Day #44

Today’s favourite poses: Child, Pigeon, Down Dog, 3 Legged Dog, Plank, The Warriors

Minutes with a relatively quiet mind: 10(IsH)

Today’s interesting/thought provoking reading: (Taken from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle)

The first part of the reading starts off with someone asking Tolle the following:

“I always thought that true enlightenment is not possible except through love in a relationship between a man and a woman. Isn’t this what makes us whole again? How can one’s life be fulfilled until that happens?”

(He answers);

“Is that true in your experience? Has this happened to you?”

“Not yet, but how could it be otherwise? I know that it will happen.”

(He answers);

In other words, you are waiting for an event in time to save you. Is this not the core error that we have been talking about? Salvation is not elsewhere in placed or time. It is here and now.

Most people pursue physical pleasures or various forms of psychological gratification because they believe that those things will make them happy or free them from a feeling of fear or lack. Happiness may be perceived as heightened sense of aliveness attained through physical pleasure, or more secure and more complete sense of self attained through some form of psychological gratification. This is the search for salvation from a state of unsatisfactoriness or insufficiency. Invariably, any satisfaction that they obtain is short-lived, so the condition of satisfaction or fulfillment is usually projected once again onto an imaginary point away from the here and now. “When I obtain this or am free of that – then I will be okay.” This is the unconscious mind-set that creates the illusion of salvation in the future.

True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness it is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has not opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to “know God” – not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life which all that exists derives its being.

True salvation is a state of freedom – from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all wanting, needing, grasping, and clinging. It is freedom from compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all from past and future as a psychological need. Your mind is telling you that you cannot get there from here. Something needs to happen or you need to become this or that before you can be free and fulfilled. It is saying in fact, that you need time - that you need to find, sort out, do, achieve, acquire, become, or understand something before you can be free or complete. You see time as the means to salvation, whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You think that you can’t get there from where and who you are at this moment because you are not yet complete or good enough, but the truth is that here and now is the only point from where you can get there. You get there by realizing that you are there already. You find God the moment you realize that you don’t need to seek God. So there is no only way to salvation; any condition can be used, but no particular condition is needed. There can be no salvation away from this moment. You are lonely and without a partner? Enter the Now from there. You are in a relationship. Enter the now from there.