The silent background

There is a background to all that appears, which does
not depend upon what manifests but which ALL that
manifests depends on.

This background which is silent,
formless, tasteless, without scent and has no feeling
is YOU, the "I". It is always present as that which
observes the dance of sound, form, taste, scent and
feelings, experiences. It is NOT itself an experience
but the NON-experience in which all appears and by
which all is created. This still silence is the
Eternal itSelf, it is this which observes Life through
the human form and YOU ARE THIS, always.

The illusion of time and space arises out of the
action of this stillness, its action manifests as the
objective universe and the stillness is the sole
experiencer of this, its own action. ALL is a product
of this silent stillness, it is the producer and NEVER
can be the product of anything, it just IS. There is
never a time when anything other than this silence is
the One experiencing the All and when we cease to
overlook this One we are rested AS it as the silence
in which all is appearing, One with it all.

Our ignorance of the fact that only this silence is the
observer, the experiencer, of all that is created by
it does not in any way deny that we are it. It simply
means that we are overlooking it, we are unaware of
our own Awareness. Once we are aware that we are aware
we SEE that we are this Awareness which is prior to
all that exists as the objectivity in time and space.

There is nothing to search for once you realise that
this everpresent silence IS what you are, you are
always, already home, you ARE the once imagined goal.
Once this recognition takes place that which is SEEN
and known again is exactly the same for each body in
which it is recognised. The description of it comes
from the experience of knowing it directly and such a
description carries within it a taste of the Divine
reminding those who are overlooking and pointing them
back to the home that they never left.

Avasa.

Last embrace

When desperation comes, when you feel you have lost all your dreams, it is when it has arrived the time in which a deep depression can come. It means to let go completly of the mind's plots and tricks about Life and let Life leaving you totally, in each moment, with no plan, with no ideas about anything at all.

The fact is that losing yourself will be much more painful than seeing all projects or ideas one had about the future dissolve and often this last lost is fought intensily. Even suicide looks an alternative as paradoxically we intuitivly feel that the end of this pain will come if "we" drop our anchors away. The last object in the dream of Life that must go is infact that object that is what we consider ourselve to be. The sense of existing as a person, the Iamness itself, is infact still a something where what we truly are is Nothingness itself, it is that Pure Void that sees it all. That is why when we feel we have come to be one with everything a big feeling of love arises and of emotional connection with everything and everybody. But that feeling of radiance, that is actually the expansion into everything - the BECOMING everything - has to reach the highest point that is the dissolving of the last object into that pool of love, the "I am itself". That last quantum leap, from One to Zero in a sense, happens by itself as for definition cannot occour with the help of any imaginary individual, any imaginary "me". That almost endless bliss has to melt in its highest vibration that is Silence. That all-encompassing gratefulness must expand into a kind of silent prayer for existence to be as it is, with no-one to which that gratefulness is adressed to and nothing one is grateful about.

One has to lose his dream and the last object in the dream is oneself. One gets lost and never comes back - if not as a empty ghost with no center or indipendent will - in the realization to be the Dreamer.

In this process, as this death is just the dissolution of an idea not of a real somebody, it has to be understood that whatever happens in one's apparent personal life is just set up to awake oneself to what one is. Life will bring the apparent individual up and down with illusory victories and illusory defeats with the entire impersonal aim to SEE what we truly are. The dream of Life has to fail you, even to betray you, to shake you from this hypnotic illusion to be a person. As long as one feels or thinks to be separated from Life, that sudden bends of Existence can look painful and unfair, but they are utterly necessary to unweave the dream web in which we look trapped in.

The last illusion to drop is that NO-ONE is actualy trapped as there is no-one ever. In other words, the last illusion that drops is the idea to be the subject of the dream itself, and as this last object dissolves the attention moves from this illusory subject - the me - to its real one, this eternal I.

That true subject was what out of which the dream of Life was weaved and what was in a sense directing the entire show all the time. Out of this so called global perspective nothing looks anymore unfair, but necessary, unvoidable and therefore utterly perfect.

Even before this is totallly true of oneself, the Dream is totally perfect in each moment. Knowing it or not it is the difference between hell and paradise.
Life is not fair or unfair, Life does what it does. When there is attachment to the Dream or even to a minute part of it, the capable hands of Love will be busy to let us open our arms again so we can embrace Life in its totality and dissolve in that final embrace.

Shakti

Dark night of the soul

Fear, and all fears are based on fear of death, is often accompanied by a sense of meaningless for life. What you believe to be is a person and as the sense of being a separate individual dies also all the "reasons" that were keeping the idea of being a person going will dissolve one after the other.

