The grand illusion

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2020/03/03/shattering-the-grand-illusion-the-power-of-human-thought/


This is an excellent article ,click the link above. 

Growing In The Rocks

You are growing in the rocks! Sounds like a strange statement . Before, you think...Brian has completely lost his mind this time, allow that thought to sink in and let me expand on that idea a bit.

Over the years I have been amazed at how trees grow out of the rock faces on the cliffs. I became aware of this again recently on a trip to Newfoundland. On one of my beach combing walks the thought came to me ...

....you are growing in the rocks, just like these trees...


How can life live on such bare and raw elements with very little fine particle soil visible? Somehow, their roots squeeze down through fine cracks and find enough moisture and substance to survive and appear healthy.

We know that life grows and thrives in the elements found on earth, but, the life energy itself, and its source, this is the greatest mystery pondered by the sages for thousands of years.  What is it ?  Over 4000 years ago in one of the Vedic Upanishads, this life mystery was referred to as simply 'That" and also found in this ancient text was the the famous statement 'you are that '. You are 'that', that mystery we call life.

Elements are the basic physical substances that cannot be chemically interconverted or broken down into simpler substances and are the primary physical constituents of matter.  The human body is made up of less then 20 of the 92 elements found on earth, and  99%  of the biological body is made from just 5 elements, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. 

So, what is this life presence that lives intermingled and  immanent among these elements in nature? Life does not seem to come from the elements, although elements are made of atoms which are now known to be made from pure energy rather then solid particles. Life  lives immersed, seemingly within the basic elemental particles and molecules. It is not made of matter, molecules or material of any kind, it is not a thing. Spirit is perhaps a more accurate description of 'life'. But, in reality, words cannot express what life actually is. Life is conscious, it is aware. It is a type of universal intelligence, a cosmic mind, a presence, it can be called the web of consciousness, and it seems to be one giant network of cooperating forces controlled by intelligence and love. Love in this universal sense can be seen as an harmonious energetic balance created when seemingly opposite forces (yin and yang) cooperate for the evolvement of the whole, one life. Consciousness is continually evolving, its very nature is a creative energy force, while maintaining oneness it chose to manifest itself into multiplicity with infinite diversity through creation. Its natural cycle is a return to oneness and nothingness out of the diversity of its creative forms. This creative life spirit is at its very essence, the primordial foundation, the all encompassing ground of diversity (GOD). This life energy which is no-thing is in a continuous play and intermingling with form. It manifests into form for a time and returns to non form or no-thingness. This cycle of being, in form and out of form is what we call life and death. In this sense death can be thought of as the unmanifested life which is not residing within form. It is spirit not attached to or within a physical body.  When life leaves the form of the human body, insect  or plant, it returns to non form. The life leaves the material body, which it had immersed itself into for awhile, and what remains becomes a decomposing biomass over a skeleton of heavy dense elements . What is composed as form will decompose back into the base elements once again, in time. Just as the life spirit cycles from form to non form, so also complex molecules composed of elements decompose back to the raw elements and in time will be used by the life force to compose new forms of living biological beings. 


When we observe a  dead body or dead tree, we know the life has gone out of it.

(below is a painting I did in 2004 )


086-2004 -For everything there is a season  16" x 20" acrylic on canvas
 
Life disengaged from being an apple tree, what remains is the raw bare form of a tree,  decomposing back to the base elements. The life has gone out of it. We are life, manifesting as a human being,  just as it does in the trees and the grasses of the field, here for a short season and then gone. There is a season for everything. - Eccl :3




 



You at the pure essence level can be thought of as life itself , appearing in form. A human being or any being, is a type of hybrid of Life/Spirit and form made of elements. This life/material hybrid is what you are. You are immersed in matter and appear as a living being. But, in some sense you have forgotten who you are. 

This living consciousness wants to experience humanness just as lovingly as the humanness seeks to experience the mystery of consciousness. This consciousness (Life) wants to experience itself (life),  it is 'awareness ' itself and it is also aware of what is, in the present, now. Remember life can only be now. It does not seem to be concerned about past, but there is the idea of the akashic records , and  it does not seem to get fixated on the concept of future as the human little mind does. 

