Open-Secrets

Month: March 2008

  • Universal Love

    Universal_loveWhat is universal love? Is it the same as unconditional love or is unconditional love a subcategory of universal love?

    It is my, and many others, observation that love is something experienced by most of humanity and yet it remains mostly misunderstood. It’s interesting. Everyone knows what it is, but few really know it or understand it in a deep way.

    I think this is because most understand love in emotional terms only. And for the most part emotional love is entangled in unconscious material from out past.

    Universal love is conscious and loving at the same time. It is also known as universal consciousness or cosmic consciousness. Universal love is a unification of all aspects of Essence. When you experience universal love you understand the action of love. – A.H. Almaas

    This is a pretty wild idea, especially if you understand what Almaas means when he refers to conscious and Essence. Don’t misunderstand his meaning of conscious with getting up in the morning and having your eyes open.

    Equating universal love with universal consciousness and cosmic consciousness means this is much more than just expanding the space love inhabits. Universal love then not only exists everywhere and at every time, but is also the very consciousness that underlies all existence.

    Which means it is more fundamental and preexists emotional love which has evolutionary history. What is love then, if it is not emotional, in it’s more fundamental nature?

    The question then is not what is universal love, but what is love? And most assume they know – just ask any teenager! And they do, but they don’t.

     

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  • Ego Death

    Ego death

    What does the term *EgoDeath* exactly mean, in brief?

    Ego death, as I think it should be defined, is a set of insights about, and a powerful experience of, the impotence and logical invalidity of the accustomed apparent control-agent who seems to reside in the mind. Ego death is associated closely with the loss of control, or the loss of the sense of being a legitimate controller.

    Ego is not entirely false. To say that “ego dies” really means, more precisely, that the cognitive structure labelled ‘ego’, and the egoic mental model of the world, are systematically re-conceived, just like the components of Newtonian physics were systematically re-conceived to form the new system of Einsteinian physics. Ego death means that the mind no longer centrally identifies with the ego. The locus of control or origin of control is no longer seriously taken to be the ego. The transcendent mind knows that there is a source of control underlying the ego, and that ego’s power of control is an epiphenomenon. – Michael Hoffman

    Looking closely into one’s attitude and orientation around ego death reveals that it is usually the ego itself, that has reified this notion and is – seeking it’s own demise? This seeking is just another means the ego has of maintaining it’s structure.

    “You cannot make the egoless state into a future goal and then work toward it. All you get is more dissatisfaction, more inner conflict, because it will always seem that you have not arrived yet, have not “attained” that state yet. When freedom from ego is your goal for the future, you give yourself more time, and more time means more ego.

    “Look carefully to find out if your spiritual search is a disguised form of ego. – Eckhart Tolle

    Instead of seeking ego death or enlightenemnt, which is mostly goal oriented in time and space – and thus a creation of the ego (and therefore antithetical to ego death), endeavor to understand yourself more deeply. Accept the ego and inquire deeply into it. True understanding will reveal the truth and dissolve the false naturally without the need for us to reject anything.

    Enlightenment equals ego death. For millennia this equation has held true. While the term “ego,” meaning “I” in Latin, is obviously a relatively recent addition to the English lexicon, just about every major enlightenment teaching in the world has long held that the highest goal of spiritual and indeed human life lies in the renunciation, rejection and, ultimately, the death of the need to hold on to a separate, self-centered existence. From Shankara’s rantings against the ego as a “strong and deadly serpent” to Muhammad’s declaration of a “holy war against the nafs [ego]” to the Zen masters’ fierce determination to use any means necessary to break the ego’s grip on their students, this “ego-negative” interpretation of the spiritual path has remained enshrined in enlightenment teachings for ages, for the most part unquestioned and unchallenged. What is Enlightenment

    Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

    Asking this a million times in a sincere, hearful way will reveal what ego death really is.

    Image by Bad Kitty

     

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