BE

library

Sit with a page

A name, or a word that is alive. The books remain themselves. A page is a place to stand. The shelf holds the rest of the rooms.

Pages

Meher Baba

The fish and the water

All persons have to pass through the state of bondage, but this period of bondage is not to be looked upon as a meaningless episode in the evolution of life. One has to experience being caged if one is to appreciate freedom. If in the entire span of its life a fish has not come out of the water even once, it has no chance of appreciating the value of water. From its birth till its death it has lived only in water, and it is not in a position to understand what water really means to its being. But if it is taken out of water even for a moment, it longs for water and becomes qualified by that experience to appreciate the importance of water. In the same way, if life were constantly free and manifested no bondage, man would miss the real significance of freedom. To experience spiritual bondage and know intense desire to be free from it are both a preparation for the full enjoyment of the freedom that is to come.

Discourses — The Stages of the Path

Meher Baba

The tunnel and the streak of light

The longing to go back to the source is present in each being from the very time that it is separated from the source by the veil of ignorance; but the being is unconscious of the longing till it, as an aspirant, enters the spiritual path. One can in a sense become accustomed to ignorance, just as a person in a train may get accustomed to the darkness of a tunnel when the train has been passing through it for some time. Even then there is a definite discomfort and a vague and undefinable sense of restlessness owing to the feeling that something is missing. When one’s experience of this world is sufficiently mature, the repeated disillusionments in life set one on the right track to discover what is missing. From that moment the individual seeks a reality that is deeper than changing forms. This moment might aptly be described as the first initiation of the aspirant. Just as the person in the tunnel longs for light all the more intensely after he sees a streak of light coming from the other end, the person who has had a glimpse of the goal longs to hasten toward it with all the speed he can command.

Discourses — The Stages of the Path

Meher Baba

The veil of manifold imagination

On the spiritual path there are six stations, the seventh station being the terminus, or the goal. Each intermediate station is, in its own way, a kind of imaginative anticipation of the goal. The veil that separates man from God consists of false imagination, and this veil has many folds. Traversing the spiritual path consists in undoing the results of the false working of imagination, or dropping several folds of the veil, which has created a sense of unassailable separateness and irredeemable isolation. The more he communes with Reality, the thinner becomes the veil of ignorance. What changes is not the Self but its idea of what it is. Suppose in a daydream or fantasy you imagine yourself to be in China while your body is actually in India. When the fantasy comes to an end, you realize that your body is actually not in China but in India. In the same way, gradual nonidentification with the body and progressive identification with the Oversoul is comparable to the actual traversing of the path, though in fact the different intermediate stages on the path are all equally creations of the play of imagination.

Discourses — The Stages of the Path

Meher Baba

Six fanas, and then Fana-Fillah

Six intermediate planes and their states of consciousness have to be experienced before reaching the seventh plane, which is the end of the journey. After entering a new plane of consciousness, a person usually takes some time before he can freely function on that plane. As there is a radical change in the total conditions of mental life, the person experiences a sort of paralysis of mental activity known as samadhi. A person is totally unconscious in sleep; whereas in samadhi he is conscious of bliss or light or power, although he is unconscious of his body and surroundings. The fourth plane is one of the most difficult and dangerous to cross: the pilgrim not only feels infinite power but has occasion for its expression, and a definite inclination to express it. On the sixth plane the pilgrim sees God as directly and as clearly as an ordinary person sees the different things of this world — and yet does not become one with God. If the pilgrim ascends to the seventh plane, he experiences Fana-Fillah, the final annihilation of the self in God. He has now reached the opposite shore of the vast ocean of imagination. It is the only real awakening.

Discourses — The Stages of the Path

Meher Baba

The happiness that merely IS

Only when it attains God-realization on the seventh plane can the soul fully control its joy. The unlimited happiness that is eternally his does not in any way unbalance the person because he is now permanently established in the poise of nonduality. The happiness of the God-realized person is unconditional and self-sustained. It is therefore eternally the same, without ebb and flow. He has arrived at unqualified finality and unassailable equanimity. The happiness of the aspirants is born of their increasing proximity and closer intimacy with the divine Beloved — who, however, remains externalized as the Other. Whereas the happiness of the God-realized is an inalienable aspect of the God state, in which there is no duality. The happiness of the aspirants is derivative, but the happiness of the God-realized is Self-grounded. The happiness of the aspirants comes from increasing bounty of divine grace, but the happiness of the God-realized merely IS.

