| | My Teacher
| New Age Messiah
User ID: 782948
11/5/2009 10:47 PM
Report abusive post | My Teacher
| Quote |
This guy is the GREATEST MOST AWESOME SPIRITUAL TEACHER OF ALL TIME.
[link to ahalmaas.com]
One little snippet, written in 1973, he has since written a whole library of amazing books 
The Devil and the Seraph
Man is asleep. Little do we know what this means, the extent of this sleep. Little do we know what it means to be really awake, to be ripened, completed, a whole person. Sometimes, when a drop of grace kindles my heart, my first feeling is to cry, with a burning heart for how asleep I am, how blind I can be, without even knowing it. I feel so sad then, so sorry for how far I go from God, how estranged I can be from my true nature. My deep love for Truth, for the precious gold of Reality, melts my heart into warm running tears when I remember how hard it is to remember. The realization that when I am asleep I don’t even know how far I am from God makes my heart burn with more fire. It is so easy to forget. And it is such a sad affair, for what I forget is my own true nature, the precious wine of my innermost soul. No wonder the Sufi makes it his first and foremost duty to remember God, day and night. God’s name is always on his tongue, constantly within his heart.
It is so easy to forget who I am because identifying with my ego patterns is such a smooth and automatic process. It’s like gravity, always there to pull me down. Even when I am keenly aware of my process, there always comes a time when a subtle game takes over, and without realizing it I am cut off from the origin, estranged from the source of Being.
Identification always comes with blindness. They go together. When I identify with a particular reaction or a pattern of mine I am really saying that I am this reaction or this pattern, without being aware that I am saying so. The blindness can go so far that I feel self-righteous about this particular identification. And this really means that I am asserting the existence of the devil, and negating what is real. I blind myself from seeing this by rationalization or pretension. Essentially it is self-deception. So I find myself running after gratification of my games with complete justification and self-righteousness, of course.
Forgetting God, the one Reality, always means siding with the devil, the delusion we call ego. It’s so painful, it’s so shameful, that sometimes I actually say to the devil, “Yes, I believe you.” I turn my back on God, on Reality, on the source of life, believing that the devil, my ignorant ego, will give me the satisfaction and contentment I desire. Time and time again, with a lot of pain and sorrow, I find that I only end up in more frustration, more suffering, and more alienation.
It is in the nature of ego striving and the desire for gratification that the heart is upset. There can be no peace with craving and grasping. This craving is a certain energy, a certain state that is by its very nature harsh, hard, excited, and violent. It is the seed and source of all negative emotions. It is felt and experienced as violence within the heart. It feels like sand grating against the pure smoothness and softness of the heart. It is no wonder greed, craving and desire for gratification produce wars and violence, for it is actually the energy of war within our hearts, inside our own bodies.
Still, rare is the individual who will even listen to such a fundamental truth, let alone do anything about it. It’s as if our very nature does not want us to see this truth or to admit to its validity and significance. Of course not, the devil does not want to see its deception, ego does not want to die. NO. It will fight fiercely with all weapons possible, more weapons than we can even conceive of, to avoid the truth, to conceal it, to reject it. The devil will not see itself as the devil. It has to point to something else as the cause of trouble. And it will continue opening its hungry mouth, screaming, “Give me, fill me, satisfy me.” But of course, this is another illusion; it will never be filled, it can never be satisfied. For its hunger is bottomless, its emptiness has no limits. It is always the temptation of satisfaction, but never total satisfaction.
The Buddhists found an apt image for this state of ego. They call it the hungry ghost. It is a being with a huge stomach and a tiny mouth, like the hole of a needle. It can never get enough through the small hole to fill the huge stomach. This is the usual state of ego, whether we are conscious of it or not.
The core of ego is a feeling of deficiency, of poverty, of emptiness, of saying: “I am no good, I am worthless, I am empty. Give me, give me, more, more, more, more.” In this state of deficiency I don’t love myself, I don’t accept myself. I reject myself. I want to run away, distract myself; maybe go to a movie, see a friend, have sex, eat, fill myself with knowledge, or pretend I am O.K. I am always wanting to fill this emptiness, always rejecting it, always afraid of it. In fact, we are all terrified by it. Most of the time people don’t know that this emptiness, this deficiency is what is driving most of their actions. It’s such a desperation, such a race to fill this bottomless pit.
But how sweet it is to say “yes” to this emptiness. How courageous it is to say: “I feel empty, I feel deficient, and I won’t attempt to fill it. I want to see the truth. I want to experience the reality of me. I refuse to manipulate. I want to wake up regardless of how painful it is.” Only the hero will take this attitude, for it is a heroic act to see your deficiency, your neediness, your emptiness, and yet not try to manipulate your life to fill it. We are so compulsive, so driven to manipulate, to avoid feeling this basic deficiency of our personal ego. But believe me, my friend, there’s no other way towards fullness. God will not pour His grace if you don’t accept your deficiency and stop manipulating. Manipulation, striving to fill this emptiness, is only the devil doing its efficient work. It is constantly working to hide its weakness.
