Conscious Intentions

No living thing, animals or human being can ever live beyond their conscious level. A lion kills its prey by using its claws and teeth and strength, because that is the only way it knows how to kill, if it knows better it would probably use a shotgun and save some energy.

Similarly it is with us human beings, a lot of times we get frustrated by the way other people are treating us and putting us through, and we cannot help but ask why is he/she doing this? Why can’t he/she be like that nice lady/man that lives next door? Why can’t he/she be more civilized?

He/she can’t be like any other, because he/she is not any other! Everyone of us have very different level of consciousness. In the bible, when Jesus was being tortured to death he said, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” This is exactly what Jesus is teaching us, that we are not fully conscious of ourselves, the people who tortured Jesus, did what they thought was good for them and the people, although from our point of view we thought they were bad, because obviously we have become more evolved consciously, or have we? Because something tells me, if Jesus reappeared as Jesus himself on this planet, the church would most likely be the first to punish him for blasphemy.

Hitler also didn’t think what he did was bad, he did what he thought was good for his people the Aryans. No body would do anything that they think is bad. Unfortunately bad and good is a very relative term.

This is why we see parents hitting their children telling them to stop crying and suppressing their emotions. The parents are doing what they think is best for their children, although we all know that is not the best for the child, but most of us know what is best only theoretically, but how sure are we that we won’t treat the same child the same way if we were being put in the same situation? We have to be able to raise our conscious level if we want to live well and live wisely. Your intentions don’t mean a thing if your conscious level is low. Your intentions may be as pure as Jesus’s but your conscious level is as low as Hitler’s, and if your act from that conscious level, you are sure to bring misery with your good intentions.
Remember, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The following passages are taken from the book Meetings With Remarkable People by Osho, I hope it will serve its purpose by making sense of the existence of enlightened beings such as Jesus, Buddha and Krishna which has been questioned up to no end through out history; a history that is just filled with people who believed in the existence of people like Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan more than these wonderful personages:

Man can live in two ways: one is in time, one is beyond time. History is the name of the life that we live in time; it leaves marks in the temporal. But there is also a life which we live beyond time-it leaves no marks anywhere. It is not just an accident that existence of Jesus is doubtful; so it the existence of Krishna, Lao Tzu and Zarathustra. Why is their existence doubtful? They have not really left mark in time. They lived a life of interiority, the lived in themselves. Their life had no visible, tangible impact, but they transformed human consciousness. They lived in consciousness and they impressed human consciousness. But history takes no note of them. History takes not of Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Tamburlaine; history takes not of people who live in time and leave marks on the sands of time. But people like Buddha, Christ, almost pass from existence as if they have not passed at all. That’s what I mean by going beyond history. Don’t live in events: live in awareness.

-Osho

How to Help your Baby Attain Enlightenment

It was on a particular night 20-30 years ago in Germany, when a heavily depressed man decided to commit suicide and end his life all the while saying, “I CANT LIVE WITH MYSELF!” repeatedly. When all of a sudden a voice arose in him asking, “Who is this Self that I cant live without? Is this Self me? I don’t think so, is my work, my troubles and problems me? I don’t think so. If it is not me then who am I? ah! I know it, I am the witness, the awareness behind all this. I am!”

And with that, instead of killing himself, it was his ego that got dissolved, it was his ego that got killed, he dis-identified himself with his ego (please note that I don’t mean to say that everyone who asks him/herself this question will attain enlightenment)

Today we know this man to be one of the greatest and most respected spiritual teacher of our time, he has written 2 books which became bestsellers, and he is currently collaborating with Oprah Winfrey in making online spiritual class that can be watched for free or which can be downloaded or streamed via Oprah’s official website, a feat that has never been done before in the spiritual department, it is being viewed by millions and millions of people from around the globe, all the while awakening them to who they truly are. I’ am sure you have guessed who he is by now; he is none other than Eckhart Tolle.

