Love

Tom Das – pointing at the unspeakable (recent quotes from my Facebook page)

~ Tom Das ~ Leave a comment

Here are some of my recent posts from Facebook page (my account is http://www.facebook.com/tomdas.nd)

Everything you see is yourself, calling you back to yourself.

May your ever-seeking mind be engulfed and consumed by the warm smouldering embers of surrender.

Sometimes insight alone is enough. Sometimes practice is required.

Relax, let go & enjoy.
Freedom is already fully & completely present.
No need to pay too much attention to thoughts & feelings that say otherwise.

Notice all the ways you try to avoid THIS.

How can THIS be spoken of? How can THIS be taught? In the ‘final analysis’, what is there to teach?

The freedom that we are looking for is wholly verifiable in our experience right now. We do not necessarily need to have a special experience or to obtain a special knowledge for this freedom to become apparent. Nor is belief of any kind required. Stay true to what you know directly. Don’t pretend to know something you don’t and don’t take on someone else’s beliefs.

Simply quieten your mind and notice what is happening. Examine how suffering is created and the notice the myriad of beliefs that underlie it. Notice the non-existence of an entity (‘you’) that is the author of thoughts and actions. This ‘you’/author is just an imagined product of throught.

Notice fulfillment is not to be gained through either objects, accumulative knowledge or specific/certain experiences, all of which come and go. See this for yourself. Don’t take my word for it.

Dare to seek and know what is true for yourself, and stay true to your own direct experience, even if it means you are contradicting a supposed authority in the matter.

Good luck!

When I first started teaching I tended towards just direct pointing. I quickly realised there are a whole host of reasons why people were not getting it, or if they were ‘getting it’, they quickly ‘lost it’.

I began to understand the value of emotional work, of heart opening, of regular spiritual practices, of becoming more sattvic – ie. the value of the progressive path (as well as the negatives too, eg. the reinforcement of a sense of doership/ego).

Remember that consciousness/awareness, if you want to use that concept, doesn’t need any teachings. Freedom is already here, totally and completely. It is only the mind that needs teachings.

A relatively uncluttered mind in need of little emotional work may respond to direct pointing, whereas sometimes some decluttering needs to occur first.

If emotions are not deeply felt, there is risk of emotional bypassing.
Emotional work may need to be done either prior to or after awakening, otherwise unnecessary suffering and destructive tendencies will continue on a relative level with the body-mind in question.

If you observe, you can learn the apparent mechanics of suffering and awakening, which when understood makes the teachings much more potent.

This has immense value in my experience to an apparent someone who is struggling in their belief in separation.

If you have come this far then you will also realise that ‘awareness’ is just another way of saying ‘presence/appearance of objects’. Here the subject-object distinction falls away.

The idea of a subject/awareness that is aware of objects is just that – an idea or concept.

When this is seen one can no longer even talk of awareness, as that implies a subject and object, a perceiver and perceived, and this is now just seen to be an assumption, a imagined creation of throught.

There is only ‘what-is’.

Simple, direct, unspeakable.

The concepts of the teaching, such as a ‘pure awareness’, were useful tools on the journey to remove the basic ignorance, but can now also be dispensed with once their ‘job has been done’.

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Krishnamurti: meditation is not an escape from the world

~ Tom Das ~ Leave a comment

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Meditation is not an escape from the world; it is not an isolating self-enclosing activity, but rather the comprehension of the world and its ways. The world has little to offer apart from food, clothes and shelter, and pleasure with its great sorrows.

Meditation is wandering away from this world; one has to be a total outsider. Then the world has a meaning, and the beauty of the heavens and the earth is constant. Then love is not pleasure. From this all action begins that is not the outcome of tension, contradiction, the search for self-fulfillment or the conceit of power.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, taken from his book ‘The Only Revolution’

Freedom is Absolute Total Forgiveness

~ Tom Das ~ 1 Comment

(This question is continued from a prior post: Responsibility: if there is no doer and no-self…then what about responsibility?)

Question: OK, you mentioned total forgiveness? That’s confused me. Why do you say that?

Tom: Well everything is just unconditionally accepted, choicelessly. That’s just the way things are. Whatever happens is whatever happens, and in that sense it is totally accepted regardless of what the body-mind thinks of it.