This means that we might experience it as a sense of vacuity in ourselve, a void that is not perceived positivly as silence and peace but as a black hole that is sucking us back and destroying all things we were living for. This state that you could describe as depression is actually a very spiritual state that needs to be addressed as such: YOU ARE DYING, not the body, but the "ME".

This death of the ego can be so strongly refused that even suicide can be on the cards as an option to avoid to feel that extreme suffering: it is not actually an option as -even if the body dies- that suffering will be at last felt completly anyway, so really suicide is not a way to stop the suffering. If we could have a choice about it, it is of course far better to experience the pain and go over it and live afterwards a free life. The message is correct: dying, but is a message for the me and not for the body itself.

This deep crisis of the ego brings desperation, depression and a sense of meaningless in living life: see clearly that these feelings are a sign of a spiritual crisis, the darkest moments before the dawn, the crossing of the core of the sense of feeling separated from Life. They dont last forever, they seem not to go away because there is an avoidance about them.

Be clear that no emotion is too big to be observed as whataver is the feeling - frustration, anger, fear, or even desperation - you are what is seeing it coming up in consciousness and not the subject of it. In other terms the feeling is present, but you dont HAVE it, it is simply there. Recognizing this allows you see that there is a distance in sense between you, Consciousness, and the psycological suffering, it reduces the drama that the mind builds up about the suffering. For istance, the fear of not having money or being lonely might be present and needs to be felt fully for it to go away complety, but all the drama about YOU being poor and lonely is something fictious that entertain the "poor me" and self-pity image.

As long as your attention is on the story, on the drama, you will not be able to rest in the feeling itself because you will go in the mental story of it. Often we are thrown to avoid to sit with the feeling present and we run into strategies that temporarely less the pain. Becoming conscious of these strategies, (you will know with a bit of honesty which one you are playing) it is already a big step. What has to be clearly understood is that as long as you go into the strategies of avoidance the feeling will keep on being present on the background and when all the strategies will stop functioning ( they all do), when the sense of desperation is reaching a point of unbearability then the only possibiliy left is sitting with our pain without trying to fix it, hide it, or send it away.

There is no other way around, that burning sensation has to be felt fully and when this is done, it will disappear completly from your life to the point that you have been able to face it.

Shakti

Openess

More in our lives we can face the fear without any stepping back without attempting to cancel it or diminish it and the greater will be our capacity to feel passion in life. The concept of the "me", the concept of being separate individuals from the rest of the universe, is what generates fear. Only if we conceive the world and the surrounding reality as separate from us, we feel fear: fear or terror of not getting what one wants or that what one loves can be taken away from us. That's why we build defenses and strategies to protect ourselve from fear, we believe that those barriers could protect us from feeling the fear.
When one is able to sit with this fear, an inner fire begins to burn, a flame that consumes the sense of separation that we feel respect the whole world. That fire, which is Love itself, will burn all those defenses, leaving us naked and open to life.
Only then Life can touch us and really only in that moment we can feel a genuine passion for life. Until then indeed we will not be so open to let passion come through us completly, we will try to be careful and not letting ourselve to be burnt by that flame that is Love itself.
When we are at that point so open to Life that there is nobody or anything which is open, there is only openess. And in that boundless openess Life can dance at any time any type of dance, with the sole purpose of our delight.

shakti

Flame of Love

What you are is always alone as you are One, as there is just Oneness, and that Oneness is your own true Being. When your Being is shared in the company of other people that live from the same recognition that all is One and this is One is oneself, you are already and always alone, even if the same room or even the same bed is shared.

Like a flame of a candle dancing by itself whoever is passing by will feel your warmth and light, but nothing will be given intentionally and nothing taken to them or from them. When two people or more can stay near to each other and burn by their own flame then even more warmth and light will be there in the surrounding, but each candle nevertheless will be burnt by the same fire, and its heat and splendour at core will be the same independently by how many are present.

Love is that fire, Love cannot be given or taken, can only be shared. The light and clarity of Truth can only be shared. Maybe one is hit by one of those glourious flame dancing by themselve and think that when that light is not near to them, something will be missing, some of that warmth and radiosity will be taken away. this is just because we are so used to seek that flame outside of us, begging for it, trading for it, compromising for it.

A master is that flame itself, but it is so easy to think that he or she is the candle... he or she is the fire, the same one that is burning in you when you feel lonely! the fire of the master is just burning the candle and it is not bigger or smaller in its warmth or light by that Love that you are and is burning your sense of separation.

