Open-Secrets

Author: John

  • The Unfolding Now

    Unfolding_now

    A new book by A.H. Almaas – The Unfolding Now – will be released 6/10/08. With all the interest generated in the NOW by Eckhart Tolle and Oprah, it will interesting to see if Almaas’ works become more widespread.

    I have a manuscript copy of The Unfolding Now and I think it is one of Almaas’ most useful books for people interested in presence, the now, and spiritual development.

    The Unfolding Now goes into great detail about the barriers and issues that keep us out of the now.

    I love The Unfolding Now! Almaas’ clarity never diminishes, yet each book brings an increasing simplicity and gentleness. As I worked with this latest material, I felt like I was receiving a transmission of pure compassion. His strong, true voice reminds us that beyond the endless self-improvement projects and idealized mystical states with which the spiritual path is strewn lies the simple but exquisite taste of our own being.

    Cynthia Bourgeault, author of Mystical Hope, The Wisdom Way of Knowing,
    Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening

    Almaas is a genius at revealing both the core qualities of Essence and the veils that obscure it, always in language that helps peel away those veils, always holding open the door to the unfolding presence and awareness that remains when the veils have dissolved. The Unfolding Now leads the reader through a masterful series of inquiry processes, invitations to sense and know ourselves at increasing levels of subtlety, gently walking us deeper and deeper into Truth.

    Sally Kempton (Durgananda) spiritual teacher and author of
    The Heart of Meditation: Pathways to a Deeper Experience

    “Without heart, we are not really human. And the possibility of having an authentic and deeply satisfying human life is only a pipe dream when our love is not directed to what truly fulfills the heart. To find true fulfillment, many of us at some point in life turn to the spiritual search. But what is it in spirituality that gives this fulfillment? Where does this deep satisfaction come from?

    First we need to find out why we become involved in the spiritual search in the first place. What are we looking for when we begin the journey? To experience new and remarkable states of consciousness? To travel to extraordinary realms beyond our everyday world? To be liberated from the difficulties and constraints of the world? Or are we looking to enrich and deepen the meaning of the lives we are living here on Earth? If our aim is to engage in our spiritual work so that it can impact and transform the way we live, we have to begin by seeing what we are actually doing in our lives. What are we up to? What do we really want?”

    The Unfolding Now

     

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  • Suchness – Suchness of Being

    What is suchness?

    Suchness – as it is. The flower as a flower.

    Almost everyone believes they see the flower as it is, but in fact there is very little perceived by the normal mind that is appearing in suchness. This is due to all the filters, projections and reification happening from the normal everyday mind.

    Suchness is seeing things free from all of this. Perceiving from this place of freedom – everything radiates light and being. Living presence pervades the perceiving consciousness.

    Suchness is simplicity itself – nothing added. It is very difficult to imagine the radical shift sihft in perception required to experience suchness.

    Who we take ourselves to be is far from suchness. Our normal experience of self is similar to a sticky piece of candy that has been rolled around a carpet for a couple of years – so covered with obscurring material we can’t even recognize it as candy. But this is not what we belive – of course I see you, know you – you’re…

    And that you that we see is lightyears from suchness.

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  • Ego Development

    Development of the Ego – sounds like a constuction site project and in many ways it is. There are foundations, structures, images (facades) and much more that seem similar to a housing project – and why not – when all is said and done a person lives within that structure – most are shut-ins, fearing to venture outside of their ego development (ego identity).

    Although many things are known about ego development, there is still much to learn.

    Ego development, as defined by Jane Loevinger, who developed a model to illustrate human personality development, consists of the changes in mental processes put in place by the self or ego (one’s self-image or sense of being) to make coherent meaning of what is happening as it experiences day-to-day life. Therefore, one could say that the ego is a meaning making machine, engaged in constantly organizing and reorganizing everything it sees, feels, hears, touches, senses, thinks and tastes. It does this to create and recreate a human viewpoint – your viewpoint. This is the individual perspective which each human can rely on to approach the enormous job of living life. Our egos work tirelessly on our behalf making our worldview out of the barrage of conflicting information that we are immersed in everyday. – Paul Marko

    A Google search on Ego Development shows almost 500K returns. Beyond the students of psychology and researchers who would be searching?

    Knowledge of ego development is invaluable for those on the spiritual journey. Ego development results in ego identity – what many spiritual seekers refer to when they say – false self.

    The true self that is sought is the self that exists free from identification with the ego and it’s structures. The “false self” does not need to be destroyed and we don’t need to engage in some holy war with it. Simple curiosity and understanding will allow the false to disolve and what’s true to remain.

    Understanding ego development helps this process along.

     

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  • How Easy is it to Be in the NOW?

    Source: WikipediaIn 1971 Ram Das entreated us to Be Here Now. It is currently in its 37th reprinting and has sold over one million copies.

    In 1999 Eckhart Tolle told us about the Power of Now. The Power of Now gained power from word-of-mouth, the New York Times’ Bestseller List and Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.

    The continuing popularity of these books reflect the continued interest in the spiritual journey. Oprah and Eckhart Tolle have one of the most dynamic presentations to ever hit the web. according to reports, over 500,000 people are trying to tune in to the ten-week series.

    In June of 2008, Shambhala willl publish A.H. Almaas’ 14th book – The Unfolding Now.