In this post I would like to share with you something rather interesting that I grasped from one of his A New Earth online class.

Eckhart was teaching parents on how to raise awareness of the present moment and to avoid their children from identifying with forms and objects around them, and to teach them from the beginning how to see things as they are and not to identify things with labels that we give them.

The problem with most of us is that we cannot see things as they are, we are too attached with the labels, the moment we see a tree or a bird, our mind gives it a name, and adds a comment to it (good comment or bad comment does not matter, comment is comment), and instead of seeing the tree, the bird as they truly are, which is life, which is energy, which is that, we are too engrossed with the labels and the thoughts.

I invite you to take a walk in the garden and start observing nature, look at the trees and birds, but do not label them, or make comments about them in your mind, just don’t think anything about it, but just look, observe it. You will notice how alive and radiant it is, and by observing its radiance, you will feel alive as well, because you and whatever it is you are looking at is part of one whole being.

Now you, an adult may understand what I am saying, but you can’t expect a small child to understand at all, and it is very important for a human being to understand that things are not the label that you give them from a very early age, so their mind won’t be conditioned into labeling things and identify with them.

Now the question arise how to teach a child this thing, and this is where Eckhart Tolle shows why he is what he is. When he was asked this question he said that whenever your curious little child asks you “mom/dad, what is that thing over there?”

Instead of saying “oh, it’s a bird, sweetie.” You should say “oh, that is called a bird.”

This makes a whole lot of difference, if you answer it like the latter you are implying that what the child is looking at is not a bird, but something that is called a bird in this beautiful planet of ours! What it is cannot be defined; it can only be experienced or witnessed. The moment you consider that thing to be the label that you give it, you are blocking life to yourself, you are blocking the radiance that life has to offer you, through what ever it is that you are observing, because your mind is just making so much noise, that you can’t experience the stillness where life resides in all its glory and might.

Part of what it means to be enlightened is to be able to see things as they really are, to be able to see things through the eyes of a baby, for whom everything in this world is so vibrant, so new, and so alive. To dis-identify the labels you give to the things that you see. I don’t mean that you should not label things, you should, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to address things, but do not identify those things with the label. If you can do that, then you shall witness and experience the glory of this universe first hand! I wish you good luck in your endeavor.

Sankhara

To cure an illness, the first thing we need to do is to identify it, know what it is and its nature. You cannot cure an illness if you don’t know what it is in the first place, complaining about it will not help you either, in fact if any, and it just causes more misery and magnifies the pain.

One of the things that I would like to address over here is Habit. What is habit? What is it’s nature? How is it formed?

Habit is a mental volition, a mental conditioning which has become part of the subconscious, it has been formed in our subconscious, and came to be because we repeated the same actions over and over again, and in due time it became a habit.

Buddhism refers to this as sankhara, which if viewed from a psychological lense refers to as the habitual mind pattern that is formed in the unconscious mind. Sankhara is what gives everyone a unique character, objectively speaking, I will not add “good” or “bad” here.

Spiritually speaking, it is what sows the seeds for the next rebirth, when we die, it is actually our body that dies, our mind or consciousness does not die, and the sankhara that it has gained from its previous life is then carried with this mind and is being used to form the basis of the character of the next life that this mind will be living. As long as the mind has sankhara we will still be under the cycle of rebirth.

We normal mundane human beings has sankharas that has been accumulated even from many of our previous lives and god knows how many lives we have led, and to be free of the cycle of birth and death, to be enlightened, we have to rid ourselves of all these sankharas or all these mental volitions and habit pattern.

The question now arises, how do we rid ourselves of these Sankharas?

We should not do anything, which is actually much harder than it sounds, because when we do nothing, these Sankharas arises within us and we are gripped with this urge to act on this urge, and thereby we are just strengthening the sankhara in the process because we are allowing ourselves to be a slave to our sankharas, to be a slave to our mind.

