YOUR STORIES
 

The Covid-19 pandemic we’ve witnessed has provided each of us with considerable material to add to our conventional, habitual and familiar life stories. We can all recount some amount of inconvenience, fear, discomfort, illness or loss that have become a part of our everyday personal narrative. For anyone on a spiritual path this is an opportunity to notice how our Covid stories have become coopted by ego so that they’ve become about “me” – how “I” adapted or suffered. In other words, the ego has laid claim to these life events, making them seem limited to a separate and personal self. The selected quotes point to how we might detach from our lifetime accumulation of stories that we’ve used to identify ourselves 

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QUOTES

 

The biggest challenge for most spiritual seekers is 

to surrender their self importance, and 

see the emptiness of their own personal story. 

It is your personal story that you need to awaken from in order to be free.

~ Adyashanti

 

Notice the difference between being lost in a thought and being mindful that we’re thinking. Becoming aware of the thought is like waking up from a dream or coming out of a movie theater after being absorbed in the story.

Through mindfulness, we gradually awaken from the movies of our minds.”

~ Joseph Goldstein 

 

We are trained to know who we are and what reality is through our definitions, through others' definitions, through cultural parameters, religious parameters, and even spiritual parameters. We limit ourselves when we rely on knowing ourselves indirectly, through predetermined thought.

When I met Papaji, he told me to stop. When I let that stop in, I recognized that he meant to stop every habit of defining myself. He meant to stop creating and recreating myself. What a monumental task that is, and yet it is absolutely immediate and simple. The truth of who we are is freshly revealed when we take responsibility for its direct discovery.

~ Gangaji

 

The ego thinks it gains something by getting attention—it wants to validate itself. It wants to be visible because then it feels real, so it looks for attention to make itself experience visibility. In this way ego has created a story, and the attention it receives enables the idea that you are that ego, that you are the one seeking attention. Then mistaken identity happens! See how this game works?

~Jac O'Keeffe

 

The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story.

~ Byron Katie

 

When you are present in this moment, 

you break the continuity of your story, of past and future. 

Then true intelligence arises, and also love. 

~ Eckhart Tolle

 

Life will always touch you in some way .. but who you really are cannot be touched.

Opening wide to allow the paradox of this means you become vaster than who you think you are. And in this vastness, you live from the space within which everything happens.

Now you are free of your story.

~ Amoda Maa Jeevan

 

In the story of you, you believe you are going somewhere, to some future moment of awakening. But you are not going anywhere. More precisely, there is no "you" to go anywhere. There is only thought happening.

That thought paints a picture of past that you call, "Who you are." It paints a picture of future that you call, "Who you are going to become." But you are not thought. You are not the past or the future. Because you are not thought, you cannot find yourself through seeking, which is a dream of thought.

In seeing that the spiritual search is happening all on its own, there is the possibility that awareness will start to see it for what it really is -- a dream of thought. When awareness sees the dream of thought known as "you and your spiritual search" and sees that it is happening spontaneously and involuntarily, all of the mental and emotional effort drops out of the search. There is a natural resting into what is.

~ Scott Kiloby

 

Oftentimes when we are caught in the story it's very hard to come to the simplicity of the sensory present moment experience. But it is important because in the noticing of what is here, the mind can have a moment of rest. And that very moment can be a gateway to presence.

~ Neelam

 

First we recognize awareness. Once we get used to that, quite naturally if we're willing, we'll put less emphasis on story and we'll start to enjoy the soothing presence of aware-being. When we get used to that, we fall in love with it (ourselves/essence) and there is non-referential, yet crystal-clear bliss. 

~ Bentinho Massaro 

 

You need to hear the truth about yourself as frequently as possible, because your mind is so preoccupied with false self-images. 

~ A Course In Miracles

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Whatever mind presents is just story. Seeing it as story is one thing but really to recognize it as story removes its life-force. When you recognize a scenario as story, honor your own spiritual path by always dropping it. When we chose a story knowingly, having seen it is a story, and we still find it entertaining/interesting then we are turning our back on the truth.

~ Jac O'Keeffe

 

Because you see thoughts, feelings and sensations as inside you, you identify with them. . . .Take a deep interest in your own story. Face your reactions. Every time you face your reaction you cease to be an accomplice with it and without fuel it fades away. 

When you live free from all reaction you find yourself in a new dimension that is always interesting. In life you must make a choice and the choice should be to live in beauty. So become more acquainted with beauty.

~ Jean Klein
 

The ego sustains its separation from life by telling itself stories about whether life is or is not trustworthy, or whether life is essentially good or bad. All these conclusions comprise our personal myth about life, and they are the prism through which we experience life. They perpetuate the ultimate myth, which is who I think I am—the imagined ego. So can life be experienced without any conclusion, any judgment, any story? What is life then? Dare we experience life with such directness and simplicity? Who are we without our personal myth about ourselves and life in general?