When is possible to sit in your loneliness and let that fire grow, then it will be just aloneness. You will not be seeking anymore someone that lights you up in those dark moments, because even alone, that light and warmth will be enlightening whoever or whatever is present. If your husband or girlfriend are not with you, you will be in love with the flower pot. The flower pot will be the beloved, and your light and warmth will be reflected in the beauty of those flowers or that unique way in which the sunbeams are making shine the vase. Then it can happen that a wonderful man or a beautiful woman enters in the room and all your radiance will be reflected there. For five minutes maybe, or even 10 years, or 50 years. Then again maybe alone, again all One.

A master points you to your own fire, your own Love. He or she invites you to sit with it, despite whatever is happening in any moment in your life. He or she invites you to get completly burnt in that flame of Love, until any sense of separation is dissolved. Only the ego get burnt, fire does not get burnt. That flame of Love that you are will will be what will only remain, and its magnificence reflected and multiplied in any part of the manifestation.

with love and gratitude,
Shakti

Wind

Blowing, whistling and hissing
A strong wind is now hitting
The structures of the me
Already in brittles are flickering.
Crumbles of I all on the floor
Crackling away the idea that there is more
Beyond this appearance of the here and the now
Nothing there lies, just an empty background.
So wind please do blow and destroy more and more
The falseness of ego, its shallow galore
As tired n’ worn out the mind is asking
To end its agony and in peace finally resting.
One day it will be seen that all this was necessary
The pains, the joys were both part of the setting
That allowed this Truth to shine once again
And the empty blue sky enjoying in its fullest frame.

shakti

The last flare

We exist and yet we are not
human form appears like a flicker of light in the empty screen
one moment we are here
shining as gold as the scene appears
and then again nothing
beyond darkness and light the world disappears.
Who are you, who am I, what is this all about?
Empty questions as shells in the mind floating by
fleeting around like a smoke whisp in the room
where no-one has ever stepped out,
as nobody is asking and nobody is listening,
just words appearing and the again deliqueshing.
No answers will ever satisfy a mind that always will buy
in the idea that truth somewhere must abide
where instead the pain comes from the questioning itself
what causes the suffering is the search of this Self
that never was far, or away, or elsewhere
it is just what always IS
when all the rest dissolves in the mind's last flare.

shakti

Let's be merry

Let it enter, beloved,
Love knocks at the door asking you to,
Just open your heart,
melting it fully in this that I am and that you are too.
Let it spill, beloved,
the water of Life is filling my cup overflowing with lush
the joy to know a Dream this is just
and like leaves we are danced here to have fun.
No need of protections by what springs from within
This Love is not coming from an object in the dream
It is here, already, asking you to
turn your attention from the scene to the one that looks
outside at the play of colours and forms
untainted by all
and yet mingled in the whole.
This Radiance is shining from the breakings of the wall
of the ego, that you that is actually false,
its veil is now thin and is made out of what
it is currently appearing in Life’s comedy plot.
Its substance is illusion as therefore not real
no ego to kill, you are free now my dear!
No need of salvation, you are already out
The leela is there consistent as clouds.
So let’s be merry beloved, be happy and gay
Enjoying fully what brings every day.

Shakti

Paradox

Between existence and non existence
Human life unfolds.
A moment fully engaged
In what seems to be a multicolour pool
Of shapes and shades and tones
That take the form of people
And places and loves and hates
A moment totally dragged away by the scene
And then again observing from what cannot be seen.
I’m all, I’m nothing
Which one you decide
Something will be missing
As in this whole paradox
I do abide.

Shakti

Dreaming Life

What we generally call life is actually a dream, as it is just a movement of Consciousness. What we are is Pure Consciousness that manifests itself in Life as all the characters that you meet, all the places we visit, all the events etc. In other words, as in a dream you create everything and you are everything, so Life is your Dream. Also dream that happens during the night it is just another way through which Consciousness manifests itself. In the night-dream this manifestation happens differently because the body-mind is functioning differently ( being the body-mind the tool through which you experience life). In the night-dream Consciousness simply experiences itself in another way.

When during the night we become conscious that we are dreaming - when we are aware that what is happening is not real but just something that we are creating - we are in what we could call a "lucid dream".
Lucid dreaming is really similar to a spiritual awakening, that is actually happening during the night-dream. You could say that if you awaken in your "day-dream", life, than Enlightenment happens. Enlightenment is really just the realization to be pure Consciousness, that lives through all form and manifests the so called reality out of its own being. It is the very simple recognition of you really are.

