Spiritual Books

Haemin Sunim

​​Humor opens closed hearts. Humor can free us from the grip of our thoughts. When we smile, we feel we can accept things we previously could not.We feel we can forgive those who have wronged us.Humor is an essential part of life.When we are joyful, our heart opens up to new things.When we are in a bad mood, we can’t be open to new things, no matter how wonderful they are. Without joy in our heart,our progress in life is slow and uninteresting.

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Adyashanti

When we perceive ourselves as consciousness, as awareness itself, it is life changing. This is a significant insight, and we can even call it its own kind of awakening—a fundamental shift out of identification with thoughts and feelings to the purely subjective experience of being consciousness or awareness—but it is not an end point. It is a midpoint of realization. We still have a fundamental difference between the perceiver and the perceived, between awareness or consciousness and everything that awareness or consciousness is aware of or conscious of. Next come the deeper states of realization, when the perceiver or the witness state collapses and when the perception of subject and object collapses. That is when we find our truth about the nature of our existence.

Loch Kelly

You have to begin where you are, but the one who starts the journey is not the one who awakens. “You” do not awaken, and awareness does not awaken. Awake awareness, which is contentless and unconditioned, realizes that it has always been awake and is the primary foundation of your conditioning and human life. Many people call this realization, or remembering who we truly are. One person said: “This is the feeling of who I’ve been at all ages in my life, which hasn’t changed.” It is so ordinary that it is extraordinary. When you awaken, you awaken from a looping thought pattern that has been called “me” and feels located behind your eyes, in the middle of your head. But awakening doesn’t make you become a nobody, a bliss-ninny, or a vacant robot. You are simply not the particular identity that you formerly took yourself to be. This journey starts with freedom from identification with our bodies and minds, but it ends up including and embracing everything from open-hearted awareness.

Albert Einstein

A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.

THE WORLD AS I SEE IT, 1934

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Rupert Spira

Enlightenment or awakening is not a particular experience or state of mind that may be achieved by practicing hard enough or meditating long enough. It is the recognition of the very nature of the mind.

There is nothing more familiar or better known than the simple experience of being aware. If someone were to ask us the question, ‘Are you aware?’ we would all answer with absolute certainty, ‘Yes’, and our answer would come from direct experience.

It would come from our obvious and intimate experience of simply being aware. Just as the sun does not need to direct its light in any particular direction in order to illuminate itself, so awareness does not need to direct its attention, the light of its knowing, in any particular direction in order to know itself.

In fact, any direction in which the sun directed the rays of its light would only illuminate something other than itself. Likewise, any direction in which awareness shone the light of its knowing would only give it knowledge of something apparently other than itself.

Thus, to know itself awareness does not have to undertake any special activity or direct the light of its knowing in any particular direction. No effort is required for awareness to know itself. In fact, any effort would take it away from itself.

Awareness knows itself simply by being itself.

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Thich Nhat Hanh

Look around you what you see is not your environment, it is you. Whatever nationality or culture we belong to, whatever religion we follow, whether we're Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and atheists, we can all see that the Earth is not inert matter. She is great being, who has herself given birth to many other great beings including Buddhas and bodhisattvas, prophets and saints, sons and daughters of God and humankind. The Earth is a loving mother, nurturing and protecting all peoples and all species without discrimination. When you realize the Earth is so much more than simply your environment, you'll be moved to protect her in the same way as you would yourself. This is the kind of awareness, the kind of awakening that we need, and the future of the planet depends on whether we're able to cultivate this insight or not. The Earth and all species on Earth are in real danger. Yet if we can develop a deep relationship with the Earth, we'll have enough love, strength and awakening in order to change our way of life. We can all experience a feeling of deep admiration and love when we see the great harmony, elegance and beauty of the Earth. A simple branch of cherry blossom, the shell of a snail or the wing of a bat all bear witness to the Earth's masterful creativity. Every advance in our scientific understanding deepens our admiration and love for this wondrous planet. When we can truly see and understand the Earth, love is born in our hearts. We feel connected. That is the meaning of love: to be at one. Only when we've truly fallen back in love with the Earth will our actions spring from reverence and the insight of our interconnectedness. Yet many of us have become alienated from the Earth. We are lost, isolated and lonely. We work too hard, our lives are too busy, and we are restless and distracted, losing ourselves in consumption.


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Svetasvatara Upanishad

To realize God, first control the outgoing senses and harness the mind. Then meditate upon the light in the heart of the fire--meditate, that is, upon pure consciousness as distinct from the ordinary consciousness of the intellect. Thus the Self, the Inner Reality, may be seen behind physical appearance.
Control your mind so that the Ultimate Reality, the self-luminous Lord, may be revealed. Strive earnestly for eternal bliss.
With the help of the mind and the intellect, keep the senses from attaching themselves to objects of pleasure.
They will then be punfied by the light of the Inner Reality,
and that light will be revealed.
The wise control their minds, and unite their hearts with the infinite, the omniscient, the all-pervading Lord.
Only discriminating souls practice spiritual disciplines.
Great is the glory of the self-luminous being, the Inner Reality.
Hear, all ye children of immortal bliss, also ye gods who dwell in the high heavens: Follow only in the footsteps of the illumined ones, and by continuous meditation merge both mind and intellect in the eternal Brahman.
The glorious Lord will be revealed to you.

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Alan Watts

To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.


But so long as you are not aware of the inseparability of thinker and thought, you will try to escape. From this follows, quite naturally, absorption. It is no effort; the mind does it by itself. Seeing that there is no escape from the pain, the mind yields to it, absorbs it, and becomes conscious of just pain without any “I” feeling it or resisting it.


It experiences pain in the same complete, unselfconscious way in which it experiences pleasure. Pain is the nature of this present moment, and I can only live in this moment. Sometimes, when resistance ceases, the pain simply goes away or dwindles to an easily tolerable ache.


At other times it remains, but the absence of any resistance brings about a way of feeling pain so unfamiliar as to be hard to describe. The pain is no longer problematic. I feel it, but there is no urge to get rid of it, for I have discovered that pain and the effort to be separate from it are the same thing.


Wanting to get out of pain is the pain; it is not the “reaction” of an “I” distinct from the pain. When you discover this, the desire to escape “merges” into the pain itself and vanishes.

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