When the human is centered and in flow with the inner consciousness, now,  it experiences the fullness or wholeness of life. But, unfortunately the human condition has been plagued with a major dysfunction where the thinking organ, the intellect has taken over as master. This lower mind  thinks that its streaming thoughts and biological body are who it actually is . We have become lost in thought, with a focused attention on doing, getting and building up our outer appearances,  rather then simply just being, and allowing  the enbodiment of the real self to shine through the shallow layer of facade and outer appearances.  The outer self is a manufactured identity, a false sense of self, a personal story of who it thinks it is, with a history, which is unaware of the inner self life. It is often called the ego or personality, but in reality it is more like an actor wearing a persona mask who thinks the character it plays is the true self.  This fictional separate self has set itself up as the dominant sense of self in a house built on sinking sand , and when the house crumbles with age, along with the facade of outer appearances, it too, dissolves with it.  The thinking mind has set it self up as a master rather than its ideal role as servant. When the outer, small mind (ego) eventually learns to submit to and becomes more aware of  the master, the greater universal mind, a whole new identity is revealed to the entire being. This is often referred to as your true self or inner being and it is really who you are.

To become aware of who you really are, is actually mind blowing because the thinking ego-mind cannot comprehend it. The true self could be called the heart-mind and it is more intuitive and love based. In order to become aware of this inner self  or heart-mind there will need to be an inner work or realization, some like to use the word grace for this opening process into awareness. This opening into spirit awareness will evolve into a deeper sense of intuitive knowing your true identity.
 
To allow the greater consciousness to be aware of and experience  humanness and for the human to become aware of the greater consciousness  is perhaps the whole purpose of the human life. 

So, you are life and you are living now, immersed with, and temporarily attached to the physical elements of earth ....You are, in a metaphorical sense... living and growing in the rocks!


Allow consciousness to experience humanness. Allow humanness to experience consciousness.

Art Nature and Awe

I stood in front of the original  Salvador Dalí Santiago El Grande, one day and I was spellbound with awe. It seemed to have a majesty and a life presence beaming from it.  It gave me goosebumbs like I have rarely felt when looking at a work of art. Its a 13.5 ft x 10 ft oil on canvas painted by the artist in 1957.

I had the same thing happen again today as I stood admiring a huge 200 year oak tree in a park near my home. I have admired this tree many times before on my daily walks, but with the leaves just bursting forth with new life on this mid May, spring day, I stood for awhile spellbound with its majesty and beauty and it gave me goosebumbs just like the Dali painting did. I could sense its life presence so powerful. It seemed so rooted in being. There seemed to be an energy of life emanating from it. Perhaps I was attuned at that moment, in my psyche, to realize it. It is spring and I love life at this time of year. There is the power of life bursting forth everywhere in my area of Canada right now. Spring has sprung.


This photo here, taken 24 hours later cannot  capture what I experienced the day before, its impossible for a photo image to capture the living thing in its majesty.

The tree below  is a stock photo of an oak..

Nature is art in its purist form. It is awesome and inspiring.  The word inspire means to excite, encourage, or breathe life into. I felt something very powerful today, looking at this huge tree for that brief moment in time, and feeling the spirit coming from it. I felt infilled with spirit or in-spirited. In spirit is very close to the word inspired. Again,  I have to say, I guess the conditions were right and my awareness was in sync with nature. I felt in spirit with the world of nature around me.  Everything at its essence is spirit. We share the spirit of the cosmos. Everything at its core is one essence....one Spirit. We don't have a spirit, we are spirit manifesting in multiplicity,  everywhere throughout the seen and unseen universe. The essence of life in the oak tree is the same essence of life in all life forms including us. All life is the unseen Spirit manifested as form. When we see all of life as one spirit, we will also sense the oneness of all that is .

Cosmic Intelligence

https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/relationship-with-the-silence/

Relationship with the Silence

• by Paul Mulliner
• in Dialogues, Space
• 0 Comments

by Paul Mulliner



The conventional explanation for the existence of consciousness is that it’s generated somehow by the brain. It’s possible, though, that the brain acts as a window into a field of consciousness which is present everywhere in the universe. Indeed, if we gently hold a focus of attention in the inner core of ourselves, we can quite easily reach an intuitive realization that the conscious awareness we have inside us exists also in the space around us.

