Thank you, this means a lot for me, because I feel that is the only important stuff I really write about. Everything else is just moving deckchairs around....
However, it is disheartening that only a small fraction of my readership understands the importance of this.
An ultimately meaningless rant on Malone gets 9300 views and over 330 likes, while this article has 400 views and five or six likes.
The rant gives me more than 200 new subscriptions, while this article loses me subscriptions.
It doesn't matter much to me, but this doesn't give me any hope that a significant number of people will "wake up" to themselves any time soon, or probably ever, by getting in touch with themselves and dwelling on their internal suffering.
It seems they need to suffer much more in the world, and the suffering has to boil them down much more before they look away from the world and look for the divine solution within themselves.
How easy it is to point fingers at others and make them responsible for the greed and power games we all suffer under and not look at ourselves. We are all the same and contribute to it.
Well done sir, well done. I am honored to have my comment included in this article. When the plandemic hit and I was locked in my house for days, weeks, months, and years the solitude accelerated my spiritual journey and I doubt I would be where I am today without it, think the “elites” didn’t anticipate the awakening that enforced solitude brings about.
Very well written. The wirk of Alan Watts will continue to help man realize what you are pointing at. No effort is required... you cannot force this, and desire to "find" yourself is only distracrion. Simply be silent for long enough, "you are it"
Probably the best (for verbal brilliance) description of “what’s up” I have come across is in the books by Bubba Free John in the 1970s. Full of the Genius of Enlightenment and Divine Humor—from what I can see (and feel.) I would recommend them as a place to start from to anyone who is moved to be a “seeker.”
Man, you just made my day. I only read the Wikipedia entry on Bubba Free John and it gave me total goosebumps. I can't believe I never heard of him before. But what do they say: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. That's how it feels. Every word I have read about his teachings is yes, yes, yes. It also reassures me greatly that every word he teaches matches Nisargadatta Maharaj, one of the few Gurus I trust 100%, a guru who walked the path to the very end. But Adi Da uses a different language which thickens the same plot dramatically for me. Take his definition of Ego, for example, a true piece of spiritual art, the highest wisdom there is:
"The ego—the "I" with whom each individual identifies—is not an entity, or even an idea or a concept; it is a "chronic and total psycho-physical Activity of self-contraction", locatable in feeling as a subtle but constant anxiety or stress, and recognizable in all manifestations of reactive emotion.[85] It is a mistaken identification with the limitations of the body-mind mechanism, necessarily implying differentiation of 'self' from 'other' beings or 'selves'.
Self-contraction is an unnecessary and unnatural limit placed on Energy, or the Inherent Radiance of Transcendental Being, which is always already perfectly free. The act creates a consciousness apparently cut off from its primordial unity, producing the self-obsession and incessant seeking symbolised in the myth of Narcissus.[86]
An individual biography is generated from the movement of "desire" – the constant effort to "create a connection, a flow of force, between the contracted identity and everything from which it has differentiated itself."[87] Efforts to reunite with the divine from the position of the separate self are necessarily futile because this self itself is a fundamental illusion. The already present divine, according to Adi Da, can only be realized through releasing the contraction and transcending the illusion of separate self altogether. Such transcendence, he maintained, is made possible through satsang – the devotional relationship to the Spiritual Master or Satguru who transmits and communicates the Truth.[
To the dot, exactly what Nisargadatta says, but more accessible because more modern Western language is used. The key points being:
1. All spiritual seeking and pursuit is an ego-activity and will never set us free in a positive way, but it can help in negative way, by discarding whatever we experience (including any so-called spiritual experiences) as not this, not this (Neti Neti) and will ultimately frustrate the ego so much that it stops all seeking and surrenders to the now without doing anything at all. Only then the divine can be realized but, of course, not as result of ego activity. It will be pure grace.
2. The true nature and meaning of all desire as a flow of force to reunite with the divine. As with the ego, this has to be also frustrated. Coming to the end of all desires, surrendering in the empty moment is the place we full realization can happen.
3. The unrealness of the ego as contacted misidentification with the body-mind.
I have no idea why I am convinced that this is the highest teaching there is. Thank you so much.
For a subject that is very difficult to eludicate you have done a fine job. I was just house sitting in a coastal area where many of the houses were of the McMansion variety (not my house sit however). I don't think many of these people will ever step a single foot towards a spiritual life. Perhaps in the disenchanted twilight of their lives but the world signals to them their success and they beam it back with self congratulation. It usually takes a crisis to crack open the egg of self discovery. The best thing that could happen would be if the world woke up tomorrow to a uniform bank balance of $1.02.