What happens in our "day-dream", Life, is happening out of this Consciousness, our true nature, and might or might not coincide with what "we", as dream-characters, would like. "We" are just part and parcel of the created dream, and therefore as such we have no power whatsoever over the dream. For what we really are, as Consciousness, we are infact the MasterDreamer.

As long as there is unconsciousness, in other words not knowing of what we are, there will be suffering. There will be the belief to be something that we are not, a minute part of the dream, instead that the Dreamer itself.

If it is known that whatever the body-mind is doing happens because it is part of the dream of life, where all your sense of guilr, shame and anxiety will go? All these things have their own root in the ignorance and identification with the body-mind.

The point is that you have no control over the dream: it happens, that's it. The dream of life is happening not as an emanation of what you do, but of what you ARE. Therefore is not the result of an act of will of the imaginary individual, but it is an emanation of your Being.
If in Conscisouness there will be fear and sense of separation then this will be manifested in the dream, that will be more similar to a nightmare.

As you don't choose beforehand what to dream during the night - but the night-dream expresses what is going on in your consciousness - so at this level what is going on is an emanation of our Consciousness.
There is actually no need to have any control over the dream, because the Dream IS you: as body mind, you never ha any control, because you are just a dream-object, a product of the dream. When this understanding happens - that as apparent individual we have no control - there is also a letting go that occours: we surrender our will in the hands of the Divine and in that very instant we realize that we ARE that Divine, that since always was guiding ourselves Home.

love
shakti

Letting go and letting be

It seems to me that letting go is letting be. How can that which has never been absent, even for a moment, present itself?
-----


What you are is always, already, present. It is void, pure Awareness. Mysteriously, spontanously and unavoidably this Pure Void stirs itSelf, creating in its currents the illusion of the creation that is witnessed as reality. Part of this creation is the idea of being a someone separated in the body-mind organism.

This idea, the ego-concept, is in itself just an action that appears in the present moment, in what you are. Ego is not an entity, it is an activity, therefore it is not always present. As long as Awareness is still identified with its content it is not possible for it to be aware of itself, but will believe to be the subject of that idea. So the letting go is just of the identification with that idea, that reveals what IS already the case. You cannot let go what are, because there is never a moment in which you are not.

Your Being is always Here, but the attention is not always on it, but on its manifested qualities. The various activities of the dream on which the false subject is super-imposed like a an object reflected in a mirror leads you to look at the image and not at the emptiness of the mirror itsef. If the mirror would not exist, the image, that is always changing, could not appear. You are that empty mirror, the void canvas on which Life is painted. Life itself is just a movement in the mirror, so it cannot be really separated by it.
But yet, your reality is not the movement but the stillness in which and out of which Life is appearing. Infact Life appears and disappears and you not: Life is the illusion, what you are is Absolute Reality.

So letting go has to happen, but nobody lets go: it is the somebody that has to die, the idea to be a separate entity must be seen in all its illusion not just intellectually but intuitivly too. In other words has to be perceived directly, without any further conceptualization or intuitive sensation. The reflection in the mirror can be the pointer to the fact that what is mirroring itself is not the image that is just a reflection, but the pure light of awareness.

What-Is, the letting be as you call it, is what remains when the idea to be someone is let go. That letting be is not done with any effort, because there is no one anymore that could do any effort: all identity is disappeared and what is it is simply what was already the case.

This is the true key to joy: to rest in this letting BE.

Love
Shakti

Volition and individuality

All that it is manifest it is your will, but not of the one you imagine to be, but of what you truly are. Therefore your will could be now for example to suffer physically or just emotionally, because perhaps this is bringing you to enquire deeply about life, about what guides you, about what you are.

If everything that is happening in your life, included conflict and suffering, it would not be the case, this enquiry and the consequent understanding could not be. If you were always healthy, you could not estimate like precious the experience to be well, if you were always happy you could not know the pleasure of a causeless joy. Nothing of what it happens is against you, what we call pain is only the left hand of the Divine that is bringing us home, as well as is doing the right hand that we call "pleasurable experiences".

In Life it does not happen sometimes what we want, but always and only what need in order to recognize who we really are. Therefore sometimes the imaginary character that we think to embody suffers, also physically or only emotional, just to point us who we truly are. All that happens in a certain sense is with the aim to show you who you are, all is a gift of the Divine itself to itself. After the awakening all happens without any reason, and this is the biggest gift because it is also clear that Life could not have happened at all.