You could say our naturally awareness accepts and ’embraces’ everything within that happens within our awareness. In that sense there is constantly total forgiveness, or total  love, not the emotional love or forgiveness, though these phenomena tend to arise more frequently, but the choiceless acceptance/love/forgiveness of whatever is happening.

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Heart-Opening, Non-Duality & Freedom

~ Tom Das ~ 1 Comment

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(Continued from a previous post: Responsibility: if there is no doer and no-self, and if there no nobody here doing anything, then what about responsibility?)

Question: You mentioned earlier that the heart opens? That sounds rather fluffy and vague to me – what does it mean?

Tom: Yes, I know, it’s a bit of a vague term, but I like it! What I call heart opening is not the same as Freedom – it’s important to realise that – but there is a relationship between the two. The heart can open to a large extent without Freedom being realised, and conversely Freedom can be realised and the heart not be open. However the heart can only really fully open when Freedom has been realised, and by that I mean when the notion and sense of doership has been seen through and seen to be false.

So what is heart opening? Well it happens differently with different people, depending on their conditioning, but essentially it is an openness of the emotional centre and a tendency towards feeling open, loving, peaceful and joyous.

Question: What do you mean by ‘openness of the emotional centre’?

Tom: I mean a willingness to feel one’s feelings, really feel what you’re feeling. When this happens, when we allow feelings to come and go, over time our emotions start to balance out and a feeling of wellbeing and love can start to naturally emerge.

We start to feel happier, more grateful, more loving, kinder, and more considerate. A sense of wellbeing becomes our norm. These are the characteristics of an open heart, a loving heart, and as I said, it can occur before of after enlightenment (realising Freedom), or not at all.

Q: Does that mean that you become unconditionally loving all the time?

Good question. Of course, like all subtle objects (such as emotions, feelings and mental states), emotional love and compassion also come and go. This is quite natural. You are not necessarily loving 100% of the time, far from it! You remain thoroughly human: you can get irritated by relatively superficial things, you may feel grumpy if you haven’t had enough sleep, but the tendency is more towards those loving emotions.

You see in Freedom it doesn’t matter: you are not trying to be loving or kind, you are not trying to open the heart. It’s something that can’t be forced, and the heart is naturally more open at some times compared to at other times. That is fine, and that’s just how it goes. Sometimes it’s good for the heart to be closed. But, when it’s safe to do so, we can allow ourselves to feel whatever we are feeling, not pushing ourselves, not forcing our heart open or becoming overly sentimental, but by just being real with who we are at this moment in time.

This willingness to feel is a form of fearlessness. We are unafraid to feel, we are unafraid to feel unhappy, we are unafraid to feel even fear. When we are essentially unafraid of our feelings, we start to become extraordinarily sensitive. Lots of emotions and feelings can flood in, feelings we may have held back and suppressed for many years. Energetically and emotionally this can be a time of great ups and downs in our ‘spiritual-emotional’ journey.

Our emotional apparatus, over time, becomes more sensitive and we learn who we are on an emotional level. Over time our emotions start to balance our and come into alignment with the body and the world. At this point we can learn to better trust our emotions as a source of intelligence and allow them to guide us in our actions and relationships.

Q: Did you say that heart opening can come before or after Enlightenment? (To be continued in a future post)

Q: I’ve noticed that I often feel less than I did before, for example I care less about some things now (To be continued in a future post)

Please help me to deal with the agony I feel in connection with the suffering of animals in the world

~ Tom Das ~ 7 Comments

Dear Tom

Could you please help me to deal with the agony I feel in connection with the suffering of animals in the world? I am so utterly moved by every sign of an animal’s suffering, that I don’t feel even glimpses of peace anymore. The latest news was how in some Asian country they use dogs’ fur, and to get it without having the cavaderic rigidity ruining the fur’s quality, the furs are pulled across the ears of the dog with alive body and unimaginable torments. And this is, of course, just one example of many. But I suffer even when I witness how an animal in my neighborhood is not treated with love and kindness.

Could you please share with me how you explain the suffering in the world and what you would recommend to someone like me?

Thank you so much for reading this!

 

Dear Questioner

There are indeed many terrible things happening in this world, and animal suffering, especially at the hands of humans, is certainly one of them.