"Therefore, Jesus would never suggest anything as stupid as that he is the only way to God. What he refers to is not himself as a person (I am) but the “I Am.” The ancient name of God is “I Am” as reported in the Old Testament and delivered by Moses after his burning bush experience. Indeed, the “I Am” is the only way to God, as explained above. But it has nothing to do with the man Jesus. He had the same realization as all the other mystics, but his words were either not fully understood, misrepresented, or poorly translated. Possibly all three."
John 14:6 - "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me"
As for the rest it's wrong. We have the Rylands Library Papyrus from around 125AD, it's Greek and therefore the translation is not in question. God's name wasn't "I am" it was Yahweh. You also don't know or don't understand the view of the Trinity in the Orthodox church https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodoxy#Theology
As with most Christians I talk to, we go in cycles. You can quote from the Bible all day long and belief that this is the original translation and spiritual meaning of a quote. It is a fact that the Bible you use now has been cobbled together and sanctioned by powerful people hundreds of years after Jesus taught and my position is that there are a lot of translation errors and lost meaning in bad translations plus deliberate weaponizing of his words. For example, the first sentence in John’s gospel. Something like, from memory, “At the beginning was the word, and the word was with God……”
Please, my good Christian man, tell me what this means? It doesn’t make much sense at all and every Christian I asked (except one) stuttered and stumbled around with it withou making any sense.
Have a go. And after, I tell you what I think it means based on solid evidence.
So we can go on forever discussing the meaning of phrases in the Bible that really don’t make much sense at all, or are at odds with the core teachings of Jesus, or are highly contradicting other Bible quotes. I am not the first and will neither be the last that see the obvious. The Bible, as we know it today, reeks of human interference, translations errors and interpreations by people that don’t know God from personal experiences imo..
But the even deeper question is: Why is it so important to you Christians (against any logic at all as many people found God long before Jesus walked this earth, e.g Buddha, Latose etc.) that Jesus is the only way to God? Why do you care? Why do you need to be divisive? Why can’t you just be happy with your Jesus way and restrain from arrogance and elitist thinking and judging other ways as “inferior”? That is exactly what reeks of human power games.
And for the record, here is Moses quote from the old testament:
“The phrase translated “I am who I am” in Hebrew is ehyeh asher ehyeh. The word ehyeh is the first person common singular of the verb to be. It would be used in any number of normal situations: “I am watching the sheep,” “I am walking on the road,” or “I am his father.” However, when used as a stand-alone description, I AM is the ultimate statement of self-sufficiency, self-existence, and immediate presence. God’s existence is not contingent upon anyone else.”
This perfectly matches what countless other mystics have told us.
“I AM is the ultimate statement of self-sufficiency, self-existence, and immediate presence” - in other words, “pure beingness in the here and now” which can be reached by many means, deep prayer and meditations being the most popular ones.
The real meaning of the “I AM” Jesus used means exactly that and has nothing to do with his person and ties in his other statement: “The Kingdom of Heaven is Within YOU.” No Jesus is needed. He simple teaches us how to do it. Because he knows that “God’s existence is not contingent upon anyone else.”
People have weaponized this statement to divide believers into thinking there are different prophets and different Gods and different ways and founded their churches on it.
So you're not going to address the sections of the Bible, which you clearly have not read?
Why would I bother to explain John's gospel to you when there will be well North of a 1000 pages on the internet doing so : Sermons, Videos, talks etc. You don't want to know, you just want to ask questions and waste my time.
Here's a last section of the Bible you should read, look it up.
Fuck off, will you? You are wasting my time. Whatever I put to you, from your own Bible, you simply ignore. No point to continue. Just be happy with what ever you believe in. Why did you engage with me in the first place? You don’t like my views on things? That’s fine. Don’t like it. I really don’t care.
From the sidelines, Imma just say that up until this point y’all were having a really fascinating and beneficial discussion. I’m a bit saddened that it can’t continue in the scholarly and gentlemanly way it began. As a Buddhist and an apostate Roman Catholic, I have to say I was transfixed by the dialogue.
I agree, but past experience with Christian trolls frustrated me too much. I spend all this time writing and he just come back with "you are not addressing the sections of the Bible that you haven't read." How can I address something I haven't read? It's a stupid man, and I wasted my time, hence my rude cut-off. It's a waste of time.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏🎩🎩🎩🎩🎩🎩🎩🎩🎩🎩🎩🎩🎩👍💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯🙏Your best piece yet! I think more and more people are beginning to understand:)
#follownone #mistakeswereNOTmade #localise
Thank you, this means a lot for me, because I feel that is the only important stuff I really write about. Everything else is just moving deckchairs around....
However, it is disheartening that only a small fraction of my readership understands the importance of this.
An ultimately meaningless rant on Malone gets 9300 views and over 330 likes, while this article has 400 views and five or six likes.
The rant gives me more than 200 new subscriptions, while this article loses me subscriptions.