Discourses — The Man-God

Meher Baba

Better to become God

Of all the subjects of human study, God is the most meaningful. But purely theoretical study of God does not take the aspirant very far toward the real purpose of human life, though it is always better to study God than to be completely ignorant of His existence. To seek God intellectually is infinitely better than to be merely a skeptic or an agnostic. And it is decidedly better to feel God than to study Him through the intellect, though even feeling for God is less important than the actual experience of God. However, even the experience of God does not yield the true nature of divinity because God, as the object of experience, remains different from and external to the aspirant. The true nature of God is known to the aspirant only when he attains unity with God, by losing himself in His Being. Thus, it is better to study God than to be ignorant of Him; it is better to feel God than to study Him; it is better to experience God than to feel God; and it is better to become God than to experience Him.

Discourses — The Man-God

Meher Baba

Those who stay

After God-realization, most souls drop all their bodies and remain eternally immersed in God-consciousness. For them, God is the only Reality, and the entire universe is a zero. A rare few God-realized souls not only possess God-consciousness but are also conscious of creation and their own bodies. They take active interest in the souls who are in bondage; and they use their own bodies consciously to work in creation, in order to help other souls in their Godward march. Such a God-realized soul is called Man-God, Perfect Master, Sadguru, Qutub. When man becomes God and retains creation-consciousness, he is called a Man-God; but when God becomes man, He is called the God-Man, or the Avatar. The God-Man and the Man-God never lose their God-consciousness even for an instant, although they may be engaged in all sorts of activities in relation to creation.

Discourses — The Man-God

Meher Baba

Meditation cuts its own path

Meditation may be described as a path that the individual cuts for himself while trying to get beyond the limitations of the mind. If a person caught in the tangles of a thick forest tries to get out into the open, his efforts to break through the encircling impediments will leave behind the marks of his journey. The movements of one who comes out of the forest are different in principle from those of a railway engine, which moves along rails already laid. The individual is not following a ready-made path; the path becomes imprinted after he has traversed it. In the same way, the person who finds himself drawn into deep meditation is really grappling with the spiritual problems he faces and not merely trying to follow a rigid course that already exists in his mental makeup.

Discourses — The Types of Meditation

Meher Baba

Intelligent meditation

Meditation has often been misunderstood as a mechanical process of forcing the mind upon some idea or object. Any purely mechanical handling of the mind is not only irksome but is bound ultimately to be unsuccessful. The mind can be controlled and directed in meditation only according to laws inherent in the makeup of the mind itself. Meditation is often easy and spontaneous when the mind is dwelling upon an object that it is interested in and that it increasingly understands. The spiritual tragedy about ordinary trains of thought is that they are not directed toward things that really matter. The object of real meditation has to be spiritually important; it has to be some divine form or object, or some spiritually significant theme or truth. Such intelligent meditation is a natural process of the mind; and since it avoids the monotonous rigidity of mechanical meditation, it becomes not only spontaneous and inspiring but easy and successful.

Discourses — The Types of Meditation

Meher Baba

A picnic on the higher planes

Meditation should not be approached with a heavy heart, as if one were taking castor oil. One has to be serious about meditation but not grave or melancholy. Humor and cheerfulness not only do not interfere with the progress of meditation but actually contribute to it. The aspirant should freely allow himself the natural joy that is attendant upon successful meditation, without getting addicted to it. Meditation should be something like a picnic on the higher planes. Like excursions into new and beautiful natural surroundings, meditation brings with it a sense of enthusiasm, adventure, peace, and exhilaration. All thoughts of depression, fear, or worry have to be cut out completely if there is to be really successful meditation.

Discourses — The Types of Meditation

Meher Baba

Let the disturbance die of neglect

When the mind sets itself to systematic meditation, there is inevitably a reactionary tendency for irrelevant and contrary thoughts to emerge. This is the law of the mind, and the aspirant should not be upset by the appearance of many contrary and unwholesome thoughts that had hitherto never made their appearance. Meditation involves bringing the subconscious contents of the mind to the forefront of consciousness. It is useless to waste energy by trying to combat and repress disturbing thoughts directly. Any such attempt involves giving further attention to them; and they feed upon the very attention given for the purpose of repressing them. It is best to ignore them and turn to the object of meditation as early as possible. By recognizing the irrelevance of disturbing thoughts and the relative importance of the object of meditation, it becomes possible to let the disturbing thoughts die through sheer neglect.

