No Boundary
No Boundary
by Ken Wilber
“as an individual draws up the boundaries of her soul, she established at the same time the battles of her soul.”
“at each level of the spectrum, the boundary line of a person’s self is drawn up in a different fashion. But a boundary line, as any military expert will tell you, is also a potential battle line…”
“heal the split between the total organism and the environment…”
“In Zen Buddhism one is told to forget, or transcend, or see through one’s ego; but in psychoanalysis, one is helped to strengthen, fortify, and entrench one’s ego…these different approaches are actually approaches to different levels of a person’s self…”
“to draw boundaries is to manufacture opposites…the reason we live in a world of opposites is precisely because life as we know it is a process of drawing boundaries.”
“the firmer one’s boundaries, the more entrenched are one’s battles. The more I hold onto pleasure, the more I necessarily fear pain..The more I seek success, the more I must dread failure. The harder I cling to life, the more terrifying death becomes. The more I value anything, the more obsessed I become with loss. Most of our problems are problems of boundaries and the opposites they create.”
“In philosophy we handle conceptual opposites by dismissing one of the poles or trying to reduce it to the other. The materialist tries to reduce mind to matter, while the idealist tries to reduce matter to mind. The monists try to reduce plurality to unity, the pluralists try to explain unity as plurality.” “We never seem to question the existence of the boundary itself. Because we believe the boundary to be real, we staunchly imagine that the opposites are irreconcilable, separate, forever set apart.”
“To destroy the negative is, at the same time, to destroy all possibility of enjoying the positive.”
“The inner unity of opposites is hardly an idea confined to mystics…modern-day physics…In relativity theory, for example, the old opposites of rest vs. motion have become totally indistinguishable, that is, ‘each is both.’ An object which appears at rest of one observer is, at the same time, in motion for a different observer. Likewise, the split between wave a particle vanishes into ‘wavicles,’ and the contrast of structure vs. function evaporates.”
“such opposites as subject vs. object and time vs. space are now seen as being so mutually interdependent that they form an interwoven continuum, a single unified pattern. What we call ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are, like buying and selling, just two different ways of approaching one single process. And because the same holds for time and space, we can no longer speak of an object being located in space or happening in time, but only of a spacetime occurrence. Modern physics, in short, proclaims that reality can only be considered a union of opposites.” “what we thought were totally separate and irreconcilable opposites turn out to be ‘complimentary aspects of one and the same reality.’”
“to say that ‘ultimate reality is unity of opposites’ is actually to say that in ultimate reality there are no boundaries. Anywhere.” “For boundary lines, of any type, are never found in the world itself, but only in the imagination of mapmakers.” “…those lines join and unite just as much as they divide and distinguish.” “A line becomes a boundary when we imagine that it just separates but doesn’t unite at the same time. It is fine to draw lines, provided we do not mistake them for boundaries.”
“in all the mystical traditions the world over, one who sees through the illusion of the opposites is called ‘liberated.’”
“The point is not to separate the opposites and make ‘positive progress,’ but rather to unify and harmonize the opposites, both positive and negative, by discovering a ground which transcends and encompasses them both…liberation is not freedom form the negative, but freedom from the pairs altogether.”
“…that peculiar discontent that thrives on the illusion that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.” “For when we see through the illusions of our boundaries, we will see, here and now, the universe as Adam saw it before the Fall: an organic unity, a harmony of opposites, a melody of positive and negative, delight with the play of our vibratory existence. When the opposites are realized to be one, discord melts into concord, battles become dances, and old enemies become lovers. We are then in a position to make friends with all of our universe, and not just one half of it.”
“The ultimate metaphysical secret…is that there are no boundaries in the universe.”
“a class of classes, a boundary on a boundary…a meta-boundary.” “the first boundary produces a class. The meta-boundary produces a class of classes, called number. The third or meta-meta-boundary produces a class of classes of classes, called the variable.” “the entire process of formulating scientific laws was based on three general types of boundaries, each building on its predecessor and each being more abstract and generalized.” “This meta-meta-boundary converts measurements to conclusions, numbers to principles. Each step each new boundary, brings you a more generalized knowledge, and hence more power.” “Man had gained control over nature, but only by radically separating himself from it.”