So firstly, who says you shouldn’t feel upset when you see animals suffer? Who says you shouldn’t feel pain, sorrow and anger? What’s wrong with feeling so-called negative emotions? Perhaps these thoughts are natural and appropriate, perhaps it is natural for the human organism to feel angry or upset when it perceives injustice and cruelty, perhaps emotions are there to guide us and inform the quality and energy of our response to situations life throws at us – perhaps – who am I or anyone else to tell you otherwise? And more importantly, how will you find out for yourself what is true?

If you accept my or someone else’s answer, that’s second hand knowledge, that’s a belief, a theory to be stored away in your mind along with other theories it has collected. And beliefs and theories can always be doubted. If you are like me, there’s always a corner of your mind that can (and will) doubt the belief. What’s important is that you find out for yourself. So how will you do this?

I recommend you watch yourself, look at yourself, your reactions, how you respond. Write down and/or talk about how it makes you feel when you see animals suffer. Writing things down can be particularly powerful. Notice the thoughts that appear. Notice the words that appear in your head, the narrative. Are there angry thoughts? How do you feel about those who perpetrate these horrific acts? Be honest now, be honest with yourself. Do you judge them? Do you hate them? Do you understand them? Do you forgive them? Find out your genuine thoughts and feelings, allow your mind to speak its truth, find out for yourself. Feel how it feels in your body too. Discover the truth of your reactions on the mental, emotional, and feeling levels. Now you are learning about yourself, your psychology, who you are, discovering, uncovering. This is firsthand factual information, not based on beliefs.

Now, you say that you no longer even feel ‘glimpses of peace’ anymore. A level of emotion that regularly overwhelms you or prevents you functioning in daily life indicates to me that perhaps there are some unresolved issues in you (I say ‘perhaps’ because I do not know for sure – only you can know for sure, only you can find out if my words are true for you – maybe they are not true, maybe they do not apply to you).

Sometimes when we have unresolved issues with ourselves, for examples perhaps we have been mistreated in the past, we project our sadness and pain onto other beings, such as animals. When we see animals suffer, we not only respond to their suffering but we also project our past hurts and suffering onto them, thus adding to the pain felt. This distorts and clouds our emotional response. Again, see if this is true for you. Have you been mistreated in the past? Does the way you feel when you see animals suffering remind you of how you felt when you were younger? Is there still unresolved pain at play? If there is, then gently and lovingly healing this pain will go a long way to re-balancing your emotional response to animal suffering, or any other suffering for that matter, and allow your emotions to more effectively and accurately guide you through life.

In my own experience, when emotions are explored, felt, understood and allowed to flow, the unresolved hurts and pains often underlie them can be brought to the surface and lovingly healed. Distorted concepts and thinking can also be exposed and seen through. Our thoughts and feelings become aligned to reality. Then thoughts, feelings and emotions can become our friends, our guides. They can tell us when someone has crossed the line, when our boundaries have been trespassed, or when we perhaps have gone too far. They can also tell us when something is right, when something is good, when something is working well. This is all part of our intuitive sense, our natural intelligence.

For me personally, every now and then emotions pour through. For example when I see humans, animals or children suffer. Or when I watch a film or hear lyrics that touch something in me. The emotion pours in, and at the same time that’s ok. And because it’s ok on a deeply felt level, not just conceptually, there’s no suffering. Emotion, yes, but no suffering. Sometimes I chose to turn away from watching something cruel on TV to avoid that emotional response, and that’s ok too. I can see why I do it. It’s ok. I accept myself. Sometimes I can see how a past hurt or current attachment may be playing its role in distorting my emotions. And that’s ok. That’s naturally lovingly allowed. And sometimes healing, a deep healing comes from all of this loving acceptance, this Presence that naturally and effortlessly is. Or perhaps it doesn’t. Either way is fine.

It’s a wonderful mystery to me how this all works. Even though I could probably make sense of it psychologically and scientifically, at the heart of it, it’s all a wonderful mystery.

And why all this terrible suffering? I don’t know. I won’t give you some philosophical platitude or logical statement – because the truth is I don’t know. And it can be terrible. But we find ourselves on this world nonetheless, and we find ourselves living this life, having these feelings, dealing with what comes our way…

There is more I could say, but I’ll leave you with the above for now. Let me know how it all goes and please feel free to ask further questions.

With love and gratitude

Tom