Discourses — The Types of Meditation

Meher Baba

Turn toward the sun

Dissociative meditation may be illustrated by the formula “I am not my desires.” Associative meditation may be illustrated by the formula “I am infinite.” Dissociative meditation is a preliminary to associative meditation. It comes first and has its own value, but it is meant merely to pave the way. If a person is surrounded by shadows, it does not help very much to be continuously upset about them. If his only interest is being cross with the shadows, there will be no end to his worries. But if, instead of fretting and fuming about the engulfing shadows, he sets himself to the more important task of bringing himself under the full blaze of the sun, he will discover that all the shadows have disappeared. What really matters is not aimless discontent with existing limitations but directive effort toward the established ideal.

Discourses — The Types of Meditation

Meher Baba

Not to teach but to awaken

I have come not to teach but to awaken. Understand therefore that I lay down no precepts. Throughout eternity I have laid down principles and precepts, but mankind has ignored them. No amount of rite, no amount of ceremony, can lead you to the path of spirituality. I repeat, I lay down no precepts. When I release the tide of Truth which I have come to give, men’s daily lives will be the living precept. The words I have not spoken will come to life in them.

Messages

Meher Baba

What is Love?

What is Love? To give and never to ask. What leads to this Love? Grace. What leads to this Grace? Grace is not cheaply bought. It is gained by being always ready to serve and reluctant to be served. Never backbiting. Tolerance supreme. Trying not to worry. Trying not to worry is almost impossible — so try. If you do one of these things perfectly, the rest must follow. Then Grace descends. Have Love — and when you have Love, the union with the Beloved is certain. True love is unconquerable and irresistible. It goes on gathering power and spreading until eventually it transforms everyone it touches.

Messages

Meher Baba

Don’t worry, be happy

Don’t worry, be happy. I will help you. There is nothing to be worried about, nothing to be disheartened about. Don’t worry. My love will give you that strength and conviction which makes you feel that you belong to God. Seek Truth with all your heart, and Baba will help you. God and love are identical, and one who has divine love already has God. Divine love is the solution to all our difficulties and problems.

Messages

Ram Dass

Be here now

Be here now. The title was given, not invented. Before leaving India, Ram Dass was told that Maharaji had given his ashirvad — his blessing — for the book. He asked what an ashirvad was, and what book. He had not planned to write it. Be Here Now is Maharaji’s book. The instruction is so simple it keeps being missed. Not later, when you are improved. Not in a better room. Here. The one you are already in. Now. The only time that has ever been available for love.

Be Here Now

Ram Dass

Walking each other home

We’re all just walking each other home. The sentence does not require you to be further along than the person beside you. It does not require a teaching credential. It requires company. The dying taught him this. The stroke taught him this. The years of being the one who still showed up taught him this. Home is not a location you drag another person toward. Home is the quality of how you walk.

Talks

Ram Dass

The compassionate father

Ram Dass kept Meher Baba in the heart’s household. He wrote of the Silent One whose teaching gives no importance to creed, dogma, caste, or the performance of religious ceremonies. The photograph in Be Here Now is not decoration. It is a lineage nod: the Harvard man who became a friend, bowing to the one who did not speak and still filled the room. Love everyone. Serve everyone. Remember God. The three are not a sequence. They are one motion.

On Meher Baba

Ram Dass

Suffering is grace

Suffering is grace. Not because pain is good, and not because you should seek it. Because the thing you would never have chosen is often the thing that thins the veil. The stroke took his words and left him more himself. He sat with people who were leaving their bodies and did not try to cheer them out of it. He let the heart break, and kept it broken open. That is a different kind of help than advice.

Talks

Ram Dass

The soul is not in a hurry

The soul is not in a hurry. The personality is always late for its own life. The soul has all the births it needs. This is not an excuse to sleep. It is permission to stop panicking that you have not arrived. Beings who are empty of ego and full of wisdom — you listen, and you remember, and you tune to your own being through theirs. Then you get up and do the next kind thing.