The key lies in being aware, when we become still and become aware, these sankharas are bound to surface within us (now do you understand the adage “a still mind is a devil’s workshop”?), it may even come in the form of physical pain sometimes, the key is to observe this pain, to observe where it is coming from, to be aware that it is there now.

Sankhara refers to any form compound, it is the “stuff” that life is made of, a tree, a cloud, whatever, it is made out of sankhara, it’s character is sankhara, it is the blueprint of every ‘stuff’. The sankhara is not permanent, it is temporary; everything is temporary. Therefore it is bound to disappear even when you don’t do anything about it, just know that it will disappear and that it is temporary, and when you don’t react to it, what happens is that the sankhara will gradually weaken its grip towards you and its power will diminish, and eventually that particular sankhara will be destroyed.

To give an illustration, picture one of those toys that has a key behind it which needs to be winded, and after winding you leave the key and the toy starts dancing and does its thing, now, if you want to stop this dancing and noise, you have to do nothing, they key will automatically go back to its original state and the toy will stop dancing. The Buddha compared with a rope, which after twisting it many times, you leave it; it will unwind by itself and get back to its original unwinded shape.

Now based on this theory, we have a long way to go; I don’t mean to discourage you. Based on the fact that we have sankharas within our minds that has come from so many lives that we have lived, so we have a lot of sankharas to be rid of. The way to do it is to be aware, be aware of what you are doing observe yourself.

Anger, for example, creates a strong sankhara within you, now if you react to anything by getting angry, which is a mental volition, it will just strengthen it. If you are angry what you should do is observe yourself, observe the racing heart beat, the hard breathing, the rise in your body temperature, and so on. To be enlightened is to be free of all these sankharas, from all these mental volitions and mental conditioning and become unconditioned.

Tradition relates that after Gautama the Buddha’s complete enlightenment he uttered these beautiful words that are written in the Dhammapada:

'Seeking but not finding the housebuilder,

I have traveled through the round of countless births.

How painful is birth over and over again.

Oh housebuilder! You have now been caught!

You shall not build a house again.

Your rafters have been broken. Your ridgepole demolished.

The unconditioned consciousness has been attained.

And every kind of craving has been destroyed.'

-(Dhammapada, verses 153,154)

The ‘housebuilder’ that Buddha talks about is this very mental faculty of sankhara whose products, the mental volition, are conditioned by and created due to mental ignorance

Being Wisdom

As some of you might have noticed, i have changed my blog's name from Freak Wisdom to Being Wisdom.

This marks a big change in maturity, one can say an evolution from a freak to a being.

the past 2 years has been a time where i have experienced alot of spiritual growth, and have become more deeply immersed in spirituality, philosophy, and psychology, things that makes human, a human BEING.

where as in the past, if you have been reading this blog since the beginning days, i used to write blogs based on things that was frustrating, my complains and rants. things that was not supposed to be said was said. my state of mind was pretty much like the mind of a Freak.

Being Wisdom is inspired from the teaching of the Buddha, a teaching which i have elaborated in one of my recent posts.

the Buddha described that there are three levels of wisdom:

Sut Maya Punya (wisdom heard or read from someone or somewhere)

Chinta Maya Punya (wisdom from ones own intellect)

Bhavna Maya Punya (wisdom that is experienced and immersed in our own being)

as you may have figured out that Being Wisdom is inspired from the third level of wisdom that Gautama the Buddha so rightly described.

A Wisdom that cannot be put into words, simply because if it is then it becomes one of the other 2 lower levels of wisdom. A type of wisdom unheard of in the western civilization who considers wisdom simply to be a mere set of words spoken or read, or something out of the intellect.

The third level of wisdom comes from ones very own being, it comes in the form of an enormously englightening feeling, where you feel that your soul is just singing through your feeling, where you just feel like you want to burst into a million pieces because you can hardly contain it. a wisdom born out of the stillness of ones own mind, body and soul.