“Because the subatomic particles possessed no boundaries, there could be no meta-boundaries, no measurements; and hence also, no precise meta-meta-boundaries, no “laws.” To this day there is no law, no meta-meta-map, governing the movements of a single electron, because a single electron doesn’t have a boundary in the first place. You can’t have a meta-boundary or a meta-meta-boundary if there isn’t even a boundary to begin with. Nuclear physicists must not work with probabilities and statistics. This means that they must gather together for their measurements enough atomic elements that the physicists can pretend that the collected group looks like a distinct thing with a make-believe boundary. Then they can construct meta-boundaries and offer up an educated guess as to how the system, as a whole, might behave. But the crucial item is that the physicists now know that these boundaries are pretend and make believe, and that the basic constituents themselves remain no-boundary.” “This is not to say that the real world is a mere product of our imagination (subjective idealism), only that our boundaries are…these laws describe not reality but only our boundaries of reality.”
Fritjof Capra: “The two basic theories of modern physics thus exhibit all the main features of the Eastern world view. Quantum theory has abolished the motion of fundamentally separated objects, has introduced the concept of the participator to replace that of the observer, and has come to see the universe as an interconnected web of relations whose parts are only defined through their connections to the whole.” “both modern science and Eastern philosophy view reality not as boundaries and separate things but as non dual network of inseparable patterns.” “when Buddhists say reality is void, they mean it is void of boundaries. They do not mean that all entities simply up and vanish, leaving behind a pure vacuum of nothingness…”
“we cling to boundaries as if to life itself. But the essence of the insight that reality is no-boundary is very simple. Its simplicity is what makes it so difficult to see. Take, for example, your own visual field. As your eye scans the territory of nature, does it ever see a single thing, a solitary thing, a separate thing? Has it ever seen a tree? a wave? a bird? Or does it instead see a kaleidoscopic flux of all sorts of interwoven patterns and textures, of tree plus sky plus grass plus ground, and waves plus sand plus rocks plus sky and clouds…”
“To disclose reality as no-boundary is thus to disclose all conflicts as illusory. And this final understanding is called nirvana, moksha, release, liberation, enlightenment, satori—freed from the pairs, freed form the enchanting vision of separateness, freed from the chains of one’s illusory boundaries.”
“of all the boundaries we construct, the one between self and not-self is the most fundamental. It is the boundary we are most reluctant to surrender. It was, after all, the first boundary we ever drew. It is our most cherished boundary. We have invested years to fortify it and defend it, make it secure and safe. And as we grow old, full of years and memories, and begin to slip into the nothingness of death, this is the last boundary we relinquish. The boundary between self and not-self is the first one we draw and the last one we erase. Of all the boundaries we construct, this one is the primary boundary.”
“what exactly does it mean to look for the primary boundary? To look for the primary boundary is to look very carefully for the sensation of being a separate self, a separate experiencer and feeler which is set apart from experiences and feelings.” “We all have the feeling of ‘self’ on the one hand and the feeling of the external world on the other. But if we carefully look at the sensation of ‘self-in-here’ and the sensation of ‘world-out-there,’ we will find that these two sensations are actually one and the same feeling.”
“isn’t it odd that I should describe myself as the seer who sees the things seen? Or the hearer who hears the sounds heard? Is perception really that complicated? Does it really involve three separate entities—a seer, seeing, and the seen?”
“You cannot hear a hearer because there isn’t one. What you have been taught to call a ‘hearer’ is actually just the experience of hearing itself, and you don’t hear hearing. In reality, there is just a stream of sounds, and that stream is not split into a subject and an object. There is no boundary here.” “When you try to hear the subjective hearer, all you find are objective sounds. And that means that you do not hear sounds, you are those sounds. The hearer is every sound which is heard. It is not separate entity which stands back and hears hearing.” “It seems that whenever we look for a self apart from experience, it vanishes into experience. When we look for the experiencer, we find only another experience—the subject and object always turn out to be one.” “If you are your experiences, you are the world so experienced.” “The inner sensation called ‘you’ and the outer sensation called ‘the world’ are one and the same sensation.” “Only parts suffer, not the Whole.”
“The more I look for the absolute Seer, the more I realize that I can’t find it as an object…I can’t experience it because it is everything experienced. It is true that anything I can see is not the Seer-because everything I see is the Seer. As I go within to find my real self, I find only the world.”
“reality is a union of opposites, or “non dual.”
“Since it is symbolic maps and boundaries which appear to separate the opposites into conflicting enemies, to say reality is nondual is to say reality is no-boundary.”