Talks

Alan Watts

The wave and the ocean

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing. You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself. The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real, deep-down you is the whole universe.

Lectures

Alan Watts

The phantom of security

It must be obvious, from the start, that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present. To pursue security is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead.

The Wisdom of Insecurity

Alan Watts

The menu is not the meal

The menu is not the meal. We have confused the world of words and ideas with the world they point toward, and then we wonder why we are still hungry. You cannot get wet from the word water. This is why spiritual book-collecting becomes its own appetite. The grove is not a bibliography. Sit down. Taste.

Lectures

Alan Watts

Muddy water

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone. The mind that tries to force itself clear only stirs the silt. This is cousin to Baba’s instruction: do not fight the disturbing thought; let it die of neglect. Cousin also to Nichtern’s spaciousness. You are not corked and you are not a project. Sit. The sediment knows how to fall.

Lectures

Alan Watts

Completely engaged

This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. Not play as escape. Play as the universe doing what it does, through these hands, without the extra job of being a stranger in the scene.

Lectures

Caroline Myss

Biography becomes biology

Your biography becomes your biology. Every illness corresponds to a pattern of emotional and psychological stresses, beliefs, and attitudes that have influenced corresponding areas of the human body. This is not blame. It is a way of listening. The story you will not tell is already speaking in tissue. Power that is given away — to a tribe, a lover, a wound, a court of old judges — leaves a vacancy the body tries to fill with symptom. Power that returns home is medicine.

Anatomy of the Spirit

Caroline Myss

Seven rooms of power

Seven centers, spoken in three languages at once: the Hindu chakras, the Christian sacraments, the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life. Tribal power. The power of relationships. Personal power. Emotional power. The power of will. The power of the mind. The spiritual connector. Everyone passes through these rooms in the search for higher consciousness. Intuition is not a party trick. It is spiritual intelligence coming back online as you stop leaking your life into bargains you did not know you had signed.

Anatomy of the Spirit

Caroline Myss

The contract

A sacred contract is the assignment you arrived with — the archetypes who walk with you as gatekeepers of a higher purpose. The wound is not proof that the contract failed. The wound is often the seal. You do not have to like the terms to live them with eyes open. Naming the pattern is already a retrieval of power. Then the body can stop carrying the whole myth alone.

Sacred Contracts

Caroline Myss

Devotion as a need

Spiritual crisis often arrives as the need for devotion — not as a belief to defend, as a current to rejoin. Loving oneself as the path to the Divine is not a slogan for the mirror. It is the end of using the self as an enemy. Between the head and the heart there is a walk. Myss will not let you skip it with information.

Anatomy of the Spirit

Joanna Macy

Active hope is something we do

Active Hope is not a feeling you wait to have. It is something we do. It involves being clear what we hope for and then playing our role in the process of moving that way. It is how we face the mess we are in without going crazy — and without going numb, which is another kind of crazy. You do not need optimism. You need a direction and a next step that belongs to life.

Active Hope

Joanna Macy

The spiral

The spiral returns: Coming from Gratitude. Honoring Our Pain for the World. Seeing with New Eyes. Going Forth. When we come from gratitude, we become more present to the wonder of being alive in this amazing living world. Honoring pain is not collapse. It is refusing to exile the part of you that loves enough to hurt. Seeing with new eyes is remembering you are larger than the story of isolation. Going forth is the cell doing what the body already knows.

The Work That Reconnects

Joanna Macy

Pain for the world

Your despair is a form of love. The Work That Reconnects helps people discover their innate connections with each other and with the self-healing powers of the web of life, transforming despair and overwhelm into inspired, collaborative action. You are not broken for feeling the forest fall. You are intact. The numbness was the injury.

The Work That Reconnects

Joanna Macy

The Great Turning

The Great Turning is the name for the shift from an industrial-growth society toward a life-sustaining civilization. It is already underway, in more kitchens and watersheds than the news can count. A regenerative homestead, a food forest, a community that tells the truth about its grief — these are not accessories to a spiritual life. They are the spiritual life, remembering it has hands.

Active Hope

Grace Walk

All matter matters

I see all matter matters and nothing matters all at once. The body and the world are sacred, yet the separate self and its dramas are ultimately empty. The true test of any interpretation is not intellectual agreement but living fruit: greater presence, compassion, clarity, and the felt sense of coming home. The Kingdom is within. The Stone is the Self. The Ladder is the Spine. The Story is alive — and it is yours.