If the surrendering of your individuality to an impersonal awareness does not appeal to you, something should be considered about. It is important to operate a distinction between individuality and personality. Individuality is the sum of the characteristics of your body-mind. Those characteristics are unique, there was never someone like you and it will never exist again. In the enjoying of our characteristics as body-mind organism, our individuality, and in letting it express itself freely there is the joy and the gratefulness of being alive in human form.

Personality is different. The personality is the identification with the characteristics of the body mind and and the thinking that the " me", separated from the rest of the Universe, has its own will and ability to act independently. This is the source itself of suffering: with that " me" comes shame and sense of guilt, fear to make mistakes, pride, competition, jealousy, envies. It is the personality is the source of the suffering, not the individuality.

In reality it is only when one is free from the sense of being a someone, from the personality, than the characteristics of the body-mind can be expressed in a total way, without the uncertainties of the personality. Artists know this well: when a masterpiece was painted, the "me" was absent and therefore there was just pure joy that was doing the painting. It is the same with athletes: a complicated dive is only visualized from diver, then is the body to act it by itself.

Do not fear of having to abandon your individuality, it is just your personality that has to disappear. This surrender is not something that personality will do or can do, actually personality is often in conflict with the realization of not to exist. This surrender happens by itself, the intuitive understanding is developed by itself, without a someone understands.

Enjoy it ALL,

Shakti

The sense of Life

A reply to the question "what is the sense of that dream called Life?".
----------------------

A dream is the manifestation of the Dreamer's Consciousness. Therefore it is not the expression of what one does, but of what we are: the dream of life is the expression of our Being, of our Consciousness.

Life is the expression of Consciosness, as well as a dream during the night is nothing but a movement of the dreamer's consciousness. In other words, life in itself is not real, only Consciousness is Reality itself, where instead the dream is just its imaginary movement.

If life would not exist, o this dream called life would not exist, we would always remain in what we could call a state of deep sleep, of death, of pure absence (our true subject). It is only through life that we can be conscious of ourselves, life exists to reflect back that nothingness in which the somethingness happens to itself.

If nothingness would infact remain just nothingness, always in its inert and passive form, it would not have the ability to know itself and therefore to have a direct experience of itself. The somethingness is therefore appearing in the nothingness as a movement of this void nothing that wants to know itself.

The identification with the dream of life and that imaginary character that we believe to embody has been until now a necessary and unvoidable movement: at birth we are Pure Consciousness, still innocent about itself. Life happens, and with its first experience we start to fall, through the conditioning, in the idea that we are those experiences.

The body, for example, is just an experience that happens to nobody. It is just a movement in Consciousness. Same thing for the mind: it is just an experience, observed by Pure Awareness.

Through the conditioning, that in itself is just a thought, we fall in the illusion to be a someone and therefore in the idea that we are author of our actions, owners of our thoughts and emotions. Falling in the hypnosys we lose the connection with that birthright perception to be One with Life itself.

That 's the moment in which suffering starts and therefore seeking starts. Seeking will happen untill it will be seen, by Consciousness itself, that there is not a possible final result, neither an author of that reserach. In other words, the research ends because it is seen that there actually no seeker at all.

Therefore, in some way, the dream apparently happens until that moment to show us who we really are, after awakening really happens because it happens, but has not a purpose or a reason.

It is really in the absence of motivation that Life has in order to appear that we can catch its infinite beauty and compassion.

Think, Life could also have not happened at all... It is a wonderful gift in all its aspects, pains and pleasure, darkness and light, that are all incredible experiences, precious and unique, that happen for no reason at all.

The creation itself is therefore just a song of the Creator, a Love song, from Love to itSelf.

May you always be in this eternal gratufullness.


Shakti

Painting Life

Painting Life

Opening to openness
The door is wide enough
Just for one of us.

Walking on a thin rope
On Eternity’s edge
Enveloped in the mystery
The ego dissolves in distress.

You asked me what is real
And I cannot tell anymore
If what I see it’s outside
Or a ghost in my eye’s mind.

If what I imagine within
And what I see out
Are two separate things
Or just One unfolding layout

I forgot all my past
The pains of yesteryear
Are illusions just as well as
The glare of the coming year.

I really don’t seek anything
In what is passing by
Knowing well that beauty
Will be gone in a while.

But I know that what I am
Is really what you are
The appearance of two
Is just here to have fun.

If you don’t believe too much
In the plot on the screen of Life
Then all that it will come
Will really be good enough.

To taste fully a dream
It is an art in itself
May you be a master painter
And I will enjoy it all as well.