[link to www.lookyourheartinthemirror.com] |
| New Age Messiah
User ID: 782948
11/5/2009 10:56 PM | | Re: My Teacher | Quote |
Almaas on TRUTH:
To truly find God, truth needs to be found independently from the opinions of others. The truth has to be found in our hearts; it has to be totally personal, totally in our inner aloneness. God is our inner core and is the core of everything. It is also the true guidance, which is always guiding us. If we are really interested in the truth we will find our own answers, because the truth reveals itself to the sincere heart as the guided unfolding of one's essence.
[link to www.lookyourheartinthemirror.com] |
| Paddy
User ID: 797089
11/5/2009 11:10 PM | | Re: My Teacher | Quote |
This is actually a very good article. |
| New Age Messiah
User ID: 782948
11/5/2009 11:12 PM | | Anonymous Coward
User ID: 808999
11/5/2009 11:16 PM | | Re: My Teacher | Quote |
This guy is the GREATEST MOST AWESOME SPIRITUAL TEACHER OF ALL TIME. Quoting: New Age Messiah
No he's not.
You are. |
| New Age Messiah
User ID: 782948
11/5/2009 11:16 PM | | Re: My Teacher | Quote |
From "The Inner Journey Home" by A.H. Almaas
"…the universe is a theophany, and its changes are the life of God."
"…when a person identifies with a particular self concept, they become dissociated from the immediacy of their essential presence."
"In the total self-realization of true nature, the soul is not self-reflective, for true nature does not look at itself. It recognizes itself by being itself."
"…the individual form goes through a process of death, and the rebirth is the arising of divine love as the oneness of all existence."
"One sees that true nature is an ocean of love, that is always present regardless of the experience of the soul, and that there are universal principles through which it operates, different from the functioning of separate entities."
"Heaven, it turns out, is always here, but only the purified and sincere soul can enter it. And the price is her head, her independent selfhood."
"We are all in God’s mind, as God’s thoughts; so are all objects both inner and outer."
"Ultimate truth and manifest reality are completely one, totally coemergent. We cannot separate the spiritual presence from the physical forms; they are actually one when our mind is not in the way."
"We may recognize here how our individual minds are reflections of universal mind, microcosms of the macrocosmic mind."
"Society has tried puritanical control of the animal soul, but this has failed just as license fails. Only the balanced harmonious integration of the complete human adult can approach it correctly; only by integrating the soul’s full potential, including the spiritual, can we truly civilize the animal soul."
[link to www.lookyourheartinthemirror.com] |
| New Age Messiah
User ID: 782948
11/5/2009 11:16 PM | | Re: My Teacher | Quote |
This guy is the GREATEST MOST AWESOME SPIRITUAL TEACHER OF ALL TIME.
No he's not.
You are. Quoting: Anonymous Coward 808999
No, I'm the greatest spiritual action hero.
He's my guru.
He looks and walks like Yoda.
[link to www.lookyourheartinthemirror.com] |
| Anonymous Coward
User ID: 808999
11/5/2009 11:24 PM | | New Age Messiah
User ID: 782948
11/6/2009 12:14 AM | | Re: My Teacher | Quote |
The Soul [link to ahalmaas.com]
True nature manifests not only its dimensions and aspects but also vital energy and matter, thus constituting all of reality. We do not include energy and matter in the dimensions of true nature because they can be experienced from within their own perspectives, without recognition of their spiritual origins, while the boundless dimensions and the essential aspects can only be experienced as the spiritual presence of true nature.
True nature further differentiates its logos dimension into what we call the souls of sentient beings. More accurately, the human consciousness is nothing but a soul, an individualization of the logos that embodies both true nature and the dimensions of energy and matter. We are each an embodied soul, where our consciousness is nothing but the consciousness of the logos appearing through a particular physical body. Our awareness comes from the dimension of pure awareness; our knowingness, and hence our mind, comes from the dimension of pure presence; and our heart comes from the dimension of pure universal love. Our human and spiritual qualities come from the essential aspects, and our animal characteristics come from the dimensions of vital energy and matter as they arise through the consciousness of the soul.
The soul is an organism of consciousness, where the creative dynamism of the logos appears in an individuated field as a growing and learning person. It is the consciousness that perceives, and the matrix or field where all experience takes place. The soul develops and grows, matures and learns. It needs to go through this development and learning in order to consciously and knowingly embody its true nature with all of its dimensions and aspects. It begins as an organism of consciousness, grounded in true nature, but dominated by the animal drives of the physical vehicle. In other words, the soul begins with the potential of both the angel and the animal, whose characteristics arise in its experience depending on circumstances and environment. The soul begins its development through interaction with its environment, especially with its primary care givers. It is here that the insights of object relations theory and those of self psychology, contemporary developments in psychoanalytic theory, are useful in understanding how the soul grows and develops, since its initial development is what is referred to as ego development, with its cognitive and affective components.