Gnostic Origin Stories

Grace Walk

Love in the midnight

There is always love available in the midnight. The gospel is not that we escape suffering, but that we can meet it with presence, surrender, and an open heart — and in doing so, transform it into medicine. The deepest teachings arise not in sterile temples but in the beautiful mess of existence. After every explosion, the only instruction that survives is: just be here now. You are not offering escape from the simulation. You are offering high-quality company inside it.

The Midnight Gospel Study Guide

Grace Walk

Remembering, not becoming

The Phoenix is Spiritual Rebirth. Fire symbolizes purification. The ashes symbolize the death of false identity. The phoenix rising represents consciousness awakening from illusion. Rebirth is not becoming someone new — it is remembering what always existed beneath conditioning. The Apocalypse, too, is an unveiling, not a destruction. The final battle is within consciousness itself.

Gnostic Origin Stories

Grandfather

We are the caretakers

Nature becomes a doorway to the spirit and spirit also becomes a doorway to nature. There is only the sacred oneness that we are all part of. When we take something from nature, its spirit does not die. Instead it becomes part of our flesh and part of our spirit. There is no real death, at least not when things are taken in the right way, the sacred way. You belong to the earth, just as you are part of this old tree and it of you. Nature can exist without us, but it would struggle far more. Remember, we are here for a grand purpose, beyond self. We are the caretakers.

Grandfather

Grandfather

Alone, not lonely

The chasm between being alone and loneliness is deep. The way you begin to be alone and at peace without being lonely is to know that you are with your best friend. When you are at peace with yourself and love yourself, you can never be lonely. Only when one learns to love himself can he love another. You must find that love for yourself before you can touch the purity of aloneness. Love of self, without being selfish, will not allow loneliness to exist. Love of self also creates a love for everything else and brings us closer to the sacred oneness.

Grandfather

Grandfather

Peace, love, joy, purpose

The four things people really work for in life: peace, love, joy, and a purpose beyond self. Peace becomes a doorway to joy. When we know our purpose in service to others and the world around us, our sense of peace and joy grows. We settle into ourselves and our personal gifts come forth. Our capacity for offering and receiving love grows with this as well. The herd does not ask you to manufacture these. It asks you to tend them, the way you would a fire you did not light.

Grandfather

Tom Brown Jr.

I am a coyote teacher

To give instruction would satisfy the needs of most people, but that is not my goal. My goal is to give the reader a picture of the world we live in, the forgotten world. This book explains that it is not easily come by and a search for the truths must occur before knowledge is attained. Grandfather’s life was full of every emotion, every feeling, and they did not come from listening to his elders. He had to seek them out for himself as I wish the reader to do. I am a coyote teacher. The fire still burns. Someday people will seek again the old ways.

Grandfather

Tom Brown Jr.

Thirst is an ally

Thirst is an ally, not an adversary. Once accepted, heat and thirst lose their power, for they become a constant part of existence here. Without them there could be no living entity called desert. He had nearly died in the desert, but only the alien had died, only to be reborn as a child of this land. Thirst thus becomes the doorway through which we can see into the heart of the deserts, and more important see into the heart of ourselves. He did feel them. He did not fear or fight them, for they were part of the realities of life.

Grandfather

Jon Young

Connection is the birthright

Connection is our natural state, our birthright. Civilization has made disconnection the only thing we know. When we connect with each other we also connect with nature; when we work on our connection with nature we are also working on our connection with each other. People have an innate and deeply rooted need to be seen, heard, understood and valued. They need to know that they are contributing and that they belong. When everyone participates, and everyone feels seen and heard, the group becomes stronger than the sum of its parts.

10 Stones Protocols for Sharing

Jon Young

Ten stones of agreement

Welcoming into the container. Wiping off road dust — what is keeping me from being fully present. Gratitude, to bring hearts into resonance. Unconditional listening, as you would listen in nature. A culture of allowance. Lifting up the gifts in others and ourselves. Supporting peace, love, joy, and purpose. Facilitation so even the quiet voices arrive. Mentoring, curiosity, and inner vision. Wrapping the bundle and closing, so nothing unfinished walks home with you. The stones work together. There is no one right way. Nature is a common context.