“discovery of the real world of no-boundary is unity consciousness.” “unity consciousness is the real territory of no-boundary.” “For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.””eternity is not an awareness of everlasting time, but an awareness which is itself totally without time.” “The present moment is a timeless moment, and a timeless moment is an eternal one…”
Christian sage de Caussade, “O all ye who thirst! Know that you have not far to seek for the foundation of living waters; it springs close to you in the present moment…The present moment is the manifestation of the Name of God and the coming of the Kingdom.”
Muslim mystic Rumi, “the Sufi is a child of the Moment.”
“Eternity is not, and cannot, be found tomorrow—it is not found in five minutes—it is not found in two seconds. It is always already Now. The present is the only reality.”
“We dissipate our energies in fantasy mists of memories and expectations, and thus deprive the living present of its fundamental reality and reduce it to a ‘specious present,’ a slender present that endures a mere one or two seconds, a pale shadow of the eternal Present.” “all of our problems are problems of time and problems in time.”
“One cannot…use time to get out of time. By doing so we just reinforce that which we wish to uproot.” “if we look for time and can’t find it, then we will already have glimpsed the timeless.”
“You cannot hear past sounds, nor can you hear future sounds. The only thing you ever hear is the present. You do not and cannot hear a past or future.”
“an endlessly changing present, shorter than a millisecond yet never coming to an end. All direct awareness is timeless awareness.”
“memory is itself a present experience.”
“when it is seen that the past as memory is always a present experience, the boundary behind this moment collapses. It becomes obvious that nothing came before this present. And likewise, when it is seen that the future of expectation is always a present experience, the boundary ahead of this moment explodes.”
“The eternal now is a consciousness.” Aldo’s Huxley
“Indeed, claims Krishnamurti, the very feeling that you now exist as a separate entity is itself based entirely on memory. If you get a good grip on yourself, you are holding nothing but a memory.”
“time is an illusion pushing against an illusion.”
“we use the illusion of time to frighten off the illusion of death. The eternal and timeless now is an awareness that knows neither past nor future. The eternal now has no future, no boundary, no tomorrow—nothing ahead of it, nothing in front of it, nothing after it. But that is also the very condition of death, for death is the state of having no future, no tomorrow, no time to come…But with the rise of the primary boundary, man refuses death, and therefore refuses to live without a future. Man refuses to live without time. He demands time, creates time, lives in times.”
THE PERSONA LEVEL
“The movement of descent and discovery begins at the moment you consciously become dissatisfied with life.” “A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities. For suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality, and forces us to become alive in a special sense—to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves and our worlds in ways we have heretofore avoided…suffering is the first grace…suffering is almost a time of rejoicing, for it marks the birth of creative insight.” “We cannot ensure our suffering with fruitful results unless we know what it means, why it is occurring.”
“Thus, therapists…will suggest that the person who feels constantly pressured simply has more drive and energy than he knows. If he didn’t have that drive, then he wouldn’t care less. The wise individual, then, whenever he feels some sort of pressure—from the boss, from the spouse, from school, friends, associates, or children—learns to see those feelings of pressure as a signal that he has some energy and drive that he is presently unaware of. He learns to translate ‘I feel pressured’ into ‘I have more drive than I know.’ Once he realizes that all feelings of pressure are his own unheeded drive, he can then decide afresh whether to act on his drive, or to postpone acting on his drive. But either way, he finally knows that it is his drive. The basic mechanism of projection itself is thus fairly simple. An impulse (such as drive, anger, or desire) which arises in you and is naturally aimed at the environment, when projected, appears as an impulse originating in the environment and aimed at you. It’s a boomerang effect, and you end up clobbering yourself with your own energy. No longer do you push to action, you feel pushed into action. You have placed the impulse on the other side of the self/not-self boundary, and so naturally it attacks you from the outside, instead of helping you attack the environment.”
“Resistance is a major cause of projection.”
“the witch hunt offers the very clearest example of the truth of projection, the truth that we loathe in others those things, and only those things, that we secretly loathe in ourselves.”
“the first step in therapy…We invite the symptom right into our home, and we let it move and breathe freely, while we simply try to remain aware of it in its own form. That, very simply, is the first step in therapy, and in many cases it is all that is required, for the moment we truly accept a symptom we also accept a large part of the shadow concealed in that symptom. The problem then tends to disappear.”
