Light

We are light emitters. Now, from a scientific point of view, all matter emits light, even stones, but ours is an extraordinary radiance, rapturously described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead as “the luminous splendour of the colourless light of Emptiness.” We think we are bodies going about the business of the body, but that’s vyakti, the outer self. The inner self, the vyakta, is pure light. I occasionally have the experience of seeing a soft white glow around the head of the man I am counselling. On those occasions I know again that all is well. There’s nothing he needs to do.  

Do nothing

“I can of my own self do nothing.” I am just coming to see how deep this truth goes. I was shredding my 2015 diary yesterday and came across this jotting: “Change nothing. Do nothing. All that is required of you, He performs.” It was in my hand, but I didn’t write it. Maybe Joel Goldsmith was briefly running things. Truth is, we do not know why we do what we do. An inner power acts; we think we’re doing something. “I did it!” we say. Or, expanding on the delusion, “High five!” Or shrivel up like a dried blueberry, as I did on a call-in show back in the day when no one called in. Are we actors? Plainly, no. We are the acted upon, the done-through. “Do you know how to do nothing?” asked Lao Tzu, pointing to the one thing we can be sure of: It’s all a mystery, top to bottom.

The beauty principle

A man went to India where he met a guru. He asked the guru what he should do. The guru said, “Don’t do anything.” Jesus spoke likewise: “Look at the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.”

Mother’s children

Life is not a problem. Our ideas about Life—that’s the problem. Every problem we THINK we have is mind-created. The problem-creating mind is the only problem. There are no other problems. Objectively, nothing is a problem.

Still, we exhaust ourselves searching for remedies. There is only one remedy: Stop searching. Do nothing. Be quiet.

The mother of all problems is the belief that we are the body. This is a false belief but extraordinarily fecund. Her children look different but in one essential aspect they are the same: Each is an in-valid.