10 Stones Protocols for Sharing

Jon Young

Wiping off road dust

Anything that keeps us from being fully present to the spirit of the gathering is a distraction generated from holding on to the stresses of the day, the week, the life. It is good to slow down to the rhythm of the Earth. The purpose is to release the distractions so you can focus on everyone in the meeting. Many people aren’t used to truly being listened to. Keep this focused on just what is keeping one from being fully present. From this, we will feel heard. All that follows will move more powerfully.

10 Stones Protocols for Sharing

Jon Young

Wrapping the bundle

Just as the first stone opens the container, the tenth remembers to close it. Wrap the bundle: what were the takeaways? Any final reflections? What are you grateful for? Intentional closing lets people cleanly separate mind, heart, and intent from the group mind, so nothing unfinished walks home. We move forward with a fresh start, still holding the feeling of belonging. The baby elephant knows this in the body. The walk ends. The herd remains.

10 Stones Protocols for Sharing

Adyashanti

A destructive process

Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true. What remains is not a better version of the person who was seeking. The seeker was the last costume. Truth does not need you to hold it up. It has been holding you.

The End of Your World

Adyashanti

Stop manufacturing a state

True meditation has no direction, goals, or method. All methods aim at achieving a certain state of mind. True meditation is effortless, choiceless awareness. You are not trying to get anywhere. You are not trying to become anyone. You rest as what you already are, and let every movement of mind and body arise and pass without interference. The one who would improve the silence is the noise.

True Meditation

Michael Singer

The voice inside your head

There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind — you are the one who hears it. If you watch it objectively, you will come to see that much of what it is saying turns out to be false. The inner roommate never stops talking. You do not have to believe a word. You do not have to argue. You can sit in the seat of awareness and let the roommate have its weather. You are the one who remains when the weather moves on.

The Untethered Soul

Michael Singer

Get out of the way

What would happen if I let go of my resistance to life? The experiment was simple, and it was not safe: say yes to what arrived, and watch what the universe would do with a life that stopped arguing. Surrender is not passivity. It is the end of using the mind as a wall. Each time the roommate said no, he practiced the opening. The life that grew was larger than the one he had been trying to manage.

The Surrender Experiment

Alfred Korzybski

The map is not the territory

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly. People react to their abstractions — beliefs, labels, feeds, slogans — as if they were reality itself. This is identification. The harder, saner path is consciousness of abstracting: this is my map, not the land.

Science and Sanity

Alfred Korzybski

The cortical pause

Insert a moment of silence before reacting to the symbol. The nervous system abstracts only a tiny fraction of what arrives. Flood it with symbols detached from silent experience, and the thalamus answers as if the word were the event. Index. Date. Add etc. Politician-2025 in this instance, not Politician is. The organism-as-a-whole-in-environments can return to cortical evaluation. In the age of instant outrage, this pause is not manners. It is hygiene for a 45-mile nervous marvel.

Science and Sanity

Iain McGilchrist

The emissary forgets the master

The right hemisphere is present to the living whole — implicit, relational, changing. The left is an emissary: it names, divides, uses, maps. Both are needed. Trouble begins when the emissary usurps the master and takes the map for the world. Attention is not a spotlight we shine on a finished reality. Attention is a moral act. It brings a world into being. What we attend to, we become able to see. What we refuse, goes dark.

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Attention makes a world

The kind of attention we pay to the world changes the world we pay attention to. A culture that attends only with the left hemisphere will find a world of parts, resources, problems, and enemies — and will be certain it is seeing clearly. A culture that lets the master lead will find a world that is alive, unfinished, and worthy of care. This is not anti-reason. It is reason remembering it serves something it did not invent.

The Matter With Things

Edgar Cayce

Mind is the builder

Spirit is the life. Mind is the builder. The physical is the result. Thought is not a comment on the body. Thought is a masonry. What is dwelt upon, the body takes up as instruction. This is cousin to Myss’s biography-becomes-biology, and to the origin stories that read the spine as ladder. Cayce would not split prayer from diet, or the unseen record from the tissue it keeps writing. The builder is at work whether you notice the plans or not.