It doesn't matter much to me, but this doesn't give me any hope that a significant number of people will "wake up" to themselves any time soon, or probably ever, by getting in touch with themselves and dwelling on their internal suffering.
It seems they need to suffer much more in the world, and the suffering has to boil them down much more before they look away from the world and look for the divine solution within themselves.
How easy it is to point fingers at others and make them responsible for the greed and power games we all suffer under and not look at ourselves. We are all the same and contribute to it.
Well done sir, well done. I am honored to have my comment included in this article. When the plandemic hit and I was locked in my house for days, weeks, months, and years the solitude accelerated my spiritual journey and I doubt I would be where I am today without it, think the “elites” didn’t anticipate the awakening that enforced solitude brings about.
This is a profoundly compelling essay and you lay out the spiritual path so well. It all begins with our own inner work. Bravo!
Very well written. The wirk of Alan Watts will continue to help man realize what you are pointing at. No effort is required... you cannot force this, and desire to "find" yourself is only distracrion. Simply be silent for long enough, "you are it"
Probably the best (for verbal brilliance) description of “what’s up” I have come across is in the books by Bubba Free John in the 1970s. Full of the Genius of Enlightenment and Divine Humor—from what I can see (and feel.) I would recommend them as a place to start from to anyone who is moved to be a “seeker.”
Man, you just made my day. I only read the Wikipedia entry on Bubba Free John and it gave me total goosebumps. I can't believe I never heard of him before. But what do they say: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. That's how it feels. Every word I have read about his teachings is yes, yes, yes. It also reassures me greatly that every word he teaches matches Nisargadatta Maharaj, one of the few Gurus I trust 100%, a guru who walked the path to the very end. But Adi Da uses a different language which thickens the same plot dramatically for me. Take his definition of Ego, for example, a true piece of spiritual art, the highest wisdom there is:
"The ego—the "I" with whom each individual identifies—is not an entity, or even an idea or a concept; it is a "chronic and total psycho-physical Activity of self-contraction", locatable in feeling as a subtle but constant anxiety or stress, and recognizable in all manifestations of reactive emotion.[85] It is a mistaken identification with the limitations of the body-mind mechanism, necessarily implying differentiation of 'self' from 'other' beings or 'selves'.
Self-contraction is an unnecessary and unnatural limit placed on Energy, or the Inherent Radiance of Transcendental Being, which is always already perfectly free. The act creates a consciousness apparently cut off from its primordial unity, producing the self-obsession and incessant seeking symbolised in the myth of Narcissus.[86]
An individual biography is generated from the movement of "desire" – the constant effort to "create a connection, a flow of force, between the contracted identity and everything from which it has differentiated itself."[87] Efforts to reunite with the divine from the position of the separate self are necessarily futile because this self itself is a fundamental illusion. The already present divine, according to Adi Da, can only be realized through releasing the contraction and transcending the illusion of separate self altogether. Such transcendence, he maintained, is made possible through satsang – the devotional relationship to the Spiritual Master or Satguru who transmits and communicates the Truth.[
To the dot, exactly what Nisargadatta says, but more accessible because more modern Western language is used. The key points being:
1. All spiritual seeking and pursuit is an ego-activity and will never set us free in a positive way, but it can help in negative way, by discarding whatever we experience (including any so-called spiritual experiences) as not this, not this (Neti Neti) and will ultimately frustrate the ego so much that it stops all seeking and surrenders to the now without doing anything at all. Only then the divine can be realized but, of course, not as result of ego activity. It will be pure grace.
2. The true nature and meaning of all desire as a flow of force to reunite with the divine. As with the ego, this has to be also frustrated. Coming to the end of all desires, surrendering in the empty moment is the place we full realization can happen.
3. The unrealness of the ego as contacted misidentification with the body-mind.
I have no idea why I am convinced that this is the highest teaching there is. Thank you so much.
Thank you, never heard of him. What specifically attracts me here is “Divine Humor”. I will look him up.
Nothing real can be threatened
Nothing unreal exists
Herein lies the peace of God.
-A Couse in Miracles.
We all need spiritual counsel. Thank you for yours
For a subject that is very difficult to eludicate you have done a fine job. I was just house sitting in a coastal area where many of the houses were of the McMansion variety (not my house sit however). I don't think many of these people will ever step a single foot towards a spiritual life. Perhaps in the disenchanted twilight of their lives but the world signals to them their success and they beam it back with self congratulation. It usually takes a crisis to crack open the egg of self discovery. The best thing that could happen would be if the world woke up tomorrow to a uniform bank balance of $1.02.
