Nightly Spiritual Quote #469 Buddhism

“On the first day of November last year, sacred to many religious calendars but especially the Celtic, I went for a walk among bare oaks and birch. Nothing much was going on. Scarlet sumac had passed and the bees were dead. The pond had slicked overnight into that shiny and deceptive glaze of delusion, first ice. It made me remember sakes and conjure a vision of myself skimming backward on one foot, the other extended; the arms become wings. Minnesota girls know that this is not a difficult maneuver if one’s limber and practices even a little after school before the boys claim the rink for hockey. I think I can still do it – one thinks many foolish things when November’s bright sun skips over the entrancing first freeze.

A flock of sparrows reels through the air looking more like a flying net than seventy conscious birds, a black veil thrown on the wind. When one sparrow dodges, the whole net swerves, dips: one mind. Am I part of anything like that?

Maybe not. The last few years of my life have been characterized by stripping away, one by one, loves and communities that sustain the soul. A young colleague, new to my English department, recently asked me who I hang around with at school. “Nobody,” I had to say, feeling briefly ashamed. This solitude is one of the surprises of middle age, especially if one’s youth has been rich in love and friendship and children. If you do your job right, children leave home; few communities can stand an individual’s most pitiful, amateur truth telling. So the soul must stand in her own meager feathers and learn to fly – or simply take hopeful jumps into the wind.

In the Christian calendar, November 1 is the Feast of All Saints, a day honoring not only those who are known and recognized as enlightened souls, but more especially the unknowns, saints who walk beside us unrecognized down the millennia. In Buddhism, we honor the bodhisattvas – saints – who refuse enlightenment and return willingly to the wheel of karma to help other beings. Similarly, in Judaism, anonymous holy men pray the world from its well-merited destruction. We never know who is walking beside us, who is our spiritual teacher. That one – who annoys you so – pretends for a day that he’s the one, your personal Obi Wan Kenobi. The first of November is a splendid, subversive holiday.

Imagine a hectic procession of revelers – the half-mad bag lady; a mumbling, scarred janitor whose ravaged face made the children turn away; the austere, unsmiling mother superior who seemed with great focus and clarity to do harm; a haunted music teacher, survivor of Auschwitz. I bring them before my mind’s eye, these old firends of my soul, awakening to dance their day. Crazy saints; but who knows what was home in the heart? This is the feast of those who tried to take the path, so clumsily that no one knew or notice, the feast, indeed, of most of us.

It’s an ugly woods, I was saying to myself, padding along a trail where other walkers had broken ground before me. And then I found an extraordinary bouquet. Someone had bound an offering of dry seed pods, yew, lyme grass, red berries, and brown fern and laid it on the path: “nothing special,” as Buddhists say, meaning “everything.” Gathered to formality, each dry stalk proclaimed a slant, an attitude, infinite shades of neutral.

All contemplative acts, silences, poems, honor the world this way. Brought together by the eye of love, a milkweed pod, a twig, allow us to see how things have been all along. A feast of being.”
― Mary Rose O’Reilley

*****

Peace and Love

Seth Kelly Curtis

Advertisement

The Wisdom of Robert Adams #55

Does eating a non-vegetarian diet cause the awakening to take longer or prevent it.
R> As far as I’m concerned, it’s morally correct to be a vegetarian.
The quality of the soul becomes purified and you come closer to realization.
Eating meat makes the human body gross and pulls you down to the earth.
That’s why they speak of the three gunas in all spiritual teachings.
Meat eaters have tamasic qualities, which are the lowest qualities of humanhood.

*****

May God bless and protect you

Seth Kelly Curtis

Spiritual Essays #117

Tapping Into The Hidden Intelligence

by Jayaram V

When you look at the beauty, symmetry and harmony in the universe, what do you feel? How can you explain so much perfection that is hidden in every object and aspect of creation? There is no doubt that mathematics and equations are at play in the configuration and architecture of all forms, objects and processes that you perceive around you. But how can you explain them and integrate them into the diversity that we see here? Scientists may argue that life originated upon earth randomly, and perhaps the very existence of the entire universe in itself may be a random process. However, it does not explain the perfection that is hidden universally at the microscopic and sub atomic level. There cannot be so many random processes happening simultaneously at so many levels.

So much perfection and symmerty in the world around us point to an inherent and hidden intelligence that must be at work in every animate and inanimate object in the universe. It must be responsible for the beauty and perfection that inundate our senses from all directions and invoke in us tender feelings. It is certainly not the ordinary intelligence that you perceive with your mind, and which you find sometimes inadequate to deal with the problems of your life. It must be very different from it because it seems to be all-knowing, self-existing, independent, immutable, complete and perfect in itself. In other words, this intelligence, which is different from your ordinary intelligence, but which is hidden in you as well as in everything else, does not seem to require any learning, improvement, change, purification, transformation, nourishment, or conditioning. It knows by itself what needs to be done, or what needs to be manifested, improved, and perfected in the things it inhabits.

You may call it by any name, soul, over soul, inner Self, guardian angel, hidden Self, embodied Self, or the Witness Self. It does seem to be the real support, the one which imparts to existence the structure, meaning, purpose, place, form, and distinction. It does seem to operate at the individual level in the things it inhabits, and it may or may not have a universal dimension. However, it does seem to be interconnected with other hidden intelligences and share the knowledge, awareness, and experience in facilitating the processes and movements that define and regulate our existence.