[link to www.lookyourheartinthemirror.com] |
| New Age Messiah
User ID: 782948
11/6/2009 1:55 AM | | Re: My Teacher | Quote |
Truth
Devotion is the way of the Heart. It starts with ordinary human yearning and love and consummates in the total extinction of the personality into the fire of divine love, where lover and Beloved are ecstatically united. The lover (Majthub) is pulled towards the Supreme Reality through devotion and intense longing till union takes place, when everything is melted away by love. In this experience of ego death both lover and Beloved merge and are extinguished. There is not even a Beloved left, only love, supreme and omnipresent. Love is the nature of reality, the substance of everything that is. It is the prime mover, the prime substance, the very essence of energy. Furthermore, when love is the only Reality it is none other than radiant light. Pure love is pure light. It is not that they are two different qualities of the same reality; they are one and the same quality, the same reality. They are indivisible. Distinction between love and light happens only at the lower levels when the one Reality is still not experienced in its nakedness.
[link to ahalmaas.com]
[link to www.lookyourheartinthemirror.com] |
| New Age Messiah
User ID: 782948
11/6/2009 11:50 AM | | New Age Messiah
User ID: 782948
11/11/2009 10:00 PM | | Re: My Teacher | Quote |
"And this is sin. Sin is not an evil deed. Sin is not going against the commandments of a judging and punishing God. It is just ignorance, forgetfulness. It is forgetting God, our true nature, and not listening to the divine call, because we are deceived and tricked by the devil, our ego. But ego is not a reality; the devil does not really exist. The devil is ignorance, is not knowing, is conditioning, is preconceptions. Sin is siding with the devil, because we are deceived by his promises and temptations. And siding with the devil is the same as turning our back on God. The two actions are identical; there is no cause and effect here. God does not punish us; it is the devil who does that, for the devil is really a state of deficiency, disguised as a promise of paradise on earth."
[link to ahalmaas.com]
[link to www.lookyourheartinthemirror.com] |
| New Age Messiah
User ID: 782948
11/11/2009 10:18 PM | | Re: My Teacher | Quote |
"I fall in love with Sweet Honey, a beautiful woman. Her golden energy reminds me of the golden energy of the Sun of Reality at the center of my Heart. I am beyond myself with joy, love, ecstasy. She is luminous, precious, and so is everything and everyone. My heart opens and breathes the breath of God. But only for a short while. Then I start wanting her body, her love, her attention. And not having her feels like the coming of the dark. I am torn by attachment and craving. I forget that she is only an expression of the divine presence, that her body is only the form for the formless one. I forget the only Reality, and I start running after the illusion, the satisfaction of my desires, the gratification of my neediness and craving. And in the midst of all this emotional excitement, the preciousness of the present is lost; the reality of her as a human being embodying the truth is gone."
[link to ahalmaas.com]
[link to www.lookyourheartinthemirror.com] |
| Anonymous Coward
User ID: 785142
11/11/2009 10:23 PM | | New Age Messiah
User ID: 782948
11/11/2009 10:27 PM | | Re: My Teacher | Quote |
"I use no analogies, no similes. These are not images. I describe exactly what I experience, or whatever part of the experience I can put into words. The breeze actually and literally blows within the cavity of my chest; the nectar is an actual soothing fluid that wells up, as if out of a spring right at the center of the chest. The experience is not physical, not emotional, not mental. It is all of these together and more. When the heart opens, when the real nectar of divine love flows within the body, all boundaries dissolve, all categories vanish."
[link to ahalmaas.com]
[link to www.lookyourheartinthemirror.com] |
| New Age Messiah
User ID: 782948
11/12/2009 1:05 AM | | Re: My Teacher | Quote |
Death
"The involvement, intimacy and enjoyment have been actually much deeper than I have allowed myself to recognize. I have been mostly preoccupied with the exploration of the beautiful and exquisite manifestations of Being, and have not explicitly discerned the deepening involvement, love and enjoyment of life that this exploration allowed. But as I acknowledge it, and feel it, I am confronted with the possibility of losing it when I physically die.
The insight illuminates the mind, as the nous radiates bright yellow and orange: I have not completely and explicitly acknowledged the fullness of the life I have been living, the depth of love and completeness of enjoyment, because of the fear of losing it. Fully enjoying living, I have come face to face with the reality of death. And I see that to consciously enjoy this fullness of life I must fully and consciously accept death."
[link to ahalmaas.com]
[link to www.lookyourheartinthemirror.com] |
| New Age Messiah
User ID: 782948
11/15/2009 2:42 AM | | |
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