"Therefore, Jesus would never suggest anything as stupid as that he is the only way to God. What he refers to is not himself as a person (I am) but the “I Am.” The ancient name of God is “I Am” as reported in the Old Testament and delivered by Moses after his burning bush experience. Indeed, the “I Am” is the only way to God, as explained above. But it has nothing to do with the man Jesus. He had the same realization as all the other mystics, but his words were either not fully understood, misrepresented, or poorly translated. Possibly all three."
John 14:6 - "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me"
As for the rest it's wrong. We have the Rylands Library Papyrus from around 125AD, it's Greek and therefore the translation is not in question. God's name wasn't "I am" it was Yahweh. You also don't know or don't understand the view of the Trinity in the Orthodox church https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodoxy#Theology
Thank you for your comment.
As with most Christians I talk to, we go in cycles. You can quote from the Bible all day long and belief that this is the original translation and spiritual meaning of a quote. It is a fact that the Bible you use now has been cobbled together and sanctioned by powerful people hundreds of years after Jesus taught and my position is that there are a lot of translation errors and lost meaning in bad translations plus deliberate weaponizing of his words. For example, the first sentence in John’s gospel. Something like, from memory, “At the beginning was the word, and the word was with God……”
Please, my good Christian man, tell me what this means? It doesn’t make much sense at all and every Christian I asked (except one) stuttered and stumbled around with it withou making any sense.
Have a go. And after, I tell you what I think it means based on solid evidence.
So we can go on forever discussing the meaning of phrases in the Bible that really don’t make much sense at all, or are at odds with the core teachings of Jesus, or are highly contradicting other Bible quotes. I am not the first and will neither be the last that see the obvious. The Bible, as we know it today, reeks of human interference, translations errors and interpreations by people that don’t know God from personal experiences imo..
But the even deeper question is: Why is it so important to you Christians (against any logic at all as many people found God long before Jesus walked this earth, e.g Buddha, Latose etc.) that Jesus is the only way to God? Why do you care? Why do you need to be divisive? Why can’t you just be happy with your Jesus way and restrain from arrogance and elitist thinking and judging other ways as “inferior”? That is exactly what reeks of human power games.
And for the record, here is Moses quote from the old testament:
In response, Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” (https://www.bibleref.com/Exodus/3/Exodus-3-13.html).God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you’” (https://www.bibleref.com/Exodus/3/Exodus-3-14.html).
In the text it further explains:
“The phrase translated “I am who I am” in Hebrew is ehyeh asher ehyeh. The word ehyeh is the first person common singular of the verb to be. It would be used in any number of normal situations: “I am watching the sheep,” “I am walking on the road,” or “I am his father.” However, when used as a stand-alone description, I AM is the ultimate statement of self-sufficiency, self-existence, and immediate presence. God’s existence is not contingent upon anyone else.”
This perfectly matches what countless other mystics have told us.
“I AM is the ultimate statement of self-sufficiency, self-existence, and immediate presence” - in other words, “pure beingness in the here and now” which can be reached by many means, deep prayer and meditations being the most popular ones.
The real meaning of the “I AM” Jesus used means exactly that and has nothing to do with his person and ties in his other statement: “The Kingdom of Heaven is Within YOU.” No Jesus is needed. He simple teaches us how to do it. Because he knows that “God’s existence is not contingent upon anyone else.”
People have weaponized this statement to divide believers into thinking there are different prophets and different Gods and different ways and founded their churches on it.
Have a nice Christimas.
So you're not going to address the sections of the Bible, which you clearly have not read?
Why would I bother to explain John's gospel to you when there will be well North of a 1000 pages on the internet doing so : Sermons, Videos, talks etc. You don't want to know, you just want to ask questions and waste my time.
Here's a last section of the Bible you should read, look it up.
Matthew 7:6
Fuck off, will you? You are wasting my time. Whatever I put to you, from your own Bible, you simply ignore. No point to continue. Just be happy with what ever you believe in. Why did you engage with me in the first place? You don’t like my views on things? That’s fine. Don’t like it. I really don’t care.
From the sidelines, Imma just say that up until this point y’all were having a really fascinating and beneficial discussion. I’m a bit saddened that it can’t continue in the scholarly and gentlemanly way it began. As a Buddhist and an apostate Roman Catholic, I have to say I was transfixed by the dialogue.
Be good to yourselves, friends.
I agree, but past experience with Christian trolls frustrated me too much. I spend all this time writing and he just come back with "you are not addressing the sections of the Bible that you haven't read." How can I address something I haven't read? It's a stupid man, and I wasted my time, hence my rude cut-off. It's a waste of time.
"No point to continue" = "I have lost the argument"
You should be happy then, Why do you continue?
You still haven't answered my questions.
Thank you for your efforts here. Much to consider. Apparently I'm a die hard materialist :)
Still think there some importance to this experience though can't say why or for what. I'll keep working on it. Looking forward to more of your posts.