1. We each have an outer self and an inner self. We saw that the inner self (or the emperical ego) is the self that can be seen, while the inner self (or transcendental self) can never be made an object or thing of any sort, but rather is, among other terms, a sense of freedom and a great liveration from the known, from the finite, and from the empirical ego. 2. The inner self lives in a timeless, eternal now. Eternity does not mean everlasting time, but a moment without time which happens to be exactly this moment, when seen correctly as an endless present encompassing all time. The true self is aware of this ever-present, never-ending, eternal moment, through which all time passes-and, while never entering the stream of time itself, remains as its unmoved witness. 3.The inner self is a great mystery, or pure emptiness and unknowingness. Precisely because it can never be known or made an object, the true self is no-thing-ness, pure mysterium, an ongoing unkown knowingness, or cognizing emptiness, or simply, the great mystery of your own being. 4. The inner self is diving, or perfectly on with infinite spirit in a supreme identity. As St. Thomas put it, if the eyeball were colored red, it couldnt see red; but because it is clear or redless or colorless, it can see colors. Just so, becuase the inner self sees space, it is itself spaceless or infinite; and because it sees time, it is itself timeless or eternal. And this infinite and eternal self is the home of spirit in you and in each and every sentient being. The overall number of inner selves is but one. Every person feels exactly the way you do when he/she feels into his or her own witness or I AMness: Since the true self has not objects or qualities, it cant be different in anybody; it is the same radiant divine shining in you and me and all of spirits creations. 5.Hell is identification with the outer self. Hell is not a place; hell is not somewhere that we go when we are dead; hell is not punishment handed out to us by something or someone else-it is rather our contracting, sinning, separating activity of choosing the wrong self to identify with. We identify witht that which are not, we identify merely and only with the empirical ego, the self that can be seen; and that puny, finite ,temporal, limited, and lacerating identity is nothing other than hell. Hell is a horrendous case of mistaken identity. We have forgotten who and what we are, a transcendental self plugged straight into spirit, speaking with words of God and shining witht the radiance of the Goddess. But we identify only with the finite self, the objective self, the self that can be seen, and not the self that is the seer, divine and infinite and eternal. 6. Heaven is the discovery and realization of the inner divine self, the supreme identity. The mystics East and West have long proclaimed that the Kingdom of Heaven is within-because the simple fact is the I AMness is Christ Consciousness, spirit itself, the Godhead in me and as me. The true self in each and every one of us is the true self that Jesus of Nazareth realized -I and the Father are ONE-and that realization, quite simply, transformed him from a temporal Jesus into an eternal Christ, a transformation that he asks us to remember and repeat ourselves. Of course, this does not mean that my empirical ego is Christ, or that my personal self is Christ. To believe that is, indeed, a schizophrenic delusion. Nobody is saying that my personal self is spirit, but rather that the transcendental witness of that personal self is one with the spirit in all beings. Your transcendental self is Christ; your personal self is you. 7. The divine is one with the all, given in grace and sealed in glory. At some point, as one rests in the inward witness, feeling the atmosphere of freedom, the very sense of an inner self versus an outer self will often vanish, seen for the illusion it is, leaving only the sense of what the mystics call one taste. My transcendental self gives way to nondual suchness, or what Meister Eckhart calls Is-ness. For spirit is not only the self of all beings, but the such-ness or is-ness or thus-ness of all things. To freedom from any object is thus added the fullness of being one with all objects. I no longer witness the mountains, I am the mountains; I no longer feel the Earth, I am the Earth; I no longer see the ocean, I am the ocean; I no longer pray to spirit, I am spirit. So seamlessly does the world, sacred and profane, arise is one piece that I can find no boundary-not a single fundamentally real boundary-anywhere in the entire universe. There is only the radiant, all-pervading, deeply divine I AMness, within which all the worlds arise and fall, are born and dide, explode into being and fade in oblivion, carried along by the one and only thing that is always every present, even unto the ends of the world; this ultimate mystery in emptiness and release, freedom and fullness, ground and goal, grace and glory, this self of mine that I can no longer find, as the raindrops in the insistent is-ness beat gently on the roof a beautiful sound of heartbeat thunder, thump, thump, thump, just....like.....that.....
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 04:15:25 +0000
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