“the second step of therapy…consciously translate any symptom back to its original form…this second step is to realize that any symptom is simply a signal (or symbol) of some unconscious shadow tendency. Thus, for example, you might feel that you are under some very strong pressure at work. Now…the symptom of pressure is always an indication, a simple signal, that you have more drive for the job than you know or are willing to admit. You might wish not to openly admit your real interest and desire so that you can extort guilt from others for all the thankless hours of work you ‘have’ to perform for ‘their’ benefit. Or you might wish to parlay your ‘selfless’ devotion into a bigger payoff. Or you might have innocently lost track of your drive. Whatever the reason, the symptom of pressure is a sure sign that you are more eager than you know. Thus, you can translate the symptom back to its original and correct form. ‘I have to’ becomes ‘I want to.’ Translation is the key to therapy.”
“by trying to deny certain facets of our ego, we wind up with a false and distorted self-image, called the persona.” “persona + shadow = ego”
THE CENTAUR LEVEL
“We could dissolve the boundary, between persona and shadow, and thus find a larger and more stable sense of self-identity.”
“most of us have long ago lost our bodies, and I’m afraid we must take that literally. It seems, in fact, that ‘I’ am almost sitting on my body as if I were a horseman riding on a horse.” “My consciousness is almost exclusively head consciousness—I am my head, but I own my body. The body is reduced from self to property, something which is ‘mine’ but not ‘me.’”
“the boundary between the ego and the body. There are a number of important opposites which come to be associated with this particular boundary, but one of the most significant is that of the voluntary vs. the involuntary. The ego is the seat of control, of manipulation, of voluntary and willed activity. In fact, the ego as a rule identifies itself with voluntary processes. Yet the body is basically a well-organized collection of involuntary processes, of circulation, digestion, growth and differentiation, metabolism, and so on. If this sounds odd, just notice the speech of the average person, and listen carefully to those processes she calls herself. She will say, ‘I move my arm,” but she will not say, “I beat my heart.” She will say, “I am eating my food,” but she will not say, “I am digesting my food.” She will say, “I close my eyes,” but she will not say, “I grow my hair.””
“as long as you are identified exclusively with the ego, then by definition your self does not include or integrate the spontaneous processes of the organism.”
“This split cannot be overcome by a knowledge of the energetic processes in the body. Knowledge itself is a surface phenomenon and belongs to the realm of the ego.”
“These muscular activities are the very essence of hostility itself. Thus, if you are to suppress hostility, you can only do so by physically suppressing the muscular discharge activities. You must, in other words, use your muscles to hold back these discharge activities. Rather, you must use some of your muscles to hold back the action of some of our muscles. What results is a war of muscles.”
“This whole situation is almost exactly as if I were pinching myself but didn’t know it. It is as if I intentionally pinched myself, but then forgot it was I who was doing the pinching. I feel the pain of the pinching, but cannot figure out why it won’t stop. Just so, all of these muscular tensions anchored in my body are deep-seated forms of self-pinching. So the important question is not, ‘How can I stop or relax these blocks?’ but rather, ‘How can I see that I am actively producing them?” If you are pinching yourself but don’t know it, to ask somebody else to stop the pain does no good. To ask how to stop pinching yourself implies that you aren’t doing it yourself. On the other hand, as soon as you see that you are actively pinching yourself, then, and only then do you spontaneously stop. You don’t go around asking how to stop pinching yourself, any more than you ask how to raise your hand. They are both voluntary actions. The crux, therefore, is getting the direct feel of how I actively tense these muscles, and therefore the one thing I don’t do is try to relax them. Rather, I must, as always, play my opposites. I must do what I would have never thought of doing before: I must actively and consciously attempt to increase the particular tension. By deliberately increasing the tension, I am making my self-pinching activity conscious instead of unconscious. In short, I start to remember how I have been pinching myself. I see how I have literally been attacking myself. That understanding felt through-and-through releases energy from the war of muscles, energy which I can then direct outward toward the environment instead of inward on myself. Instead of squeezing and attacking myself, I can ‘attack’ a job, a book, a good meal, and thus learn afresh the correct meaning of the word aggression: ‘to move toward.’”
“These blocks were, and still are, forms of resistance to particular emotions. Thus, if these blocks are to be permanently dissolved, you will have to open yourself to the emotions which lie buried beneath the muscular cramp.” “They usually involve a release of tears, a good scream or two, ability for uninhibited orgasm, a good old-fashioned temper tantrum, or a temporary but enraged attack upon pillows set up for that purpose.”