It seems that the ‘I am’ awareness, which exists, apparently separately, inside each one of us, is an intrinsic property of all space everywhere and is simultaneously present inside all of us. Cosmic consciousness seems to be a core attribute of all space everywhere and the primary stuff of the universe, and this consciousness isn’t something limited to our human brain or to planet Earth. Our brain is immersed in this spatial consciousness, allowing each one of us a unique window into the cosmic field-awareness.

We can’t think our way to this realization though, because it’s not a concept. Instead, we need to pay attention to the presence of the conscious space inside ourselves. This is easy to do, and requires that we focus our attention inwardly for a few minutes occasionally rather than just exclusively focussing on the world around us.

If we find time every day to let our thinking subside and take a focus of attention inward, we can begin to intuitively realize a connection into the living cosmic intelligence which is generating the universe out of itself.

A spatial cosmic intelligence seems to be the core stuff of the universe and everything visible is a continuously generated expression of it, a real time vibrational altering of itself that allows it to become visible and touchable as trees, flowers and human beings. Cosmic intelligence seems to be making itself visible to itself.

The cosmic intelligence field-organism, which fills all space everywhere, is expressing itself as a visible world by facilitating the continuous dynamic emergence of clusters of quantum-scale resonance vibrations, which we interpret with our senses as the branch of a tree or the shape of a flower. Tuning in to this field helps us to know ourselves as cosmic intelligence expressing itself as a living being, and this can help us both live better and re-consider our notions about dying. Rather than the onset of an abrupt nothingness, we might consider that dying in a meaningful, living universe is a dissolving into an immense intelligence that we suddenly recognize and know – an intelligence that seems very familiar and has always known each one of us, during every moment of our life, as an expression of itself, a cosmic intelligence that helps us know ourselves as expressions of itself who took on a human form for the lifetime of a human being.

Keeping in touch with the living cosmic field-intelligence organism which is our source, by taking a focus of attention inward, is an inner work which helps us be happy, a crucial part of our everyday life in the world.

The living presence of cosmic intelligence always exists within us, waiting for us to reach into it with our attention. As we inwardly focus our attention, the deep silence of this intelligence field tugs us into itself, dissolving our separation from it, helping us into itself. As we reach into the silence with our attention, we become the silence.

During our life, as we tune in to this intelligence, we can begin to feel more at home in the universe and on this planet. Our connection with cosmic intelligence re-awakens an intuitive realization that we are cosmic beings, the continuously generated vibrational expressions of a field of cosmic intelligence. Human beings are allowing cosmic intelligence to consciously realize and know itself within the context of a sentient living being.

Even though the events of our daily life on planet Earth can seem challenging, regular contact with the cosmic intelligence which is generating all of us in real time out of itself can help us find the resilience and intuitive inspiration to find solutions to the issues we have to deal with.
One conscious, no-boundary spatial cosmic intelligence, which exists prior to thought, is present in all space and is where all seeing and knowing occurs. As we take a focus of attention inward, we become conscious of this cosmic intelligence or, we could say, it becomes conscious of itself within us.

Within each one of us is the whole conscious space in all of us

Learning “Presence”: The Greatest Gift

 

 

Below is an article written by Richard Enos, it is posted on the collective evolution web site.....very interesting

 

 

Learning “Presence”: The Greatest Gift You Could Ever Give Yourself

Published
3 days ago on
August 30, 2018

By
Richard Enos

In my life coaching practice, whenever I am able to help a client to understand presence, the entire conversation takes on a new shape. Suddenly, there is an anchor point to which the conversation can moor itself. A context can be created whereby problems, grievances, obstacles, and negative emotions can be seen as being the product of a mind that has wandered into regrets from the past or fears about the future, far away from the present moment.

Often the coaching conversation itself serves to create presence for a client. A particular problem or concern from the client is heard, and with poignant questions from the coach, the client is able to examine the roots of the ‘problem’ and strip away the illusory ideas and false beliefs that are holding that problem in place. The client’s own realization that the ‘problem’ is not connected to the present moment, along with the emotional relief that comes as a result of that awareness, reinforces the notion that connecting to the present moment–which is actually the only moment we can ever truly connect to–is all that is needed.

Surrendering To The Moment

When working by ourselves, the Zen koan, ‘What, in this present moment, is lacking?’ can be helpful to ponder. Indeed, it is impossible to truly be in the present moment and actually object to something that is present–all things of that moment are accepted and taken as part of the perfection of that moment. To feel the harmony of all things that make up that moment is to be one with the moment. A sense of peace is an inevitable consequence.

