Whirlpool Galaxy: part of spacetime.Does it depend on you to exist?
Visit Inveterate Bystander the main page for discussion of consciousness
Consciousness
Ramesh Balsekar: Consciousness Strikes
Ramana Maharshi & Others At Ease
Douglas Harding: The Headless Way
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge
Thinkers
Physicist Julian Barbour's Thoughts on Time
Quantum Mechanics & Consciousness
Vic Mansfield on Science & The Sacred
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Time & Consciousness |
Footfalls echo in the memory
TS Eliot, "Burnt Norton"
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You are what you are looking for |
What is common sense? It doesn't tell you that Earth is whirling around the sun. Nor does it say that gravity keeps you from hurtling off into space. It also would have rocks as solid. Yet, Earth does orbit at tremendous speed, your feet are attracted to earth, and the hardest rock contains immense emptiness. Why should it be surprising that consciousness is all? We cannot become aware of it (as an object) but can only be it. This is so obvious that to write about it belabors the point. It is the moon at which the finger points. There is so much more to life than looking for what we already have. Yet, we often cannot appreciate this until we see clearly that we are what we have been looking for. People of various religions have discovered the most uncommon of sense. One of them was a man born in Thuringia, Germany, five years before Dante. Read about him below. |
Self-realization is not unique to Eastern cultures, although enculturated. A medieval German wrote and preached at length on the subject. Here is part of a sermon from Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) to his congregation. In it he stresses the importance of emptying the ego to allow God to enter. |
Now pay earnest attention to this! I have often said, and great authorities agree, that to be a proper abode for God and fit for God to act in, a man should also be free from all [his own] things and [his own] actions, both inwardly and outwardly. Now we shall say something else. If it is the case that a man is emptied of things, creatures, himself and god, and if still god could find a place in him to act, then we say: as long as that [place] exists, this man is not poor with the most intimate poverty. For God does not intend that man shall have a place reserved for him to work in, since true poverty of spirit requires that man shall be emptied of god and all his works, so that if God wants to act in the soul, he himself must be the place in which he acts;and that he would like to do. For if God once found a person as poor as this, he would take the responsibility of his own action and would himself be the scene of action, for God is one who acts within himself. It is here, in this poverty, that man regains the eternal being that once he was, now is, and evermore shall be. Meister Eckhart, Sermon 28 |