immediately liked her. The next time I saw Katie was at a public meeting. During the talk, I had the remarkable experience of watching myself speak. It was as if I became her. I was sitting “here” watching me speaking “there.” I fell completely in …
I first came upon the teachings of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj when I was a student in the Ashram of Da Free John. I was working as a medical practitioner in Lake County in Northern California, and Free John had an Ashram and a bookstore with an extraordinary collection of spiritual literature gathered from around the world. There was one copy (then a two-volume work) of Sri Nisargadatta’s I Am That. …
The past and future, you are told, are in your head, one as memory, and the other as imagination. But the present, because of the complicated biochemical processing of sense perceptions, which of course takes time, is already in the past by the time you experience it! You practice mindfulness. You have read the books and dabbled in the scriptures; you joined a vipassana group and practice insight meditation. Now …
J. was a man of about sixty, gray haired with a gentle, open face. I stood up, shook hands, and sat down with him at the small square table. We exchanged some small talk to begin with but soon enough got on to what really interested us both—Who we really are. I asked how long he would be in prison. “Probably for the rest of my life,” he told me. …
The very last writings of Thomas Merton were recorded in The Asian Journal. In this book Merton describes his visit in Sri Lanka to the great monastery at Polonnaruwa, which is nearly 2,000 years old. When you go to this place you’ll walk beneath huge ancient trees. Leaving your shoes on the stone path, you walk a long way under the trees, across a beautiful green grass carpet, and eventually …
Each spring, a Christian/Zen retreat is held at Gethsemani Abbey. Zen Master Dae Gak and Brother Anthony participate each year. These selections are from Br. Anthony’s talk at the 1997 retreat. I think Thomas Merton really saw that in turning to the east we stand to experience a great enrichment. In opening ourselves to other traditions, we see much more deeply into our own tradition. This deepening of one’s own …
In the past, two important Recognitions have come to me. First, nearly fourteen years ago, in a setting which it is not necessary to delineate, I suddenly recognized “I am Atman.” This effected important changes of outlook that persisted. Second, less than one year ago, while engaged in the public work mentioned above, and while deeply interested in a book giving a report of a living Indian Sage, I also …
Reflections on Reality Reality flows through each and every one of us in a tidal wave of infinite expression. We often miss the miracle of this manifestation because we somehow expect “It” to be something other than who and what we already are. Reality is not an abstract, theoretical construct. It is nothing more or other than the totality of our experience within the Infinite present. Every experience we have …
“Since we are ‘not other’ than the Self, we are condemned to eternity.” The faculty of “seeing God in everything” can be independent of all intellectual analysis; it can be a grace, the modes of which imponderables are and which springs from a profound love of God. When we say “intellectual analysis,” we do not mean speculations in the void: the “categories” of which we have spoken are by no …