The motto of spiritual teacher Ram Dass is one of my favorites: Be Here Now. A phrase so simple it belies its own profundity. Ram Dass emphasizes that presence is surrendering power and control over then moment, and detaching ourselves from any ‘preferred’ present state and simply aligning with the present state that is.

The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can’t have it. The minute you don’t want power, you’ll have more than you ever dreamed possible.

If we are able to follow the imperative to be here now every hour of every day, we would no longer experience guilt, suffering, regret, judgment, grievance, or any other negative emotion.

Rising And Falling

Alas, learning to be present is not usually a one-shot deal, although a few people, including some who have had near-death experiences, have had a sudden and significant shift into presence that imbues their daily experience.

For most of us, learning about presence is a gradual experience that comes and goes like waves rising and falling on the shore. To even be seeking presence in our lives, many of us need that first, seemingly random magical experience, often in natural surroundings, in which we intuit a tremendous connectedness and oneness with everything around us, and feel a great sense of peace, well-being, and compassion for all things.

When the feeling fades, sometimes after many hours of bliss, we seek a reunion with this experience for the rest of our lives. This becomes an incentive to forge ahead on our spiritual journey, where we search for how we can reunite with this experience, and hopefully more permanently.

Awareness Beyond Thinking

Eckhart Tolle, one of the pre-eminent speakers on the subject of presence, explains it this way:

Presence is the arising of a dimension of consciousness from where you can become aware that there is a voice in the head. That awareness is beyond thinking. It’s a space of consciousness where you can be the observer of your own mind—the awareness behind the thought processes.

For human beings to discover this dimension is extraordinarily important. It is in fact, as I see it, the next step in the evolution of humanity.

Tolle discusses practices where you simply sit silently and pay attention to the next thought that comes to you, and then the next. With focus, it becomes possible to notice that we are not really thinking most of our thoughts–often they are thinking us. The realization that we are more than our thoughts creates in us a more authentic identity, one that frees us from many of the addictive thought patterns we otherwise consider an unavoidable part of who we are:

When you no longer look to the mind to provide you with your sense of identity — because your sense of identity now comes now from a deeper place — that’s the shift that changes everything, dramatically. It is the most important thing that can happen in your lifetime.
As Presence arises you’ll find in many areas of your life enormous improvements. One is that the voice in the head that before created such anguish and unhappiness no longer has that power over you.

This is a bit of a different way to arrive at presence: recognize that we have an egoic ‘mind’ that can only reside in the past or the future, and see that who we actually are transcends the thought patterns of that egoic mind. Essentially, when we catch ourselves in states of distress and anxiety, we can remember that we are in this state because we give credence to the thoughts we are thinking as representative of who we are. Moving away from these thoughts and our habit of identifying with them opens the gates of presence.

Developing A Trigger Into Presence

Like most, I still get caught up often in distraction and judgment and feel the negative emotions that come with it. Sometimes I have enough awareness to ask myself the rhetorical question, “Did you forget that everything, in this moment, is perfect?” Because I deeply believe this to be true, this reminder often has the power to snap me quickly out of a state of negative emotion and more fully into presence and the acceptance of the moment.

We each have to develop our own triggers that help us to re-enter presence. But these triggers cannot be mere words, they must be deeply held beliefs which, through your own critical thought and experimentation, you hold to be true.

When we look at this critical thought and experimentation as the foundation of the journey of evolution that spans our lifetimes, we no longer have to be in any ‘rush’ to find presence. Indeed, when we stop rushing to find presence and experience inner peace, that’s when we find it.

Part of my own critical thought and experimentation has been enriched by regular and ongoing digestion of great writings and oral presentations on the matter, from traditions such as Zen Buddhism, and from spiritual teachers like Ram Dass, Eckhart Tolle, Dr. David Hawkins, Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, and a great list of others.

You will find that all great thinkers on the matter of presence are saying almost the same things using different words, and you will recognize the words not as truth themselves but as pointers to the truth. From there you gradually hone your own truth, which could be put into a phrase like I do, or could just be an inner knowing that, when remembered, allows you to move into presence at your leisure.

 Source:

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2018/08/30/learning-presence-the-greatest-gift-you-could-ever-give-yourself/