Readings

Edgar Cayce

One force

All force is one force. The apparent many is a way the one has of meeting itself. Healing, in the readings, is a return of the parts to that agreement. You do not have to accept every transcript to sit with the sentence. Baba’s Oversoul, Grandfather’s oneness, Tesla’s unseen ties — the same weather, different porches. What you do to the least of these, you do to the circuit you are.

Readings

Nikola Tesla

Ties inseparable

Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. Each of us is only part of a whole. The man who means to be a useful member of the community must first feel this. The current does not begin at the socket. It was already moving in the field we call a self.

The Problem of Increasing Human Energy

Nikola Tesla

The brain is a receiver

My brain is only a receiver. In the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength, and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists. If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration. Korzybski would remind us these sentences are maps. Tesla lived as if the territory were electric, and the nervous system a wire that could be tuned.

Attributed teachings

Eknath Easwaran

The mind and the elephant trunk

On festival days in India you will often see a huge elephant, caparisoned in gold and gorgeous cloth, carrying an image of the Lord on its back through the village streets. Stalls of fruits, vegetables, and sweets line the narrow, crooked streets, and the trunk of an elephant, as you may know, rarely stays still. It seizes a coconut, a bunch of bananas, whatever the stalls offer, because a trunk that is empty will take. To prevent this the mahout asks the elephant to grasp a firm bamboo shaft. Out of love the elephant does as he is told. He steps right along with his stick held upright in a steady trunk, not tempted to feast on mangoes or melons, because he has something to hold on to. The human mind is rather like the trunk of an elephant. It never rests. It goes here, there, ceaselessly moving through sensations, images, thoughts, hopes, regrets, impulses. What should we give it to hold on to? The systematic repetition of the mantram, which can steady the mind at any time and in any place.

Passage Meditation

Eknath Easwaran

Chip away what is not elephant

The sculptor studies the granite for a long time and does nothing. Then, slowly, an outline shows itself. An elephant is stirring in there. Only then does he start to work, clinging to that outline, chipping away every last bit of stone that is not elephant. What then remains will be, must be, elephant. We do not need to bring our real self into existence. It is already there. It has always been there, yearning to be out. Once we have become attentive to this true self, all we really need do is resolutely chip away whatever is not divine in ourselves. In meditation, the inspirational passage is the chisel, our concentration is the hammer, and our resolute will delivers the blows. Can you imagine a sculptor scurrying to pick up the slivers, hoarding them, ignoring the statue altogether?

God Makes the Rivers to Flow

Eknath Easwaran

We become what we meditate on

Meditation is not a religion. It is a technique which enables us to realize for ourselves the unity of life within any of the world’s great religious traditions, or even if we profess none at all. Memorize an inspirational passage — the Prayer of Saint Francis, the Twenty-third Psalm, the last nineteen verses of the second chapter of the Gita. With eyes gently closed, go through the words in the mind as slowly as you can. Do not follow any association of ideas. When distractions come, do not resist them; give more and more of your attention to the passage. The secret is that we become what we meditate on. Sustained concentration on the passage drives it deep into consciousness. Just as others write beautiful poetry, you can make your life such a work of art that everyone who sees it will be inspired.

Meditation: Artistry for Living

Eknath Easwaran

Putting others first

We all need joy, and we can all receive joy in only one way, by adding to the joy of others. Putting others first is not a slogan and not a loss. It is how the fist of I opens. The eight points walk together: a passage in the morning while the day is still cool; a mantram whenever the trunk starts to wander; slowing down; one-pointed attention to the matter at hand; training the senses; spiritual fellowship; spiritual reading; and this — freedom from the small self, joy in helping, the far shore used for someone still in the water. In living for others, I come to life.

Passage Meditation

The shelf

Titles gathered into the nine rooms. Not pages to sit inside — a map of what has been walked.

