Great Throughts Treasury

"Experience the mystery of pain, open to it, allow it. When you do, the experience shifts. What basically generates pain is the defense against it"

"I can?t stress enough the importance of the capacity to center at a transpersonal level. Without this fundamental development in awareness ? that is, if the ability to center at a Heart Chakra-like level is not established ? most expanded resources are either unavailable or can be misused... The daily - and sometimes moment-by-moment - practice of centering is what marks the individual who is awakening into a balanced process of transpersonal development."

"It is known that the ruling archetype of the Ego is the Thief. The Thief who must steal power from the Gods and Goddesses to compensate for fundamental inadequacy. The drive to power and the appropriation of power through concepts, abstractions, thought forms, and personal identification with Transpersonal power all serve to protect the young Ego/Shadow unfoldment until the greater is ready to flow into the lesser or as Carl Jung would say?the Ego/Shadow are ready to subordinate consciously to the Self. To steal the ultimately destructive power of fire expressed through uncontrolled anger and rage to conceal personally disruptive powerlessness then is to be understood as a natural development in the first half of life when the individual is faced with socialization, conditioning, family and cultural biases and preferences. Power holds the self together until contact with the Self unfolds"

"It?s impossible to go through renewal without some kind of death. When you move towards vulnerability, a more transcendent energy begins to operate. If you do not experience powerlessness, there is no awakening."

"Most spiritual teachers fear Presence when Presence is being expressed in the forms of physicality, sexuality, and emotion. Presence in these forms is too intense for the subtler forms of Presence such as when focused in feeling, psychical, mental, etheric, etc. forms. It is true it becomes difficult to experience the subtler forms when the first three are being primarily expressed. To be appreciated though is that all are forms of Presence and have equal value from an Awakened Spiritual Viewpoint. Each chakra has its Presence and none can be over valued or less valued than the others. The fabric that results in each unique being is based on the relationship and intensity of a multitude of Presences (forces) which summate into you. What holds and directs these forces into manifesting as you...is You"

"Nothing brings us to aliveness as much as intensity does. Underneath intensity is an attempt to escape meaninglessness. Intensity is a way to try to be seen, and to avoid no-thingness. Doing allows you to escape the fear of meaningless of your life -"

"Essences exchanged and the undiluted Suchness of what Is brings the final and culminating Mystery of Temporality to Wholeness. It is silent of words"

"The fundamental mystery is interior. No matter what consensual reality says, what?s outside, what we see outside, is always our projection of the inner on a screen. Your premise of reality determines what you can see and what you can?t see. We see everything through our patterns. Our experience of life is determined by our patterns ? it has nothing to do with what is really going on. Let the patterns be ? they are not the totality and, at the same time, they are an important piece. Let them run its course. Our task is to apprentice ourselves to the mystery, to have the eyes to see what is"

"The little girl or boy will never grow up, s/he has no resources. If you allow yourself to hang out too much within her/him, the whole world turns dark, or frightening, or overwhelming. The whole key to this is that s/he has no business taking over your psyche, s/he doesn't have the resources, so you tell her/him: Thank you very much, but another aspect will take care of this, and s/he will be very relieved. Change states of consciousness. There?s paradox, there's the mystery of multiplicity, and at the same time, a transcendent center. It isn't the ego - the ego is one facet of this process, the child is one part of this process. This is a rich discovery - it's called self-realization. So, instead of being trapped, it is the art of finding something else that can hold your psyche still. A lot of the mystery training is the development of a state of consciousness that can see dismemberment not as something to be rejected, but as something that represents the dynamism of transformation. Appreciate whatever brings you closer to the sense of awe and wonderment, beginning to realize Life has called you into existence, and that you are part of something very mysterious and much larger than who and what you know yourself to be."

"The most fundamental Realization is that consciousness or light is an aberrant and fundamentally temporary phenomenon of darkness to handle motion and change. Light and consciousness are both mostly interference's and most rarely a witness and handmaiden to the action of Self. Ego Consciousness is the carrier of the Soul?s incarnation into a specific time and a specific place. It is an interference of wholeness because it is differentiating and discerning. The Shadow is the Ego?s counterpart reflecting the Ego?s unconscious complements and vice versa. Gestation is the great principle of Darkness"

"The pointing finger is the basis of most of the shadow work. If you realize that you are pointing to something of your own nature, don?t get into judgment or defense, but rather, move to the Heart Center and ask, What is this?. No matter what it may mean, or the implication to the surface mind, what is this, and how is it serving? What is it in my life, and why is it that I haven?t the capacity at this stage of my life to actually begin to include it into the mystery of my forest, rather than continuing to exclude it? There are two ways to get out of the mystery of the pointing finger that are very helpful to self-realization. One of them is to have a look at the people around us and begin to describe them, particularly, to critique them - this is one way in which you begin to see some of your own unconscious material. The other way is through a pet peeve. Pet peeves are wonderful ways to catch the shadow because the pet peeve is actually the key to something within your own nature. This is a delicious exercise: criticize an individual, work on expressing everything ? just unleash all of it ? no tiptoeing around, no modulating the energy ? just get in touch with these forces and get them out, let them out fully. Then begins the process of reweaving the forces back into your own nature. The way it is usually done is that when you point the finger, then comes the idea of, when have you been involved with exactly the same dynamic, in other circumstances, or with other people? You begin to see that there is a pattern to it, that it has shown up in your life from time to time, this very same thing. Not the same person doing the exact same thing, but you begin to read the pattern. Is it an abandonment, or is it a rejection mystery, is it martyrdom? There are various kinds of patternings that you?ll see. Then you trace it back as far as you can go in your own life, where other circumstances had exactly the same kind of patterning to it. This is very helpful because you will hopefully come to the realization that your lives are determined by something that is not quite in time and splays out through all stages, that the cause of your situation now is not based on childhood mysteries."