    The keys to self-knowledge and deep contentment are right here before us in this very moment—if we can simply learn to live with open awareness. In The Unfolding Now, A. H. Almaas presents a marvelously effective practice for developing the transformative quality of presence. Through a particular method of self-observation and contemplative exploration that he calls inquiry, we learn to live in the relaxed condition of simply “being ourselves,” without interference from feelings of inadequacy, drivenness toward goals, struggling to figure things out, and rejecting experiences we don’t want. Almaas explores the many obstacles that keep us from being present—including defensiveness, ignorance, desire, aggression, and self-hatred—and shows us how to welcome with curiosity and compassion whatever we are experiencing. – from the bookcover.

    Unfolding_nowWhat keeps us from living in the Now?

    This book is an exploration of the barriers and obstacles to Being Here Now that prevent us from experiencing the reality of the Power of Now. In short, it looks at the mind, the ego, and how the past keep us from being able to be in the now.

    How is our experience within time a hindrance to our experience of our essential nature?

    …our time orientation will disconnect us from our True Nature because it contradicts the now-ness, the timelessness, of our True Nature. It is paradoxical, of course, to think about things that way because we are always thinking in terms of time. The time axis is very important for the mind. The mind is always thinking of things in the past and of what it is going to do in the future. It rarely settles in the moment. If it did, it would become quiet.

    When you settle into the moment, you realize that there is not much happening—a few things here and there. The primary awareness is of the immediacy of the moment. This is because presence—being in the now—is characterized by beingness, simply being here now. In contrast, our familiar self is based on doing, going, making things happen. We do not trust that action can arise and proceed from inner stillness; we do not recognize that Being is the ground of everything. To be in the now connects you with that quiet beingness that underlies all changes, all activity—the simple hereness where what is most basic is not activity but presence.

    So when we are not settled, all the images, all the reifications, all the projections from the past arise and influence the present. We don’t see the present as the present; and we don’t experience the presence of the present.

    That same influence of the past also keeps orienting us toward the future. Something will come up from the past that we are not happy about, and in our desire for things to be better in the future, we disconnect ourselves from the moment. We miss the now. And when we miss the now, we don’t just waste time, we miss the now-ness of what we are, the realness, the here-ness—the very fact that we are.

    When people talk about being in the here and now, it is a more profound experience than simply being aware of the content of the experience of the moment. It begins with that awareness because the content of the moment is what is arising now. So, we are aware of the content of the moment—the physical attributes, the feelings, and the thoughts that are arising in the moment. But the more we are attuned to what is arising in the moment, the more time slows down as we become more present to the moment. And when we become more present to the moment, we begin to recognize the now-ness itself, which turns out to be the presence that is present to the moment.

    So, my presence is the now-ness of the moment; they are not separate. It is not that my presence is present in the now of the moment; the presence is the now of the moment. That is how we actually know what presence is. In the practice of being where we are, it becomes clear that to be ourselves, to be real, we need to be in the present moment. We need to attend to the moment, we need to embrace and be completely aware, immediately in touch, with the moment. This immediate in-touchness with the moment is the in-touchness with the now-ness of the moment, which is the same thing as the Being of our presence.

    In some sense, all the obstacles to being ourselves that we have observed and explored so far are basically in time; they are a function of the passage of time perceived in the linear sense. They come from the past and move into the future. If our center of consciousness is operating within a linear time framework—in the passage from the past to the future—it will be engaged in these obstacles. Our judgments and rejections and hopes and desires and expectations all happen in time. Even our inner practice becomes a practice in time. We are going from one point of time to another for a process that has a beginning and an end. There is a cause and a result: something we do now will result in a change in the future. That kind of time orientation will dislocate us, will take us outside the presence of what we are and into the ephemeral mental world of time, which is where most people live. – The Unfolding Now

    The Unfolding Now table of contents here.

    Links of Interest

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    Items of Interest

  • Google God for Guidance

    I’m still reading Your Soul’s Compass and came across a paragraph I just have to share –

    Seeking spiritual guidance is often misunderstood as consulting a cosmic Dear Abby or a universal Google for advice on relationships, health, and illness, pathways to financial freedom, or even great car deals. While there’s guidance out there fabout everything in life, the kind that we’re most concerned with here sheds light on the spiritual journey itself. Are we going in a direction that helps us become less selfish, more compassionate, and peaceful? Or have we gone off on a tangent that keeps us tethered to old habits and perceptions, which perpetuate fear, greed and ignorance?

    That first sentence is wonderful. Many people seem to approach God, True Nature, Allah, Jehovah, Brahma… with this kind of cause and effect orientation which is clearly an anthropomorphism of the divine consciousness.

    I don’t want to get into that debate, but what do you think – can you Google God in your head or heart?

    Google-god

    I guess if that doesn’t work then…

    Dear Abby,

     

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  • Fantasy vs. Imagination

    My friend Gordon, co-author of Your Soul’s Compass, was attending a workshop with Hameed Ali (A.H. Almaas) recently. According to Gordon, people were using the the words “fantasy” and “imagination” interchangeably.

    I commented that in fact these were opposite concepts. “Fantasy” is a mental construct–a substitute for reality. Imagination, on the other hand, is an intensification of reality. It is depth perception, the percieving of the divine arising from the absolute that is your lover and also you in this holy instant, seeing the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower as William Blake did, perceiving the fertile realm of concrete potentiality that lies beneath the surface reality in which we find ourselves embedded. Hameed agreed with me that in fact imagination is indeed a different faculty from the one used for fantasizing.

    Your Soul’s Compass deals with how we can intentionally engage spiritual imagination–what Ibn Arabi called “the creativity of the heart”–to open us to a more harmonious and intimate dance with ultimate reality as the realm of our own and the world’s unfolding possibility.

    How do you see fantasy vs. imagination?

     

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