BE
Threads

The Veil

A fold of story we took for a wall. Thinner than it feels, once you stop decorating it.

Baba names it plainly: the veil that separates man from God is false imagination, and it has many folds. Each plane is a less-false dream mistaken for waking. Watts calls the same thing the ego — a costume the universe puts on to play at being a stranger. Jason Louv, in the prison-planet episode, calls the dropping of the separate self the clear light. Myss would say the biography you clutch is writing itself into tissue. The Gnostic origin stories call it Pharaoh, the Tower, the firstborn identity that must fall. None of this is a war on the self. It is a wearing-out. The fish taken from water learns what water was. Bondage is not a mistake. It is how freedom gets its taste.

On this shelf

Titles that sit in this room. The books remain themselves.

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

In this weather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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