“The block is released when feeling-attention can flow through that area in a full and perfectly unobstructed fashion on its way to infinity. An important change in one’s sense of self and reality results from this simple healing of the split between the mind and body, the voluntary and involuntary, the willed and the spontaneous. To the extent you can feel your involuntary body processes as you, you can begin to accept as perfectly natural all manner of things which you cannot control. You may more readily accept the uncontrollable and rest easily in the spontaneous, with faith in a deeper self which goes beyond the superficial will and ego rumblings. You may learn you needn’t control yourself in order to accept yourself. In fact your deeper self, your centaur, lies beyond your control. It is voluntary and involuntary, both perfectly acceptable as manifestations of you.”
“Ultimately, you are the deep source producing all your involuntary and voluntary processes, and not its victim.”
“‘Energy is eternal delight, and is from the body,’ said Blake, and this is a delight which does not depend upon external rewards or promises. It springs from within, and is freely given in this present moment. Whereas the ego lives in time, with its neck outstretched to future gains and its heart lamenting past losses, the centaur lives always in the nunc fluens, the passing and concrete present, the lively present which neither clings to the yesterday nor screams for tomorrow, but finds its fulfillment in the bounties of this moment (this is not the eternal present, the nuns stans, but is a step in the right direction). Centauric awareness is a powerful antidote to the world of future shock.”
“Not only might you learn to accept both the voluntary and involuntary as yourself, you might even start to understand that,, at this deeper level, voluntary and involuntary are one. They are both spontaneous activities of the centaur. We already know that the involuntary is spontaneous. But even acts of will and purposeful decisions spring up spontaneously. For what is behind an act of will? Another act too will? Do I will to will, or does it just happen? If the former, do I then will to will to will? Do decisions spontaneously occur, or do I decide to decide to decide?
Rollo May, “Neither the ego nor the body nor the unconscious can be ‘autonomous,’ but can only exist as parts of totality. And it is in this totality that will and freedom must have their base.”
Maslow, “If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life.”
“self actualization and meaning are intimately related.”
“To find egoic meaning in life is to do something in life, and up to a point that is appropriate. But beyond the ego is beyond that type of meaning—to a meaning that is less of doing and more of being.”
“To find centauric meaning in life—fundamental meaning—is to find that the very processes of life itself generate joy. Meaning is found, not in outward actions or possessions, but in the inner radiant currents of your own being, and in the release and relationship of these currents to the world, to friends, to humanity at large, and to infinity itself.”
“To find real meaning in life is also to accept death in life, to befriend the impermanence of all that is, to release the entire mind body into emptiness with each exhalation. To yield unconditionally to death on each exhalation is to be reborn and regenerated with each inhalation. On the other hand, to recoil form the death and impermanence of each moment is to recoil from the life of each moment, since the two are one and the same.”
“To identify with the ego and the body is actually to change both by setting each in a new context. The ego can reach down to earth—its ground and support—and the body can reach up to heaven—its light and space…set of opposites re-united, and a deeper unity discovered…you can embody your mind and mind your body.”
THE SELF IN TRANSCENDENCE
“The average person will therefore probably listen in disbelief if it is pointed out that she has, nestled in the deepest recesses of her being, a transpersonal self, a self that transcends her individuality and connects her to a world beyond conventional space and time.”
“basic mythological motifs must be innate structures inherited by every member of the human race. These primordial images or archetypes…are thus common to all people. They belong to no single individual, but are instead trans individual, collective, transcendent.” “Just as, for example, each person possesses one heart, two kidneys, ten fingers, four limbs, and so on, so each person’s brain might contain universal symbolic forms essentially identical to those of all other normal human brains.” [4th turning archetypes]
Recite:
“I have a body, but I am not my body. I can see and feel my body, and what can be seen and felt is not the true Seer. My body may be tired or excited, sick or healthy, heavy or light, but that has nothing to do with my inward I. I have a body, but I am not my body.”
“I have desires, but I am not my desires. I can know my desires, and what can be known is not the true Knower. Desires come and go, floating through my awareness, but they do not affect my inward I. I have desires but I am not desires.”
“I have emotions, but I am not my emotions. I can feel and sense my emotions, and what can be felt and sensed is not the true Feeler. Emotions pass through me, but they do not affect my inward I. I have emotions but I am not emotions.”
“I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts. I can know and intuit my thoughts, and what can be known is not the true Knower. Thoughts come to me and thoughts leave me, but they do not affect my inward I. I have thoughts but I am not my thoughts.”
“To witness these states is to transcend them. They no longer seize you from behind because you look at them up front.”