Do not answer this question in your mind. Do not say ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’ or even ‘love,’ because these are stories too. Just live in the questions. Let the questions reveal reality beyond all descriptions.

~ Adyashanti

 

Let it be ok that nothing is happening. Let the show be over, let the movie, the story of 'I' as an individual person, be over. And see what happens. Truth will reveal itself, absolute clarity of how this matrix works, will show itself to be no more than a matrix. And somehow, a capacity to enjoy what ever is unfolding is always there.

~ Jac O' Keeffe

 

You can't make a decision. You can only experience a story about how you made it. Decisions make themselves; they are happenings; they come when the time is right. Who would you be without the story that you need to make a decision?

~ Byron Katie

 

The revelation of Being Here while residing in a human body is infinite. The dimensions and textures of ‘here’ only seem to expand with each breath and deepen with each day.  Every moment of being alive is truly a miracle: An opportunity to open and receive the blessing of discovering the most intimate relationship we will ever have. 

But unfortunately for most of us, no one told us this. No one could show us how to receive and celebrate the blessing of being truly alive. Rather, most of us inherited the DNA that carries the tragic cultural narrative: life is just something you are here to suffer, conquer and survive. 

Add to that the fact that developmental trauma is a given for most of us, by virtue of where we are in evolution. No matter which way this narrative has played out in your personal, cultural and ancestral story line; the crux of it lands in each of as an unconscious core wound of separation from the Source of who we are.  When our native innocence is not met, seen or affirmed in early life, a core misperception of our true identity ensues. 

~ Ajaya Sommers

 

Language helps us interpret the world in story. We tell ourselves stories all the time. The categorizing of information in terms of opposites: do or don’t, win or lose, good or bad, like or dislike, and so on. These dichotomies lend themselves to value judgments. Every belief, every value, is another story. See that language is a tool. Pick it up and set it down. It’s an interpretation of the world, of you, of life. It’s limited and inaccurate.

~ Jac O' Keeffe

 

Who would you be without your story? Get still. Other than what you're thinking and believing, just now, are you OK? Just now, in reality, are you OK?

~ Byron Katie

 

Awakening has no exact definition. This is because Awakening is about a process of shifting from the unconscious states of the ego driven identity to a conscious and experiencing state of Self as the eternal awareness and Oneness of all life. It is also because it is a state in which we transcend definition and become pure being.

In the ego driven state a person experiences life dominantly through the constructed identity and perception of being separate from others, and the source of all life.  The individual believes in themselves as an actual personality – a ‘somebody’ defined by their body and events of their life.

In this state it is the logical left brain activity that is dominant. Life is experienced in dualistic terms: up down, right wrong, me you etc. Consequently, life is constantly defined and labeled. It is believed that life really is what the mind has defined.

The individual lives under the illusion of the mind, totally unaware that they are directed by a great big load of stories! This plays out through subconscious and unconscious feedback loops.  Hence a person’s life feels like a constant swing between good and bad moments of pleasure and pain. Life is very conditional on circumstances. A person’s happiness is dependent on the circumstances and events of their life. And the person lives in the fog of the mind’s illusion, disconnected from the centred state of oneness in the NOW.

Awakening occurs through an ongoing process that integrates over many stages. During this process a person begins to experience direct states of awareness in which there is a remembering – a reconnection with knowing the true Self as eternal awareness and being.

Through various direct activities and experiences (such as meditation) the right brain becomes more active. A gradual state of entrainment between the right and left hemispheres results in deeper and higher conscious activity. The mind becomes very still. There is a deep centredness in the moment of the NOW and the individual enters a state free of the mind’s stories and projections.

It is then directly experienced and realized that this ‘Self’ is vastly beyond the body-mind of the ‘individual’. This Self is infinite and at One with all things. This Self is both the One which is undifferentiated and the manifestation of every unique expression in the universe. It is like a veil is lifted and life is seen in its full glory. All questions fall away, and along with it, the belief in a constructed identity: a ‘somebody’.

In this state a profound sense of liberation occurs – there is a realization of the perfection of all things in all moments as being the One Self. Happiness becomes a constant – a realization that the Self is always freedom, peace and love. The person is free of conditional attachments or aversions.

Awakening occurs in so many varying degrees. It is most common that people experience ‘Satoris’. These are moments that can last a second or a few minutes, hours, days or weeks (sometimes even months)– before the person subsides again into the thinking mind of duality. This ‘rise and fall’ in and out of awareness can repeat itself many times – even over lifetimes before there is a sustained integration in which there is no longer a shift from the state of ever present awareness.

When we reach a saturated state of integration we become the living, radiant, constant state of Oneness, awareness and LOVE. We simply enter the beingness of life itself – the play and process of consciousness in the ever-present NOW.
~ Isira

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