The interrelationships and connectivity among the numerous intelligences may be responsible for the diversity and the universality of applicable knowledge and the possibility of life existing on other planets based upon the same set of laws and processes. If life happens according to mathematical principle and functions, then it must also be happening predictably in other places. It may have a universal dimension, but our minds are too small to comprehend it or speak about it. Hence, I would choose not to speak about It

However, based upon the circumstantial evidence that is strikingly available in numerous objects that we deal with everyday, one can be certain about its universal presence in the diversity of creation.​You cannot easily tap into it with your ordinary mind. If you are lost in the dreams of your outer world or your inner world, you may not experience it. At times, it may show itself in you as intuition, illumination, creativity, and revelations, and coincidences. If you manage to increase the incidence of such events or somehow establish a deeper and more consistent connectivity with it, your life and your intelligence will become illuminated with its knowledge, power, and understanding way beyond your imagination.

Our main objective should be to understand this intelligence and draw from it richly to enhance the quality of our lives and experiences. The seers in Hinduism long ago managed to tap into it through various spiritual practices such as yoga, austerities, and other inner rituals. So did many spiritual masters and teachers like Mahavira and the Buddha. It appears that this intelligence is fully awake only when your mind, senses and ordinary intelligence are fully asleep. Herein lies the problem, and why there are so many variations in our understanding and interpretation of existential and transcendental truths. Scientists nowadays talk about wormholes in the universe to bend the space and enter different dimension. Perhaps we need to bend our inner space or open hidden communication channels within ourselves with which we can tap into this hidden dimension of infinite truths that seem to have solutions to all our problems and reveal to us the secrets that can enhance and perfect our lives and actions. Perhaps we will move closer to it when we prefect in us what yearns to be perfected.

*****

May God bless and protect you

Seth Kelly Curtis

Nightly Spiritual Quote #467 Mooji

Sometimes I meet beings who say they have realised the Self. They believe or claim that they know and understand the Truth. They say they sense it, feel it and are convinced it is what they are and so on. However, it is often sensed here that the mind takes delivery for this understanding and purchases further life as the egoic ‘achiever’ of ultimate Truth. Consequently, the realisation does not get baptised in the Heart and a real chance of freedom gradually fades away.
Therefore, such beings can retain their sense of personhood, unknowingly. Some even edit my words to fit in with their personal inclinations, projections and spiritual fantasies, but I want to burn all of this to the ground in order that they attain true freedom.
What we speak about here is authentic transcendence, you see? One has to overcome the hypnosis of personal conditioning. They have to be free from the psychological influence of the mind. I don’t mean that you should ‘stop’ your mind but rather, focus on the witness of mind. Therefore, it has to be an authentic transcendence, not a Hollywood awakening.
Sometimes I say I don’t want or feel for your company. You indulge too much mental and psychological noise. There are too many relationships going on inside your mind. Your representations of yourself mentally, emotionally, psychically are not authentic expressions of the Self. Such a localised identity is not enough at this level of understanding, insight or, we could say, Self-knowledge.

So what has to happen?
You have to be That.
How are you going to be That?
The ‘you’ who you take yourself to be cannot be That. Being That is not a verb, an action you will take. It is an awakening, a recognition so profound that it changes your mind’s orientation immediately and irreversibly. As real understanding takes over, it will be a life changing experience.
It is as though I am telling you to do something ‘you’, as ego, cannot do.
Your mind cannot do it, but it is required of you to, acknowledge and be That which you are.
You have to be open to expose what is not in service to your true nature. It is the highest aspect of my work, guidance or teaching and it is more like an energetic correspondence, not only a verbal one.

Let the untrue be exposed and thoroughly burned. Sometimes the way into that completeness, that recognition, is that whatever is untrue is rejected as it is recognised as false, either by you or by me.
And you may be thinking, ‘Oh my god, I really thought I was getting somewhere! This is so discouraging’… and so your world feels like it is turned upside down. Do not be disheartened, instead keep an attitude of gratitude.
It is your good fortune that your ‘world’ is being crushed. I myself don’t have a world. Let yours be upside down so that what is true in you can reveal itself and begin unfolding in its authentic expression as true life and being.
Grace is helping you in every way. Trust it. Say, “Yes, I am here, remove this sense of separation, this arrogance of separateness and merge me in you, oh God, oh Universe Being, Self, Truth, Life. Don’t give me any technique.
Absorb me. Replace me with You.”
And finally: Trust your master.

*****

Peace and Love

Seth Kelly Curtis

Rosicrucian Reflections #165

“The time has come when merely reading about the mystical life has lost its value. We must become involved and dedicate our lives to some useful purpose or the opportunities of a cycle will pass us by. Whatever our goal in life, whatever our desires for achievement might be, the mystical life can make these possible. Living in harmony with the Cosmic reveals talents and abilities we little realized we possessed. We find that our minds and consciousness are uplifted and charged with a power and desire to succeed in all we do, and our hearts and total beings will be filled with a spiritual love for all humanity. Our thinking will be broader and our sympathies and feeling of compassion will grow stronger. Life will bring greater joys and happiness and we will sense a divine purpose for our mission in life which will bring the greatest gift of all.” Rosicrucian Manuscript

*****

May God bless and protect you

Seth Kelly Curtis