"The Self contains the Ego yet extends into vaster realms of Being and, at most levels, is not a personal essence per se. The Ego is, at the beginning level, the awareness that one is individual and separate. This gives us the sense of a personal vehicle."

"The Shadow work is to unveil the unconscious material that is present in one's psyche that is operating all the time. You are not creating thought forms. You are discovering what already lurks in the deeper recesses of your own beingness. Avoiding violence in films is like an Ostrich. We avoid the violence as a defense to our own violence. When it is raised to consciousness and integrated we see much more than either violence or peace."

"There is a huge difference between the ego experience and the egoless experience of Compassion, Innate Harmony, The Healing Presence, and Unconditional Love. It is not a matter of lack of emotion, passion, ecstasy, or Love - as many a Mystic and Rumi well demonstrate. It is not an intellectual process either. All of these emotions can express the Heart Center experiences yet still be egoless! It is the ego's possession of these forces that is the crux of our concern. If your preference is ego development then realize you are exploring the third chakra and do not confuse this with the more difficult traverse into the 4 chakra experiences. The four attributes of the Heart Center are Transcendental to the ego and are expressed by an ever increasingly egoless center of Awareness. Just one experience of nonego centered Awareness is enough to transform your entire life"

"To really capture the depths of what this material actually addresses, we would have to sense that the whole thing is divine including pain, ecstasy, grief, sadness, sexuality etc. ? that we are witness to a divine mystery operating through us. We are not the source of these things and one of the fascinating aspects of the ego it steals or appropriates things as If, it is itself ,so it will steal the body, steal the different emotions, steals a creative thought as if it thought it when indeed anybody creative knows that it appears in your awareness and that is why we work with the idea that the surface mind is a small dinghy sitting on top of a vast ocean so if you can catch a glimpse that we are in relationship to something . Most of us most of time don?t know it. We are always trying to turn the world into our reality and our preferences rather than offering ourselves into the fundamental mystery itself."

"Unconditional Love is the Mystery that reveals the full power of Duality through the interplay of opposites into complements and finally into singularity?..and back again"

"When the Ego does not know the Self exists, the individual is in Maya or illusion/delusion swimming in Samsara as if that is the primary reality. A very small and highly filtered awareness is being employed to experience life. It is mostly a defensive and highly compensated existence AND it functions beautifully as an unconscious collective member of humanity"

"When working with shadow a lot of very powerful material comes forward. The danger is the addiction to intensity ? it?s very addictive when you go down into some of these things and you start to see the intensity of those forces. The key to balance is that as you begin to discover something, seek also the counterpart, the split-off other half, so that you begin to work on the mystery of polarity, and not just going to look at something as if it existed independently of anything else, because it has a counterpart, and it has a center pole also. If you do that, it?s really quite extraordinary, and it keeps you from getting into isolating the shadow. You discover it has a complement. The Heart Center can give you the best eye for that because it doesn?t have a preconception or a pre-judgment of the material. Petition to open the Heart and to let go into it with the sense that you are ready to greet what wants to come up for you, rather than wanting to make things happen. It is not a matter of making things happen ? it is the yearning to discover what wants to come forward for you at this point in time. Practice the art of letting go of whatever your concerns are, and open to the forces that do us, rather than taking charge of them. One puts oneself into a vulnerable position going in because one surrenders the surface mind?s preferential viewpoint and lets the Transcendent reveal what its forces might be, and what the intent of your vaster nature is."

"Who, on earth makes up these rules? It?s the blind leading the blind when it should be the Divine leading the Divine. Beneath such thinking lies control and self-deception. Perhaps the integration of our animal nature would relieve God/Goddess of shocking eruptions from time to time. We are Divinity in manifestation, already. How can we improve on that? The need to touch in on the spontaneous primordial forces for revitalization is so essential to protect us from our sterilized and sanitized minds. Without contact with the untransformed there would be no hope for humanity?s escape from the tyranny of rationality. The War, the intoxicants, the inner city initiations, the compulsions, the outlaws, the riots, the deviants ? all an essential part of a much larger dance called Life"

"Your premise of reality determines what you can see and what you can?t see. All pathologizing and labeling are a defense. Stop labeling things and controlling them and get into a discovery ? one of the most difficult aspects of maturation. Discover who and what you are instead of trying to control it. The essential matter is to continue to develop the interiority that can, with an unconditional radiance, welcome the suchness."