“Abide as ‘choiceless awareness’ in the midst of all distressed. This is possible only when we understand that none of them constitute our real self. As long as we are attached to them, there will be an effort, however subtle, to manipulate them. Understanding that they are not the center or self, we don’t call our distresses names, yell at them, resent them, try to reject them or indulge them. Every move we make to solve a distress simply reinforces the illusion that we are that particular distress. Thus, ultimately to try to escape a distress merely perpetuates that distress. What is so upsetting is not the distress itself, but our attachment to that distress. We identify with it, and that alone is the real difficulty.”
Change Tzu, “The perfect person employs the mind like a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.”
“your relationship to your mind-and-body becomes the same as your relationship to all other objects.”
“At the transpersonal level, we begin to love others not because they love us, affirm us, reflect us, or secure us in our illusions, but because they are us. Christ’s primary teaching does not mean, ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself,’ but ‘Love your neighbor as your Self.’ And not just your neighbor, but your whole environment.”
“whatever you can see cannot be the Seer. Everything you know about yourself is precisely not your Self, the Knower, the inner I-nes that can neither be perceived, defined, or made an object of any sort. Bondage is nothing but the mis-identification of the Seer with all these things which can be seen.”
“to continuously abide as the Seer, the Witness, the Self, is to step aside from limitations and problems, and then finally to step out of them.” [Ice baths and other diversity training tools help one to accrue this skill]
THE ULTIMATE STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
“Unity consciousness, however, is not so much a particular wave as it is the water itself. And there is no boundary, no difference, no separation between water and any of the waves. That is, the water is equally present in all waves, in the sense that no wave is wetter than another. So if you are looking for ‘wetness’ itself—the condition of all waves—nothing whatsoever will be gained by jumping form one wave to another. In fact, there is much to lose, for as long as you are wave-jumping in search of wetness, you obviously will never discover that wetness exists in its purity on whatever wave you’re riding now. Seeking unity consciousness is like jumping from one wave of experience to another in search of water. And that is why ‘there is neither path nor achievement.’” “There is no path to wetness if you’re already standing shoulder-deep in water.”
“Honsho-myoshu means that true spiritual practice springs from, but not toward, enlightenment.”
“in true prayer, it is not that you are trying to reach God, but that it is God who is praying to himself.”
“our spiritual practice is itself already the goal. The end and the means, the way and the destination, the alpha and omega, are one.”
“If we take up zanen then deep within we are doing so not to become Buddhas but to behave like the Buddhas we already are.”
“there is indeed no other way to live, but, as an alternative, only numerous ways to suffer.”
“At all times we are, in truth, resisting unity consciousness, avoiding God, fighting the Tao. It is certain that we are always wave-jumping, that we are always resisting the present wave of experience. But unity consciousness and the present are one and the same thing. To resist one is to resist the other.”
“through issuing appropriate spiritual practices, we start to learn just how we resist unity consciousness. Spiritual practice forces fundamental resistance to surface in our awareness. We begin to see that we don’t really want unity consciousness, but that we are always avoiding it…To see our resistance to unity consciousness is to be able, for the first time, to deal with it and finally to drop it—thus removing the secret obstacle to our own liberation.”
“the passing present, the nunc fluens of the centaur level” “the eternal present, the nunc stans that is unity consciousness.”
“To search forever is to miss it forever. The problem is that, in order to resist the present wave of experience, you have to separate yourself from it. To move away from present experience implies that you and present experience are two different things.”
“to move away is to create a before and after, a point of departure in the past from which we move and a port of destiny in the future to which we move. Our present is reduced to the moving itself, the quiet running away.” “our primal resistance—the unwillingness to look upon all experience, as a whole…”
“To try to grasp it requires a move; to try not to grasp it also requires a move.”
“the sensation of the separate self and the sensation of resistance are one and the same thing. That inner feeling of being a separate self is nothing but a feeling of moving away, resisting, contracting, standing aside, looking away, grasping. When you feel yourself, that’s all you feel.” “His self is resistance, and thus could not stop resistance.”
“Real spiritual practice is not something we do for twenty minutes a day, for two hours a day, or for six hours a day. It is not something we do once a day in the morning, or once a week on Sunday. Spiritual practice is not one activity among other human activities; it is the ground of all human activities, their source and their validation.” “If you feel this deep commitment to realization, to service, and to surrender, through all present conditions to infinity itself, then spiritual practice will be your way naturally.”