Hold Me Tight

Sue Johnson

The Power of Vulnerability

Brené Brown

The Path of Love

Osho

The Tantra Experience / Tantric Transformation

Osho

TANTRA: The Way of Acceptance

Osho

You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For

Richard Schwartz

Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke

The Untethered Soul / Living Untethered

Michael Singer

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

When Things Fall Apart

Pema Chödrön

The Most Important Thing, Vol. 1 & 2

Adyashanti

The Direct Way

Adyashanti

The Way of Liberation

Adyashanti

Guided Meditation: Evoking the Divine Ground of Your Being

Adyashanti

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness in Plain English

Bhante Gunaratana

Take Your Time

Eknath Easwaran

Strength in the Storm

Eknath Easwaran

The Book of Life

J. Krishnamurti

I Am That

Osho

Intuition

Osho

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

Four Thousand Weeks

Oliver Burkeman

Good Morning, I Love You

Shauna Shapiro

Being Ram Dass / Becoming Nobody

Ram Dass

A Course in Miracles

Helen Schucman

The Way of Mastery

Shanti Christo Foundation

Power vs. Force / The Map of Consciousness Explained

David Hawkins

The Wisdom of Ibn Arabi

Sapientia Mundi Press

The Secret of Secrets (Secret of the Golden Flower)

Osho

Tao: The Golden Gate / When the Shoe Fits

Osho

The Book of Wisdom (Tibetan)

Osho

Commentaries on the Yoga Sutra

Pandit Rajmani Tigunait

Opening the Akashic Records / Waking Up in 5D / Living Your Best 5D Life

Maureen St. Germain

The Freedom Transmissions

Carissa Schumacher

The Power of Awareness

Neville Goddard

The Complete Works of Florence Scovel Shinn

Florence Scovel Shinn

The Collected Works of Thomas Troward

Thomas Troward

Becoming Supernatural / You Are the Placebo / Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself / Evolve Your Brain

Joe Dispenza

Access Super Consciousness

RJ Spina

The Frequency Code

Agata El Mrabet

Tuning the Human Biofield

Eileen Day McKusick

The Yoga of Time Travel

Fred Alan Wolf

Bringers of the Dawn

Barbara Marciniak

Seeing the Supernatural

Lee Strobel

Rosicrucian Principles for the Home and Business

H. Spencer Lewis

The Matrix of Four

Ethan Indigo Smith

Dying to Know

Ram Dass & Timothy Leary

When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi

Achilles in Vietnam

Jonathan Shay

Odysseus in America

Jonathan Shay

Anatomy of the Spirit / Energy Anatomy / Sacred Contracts / A Time for Grace

Caroline Myss

Song of the Spine

June Leslie Wieder

Polyvagal Theory / Polyvagal Safety

Stephen Porges

Polyvagal-Informed Restorative Movement Psychotherapy

Amber Elizabeth Gray

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk

The Emotion Code / The Body Code / The Heart Code

Bradley Nelson

It Didn’t Start with You

Mark Wolynn

Shake It Off Naturally (TRE)

David Berceli

Mind-Body Rejuvenation

Alannah Levian

Creative Integrative Medicine

Paul Drouin

Anatomy of the Soul

Curt Thompson

How God Changes Your Brain / The Spiritual Brain / Brain Weaver

Andrew Newberg

The Mind-Gut Connection

Emeran Mayer

Naʻauao Ola Hawaiʻi

Makaʻala Yates

The Tao of Long Life (Ch’Ang Ming)

Chee Soo

Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Living with the Earth

Tom Brown Jr.

The Tracker / The Vision / The Quest / Awakening Spirits

Tom Brown Jr.

What the Robin Knows

Jon Young

Coming Back to Life / World as Lover, World as Self / A Wild Love for the World

Joanna Macy

The Dream of the Earth / The Great Work

Thomas Berry

The Universe Story

Brian Swimme

Entangled Life

Merlin Sheldrake

Ways of Being

James Bridle

Gift of Power

Archie Fire Lame Deer

I Contain Multitudes

Ed Yong

From Contempt to Curiosity

Caitlin Walker

Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

Alcoholics Anonymous

Forming: A Work of Grace

David Takle

The Nature of Fear

Osho

You Are Enough

Panache Desai

Science and Sanity / Manhood of Humanity

Alfred Korzybski

The Master and His Emissary / The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

The Map / The Operating Manual to Life

David Dayan Fisher

Finite and Infinite Games

James Carse

How Emotions Are Made / Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain

Lisa Feldman Barrett

Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman

Anatomy of an Epidemic

Robert Whitaker

The Age of Diagnosis

Suzanne O’Sullivan

As a Man Thinketh

James Allen

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

Kenneth Stanley

Narrative Coaching

David Drake

Family Constellations Revealed

Indra Torsten Preiss

Gestalt Coaching

Peter Bluckert