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NON-DUAL PURPOSE & PRACTICE

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Gentle Healing 2 ~ Day 303 – True Understanding Comes from Seeing

You have a lot of spiritual practices in your life now:

  • Daily reading and contemplation
  • Journaling with inner wisdom
  • Awareness-watching-awareness meditation
  • The loving all method
  • Surrender
  • Practicing the mantra
  • Looking at chatter to notice its “I” or “me” content

Spiritual practice is becoming the center of your life. There’s a reason for that.

Most people who believe they are on a spiritual path are on an intellectual journey only. Self-realization does not come from the intellect. Self-realization is beyond the intellect. And that is the purpose of a life centered on spiritual practice—to go beyond the intellect to Self-realization.

Thoughts of Awakening # 303

Direct experience of joy
requires direct experience of release.

One cannot hold to
habitual mental activity
and know the joy of peace.

One can only know the joy of peace
by choosing to release
that which obstructs it.

Practicing what I teach
is choosing to release.

~From our Holy Spirit

Homework for this week

  • Practice daily meditation for 30-60 minutes each day.
  • Practice the “Loving All” Method.
  • Thoughts of Awakening, 302-308 including the Commentary on Not-Knowing (day 307) and the Commentary on Home (day 308).
  • Read Read the following messages from The Teaching of Inner Ramana: The Importance of Practice Part Two, True Understanding Comes from Seeing, Exposing the “I” Thought, Exposing the Attachment to Mind, and Clarity on Purpose. There is no reading on Days 307 & 308.

Anne Blanchard ~ Unfiltered ~ “Exquisite Noticing” 01/06/21

Anne Blanchard shares her experience of purification and awakening, unfiltered and as it happens. Raw, reflective, brave, and infused with clarity, Anne’s open honesty inspires us all to dive deep into the spiritual journey instead of simply skimming the surface. She continues to share deeply from various non-dual teachings and teachers.

 

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01-06-21 ~ Life as Love ~ “Cause and Effect”

Rev. Helen Avery is an Awakening Together Ordained Minister. She shares weekly in our Sanctuary with a half-hour of a heart-felt deep diving into truth, love, and awareness. This candid sharing is a time when Helen explores different modalities and teachings with various non-dual teachers and how the real life application of those particular teachings are currently showing up in her life. She shares about experiences from her path of awakening including the demonstration of how to utilize these helpful processes and spiritual tools. In her most recent Awakening journey she discusses radical truth and wisdom from teachers such as Mooji and Helen Hamilton.

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Jacquelyn Eckert ~ As It Is ~ “The Impermanence of Things” 01/06/21

Rev. Jacquelyn Eckert shares with honesty and passion about the ups, downs, and all-around of the spiritual journey. Jacquelyn is transparent as she shares about the impersonal awakening process we all experience. She moves us with stories from her own journey, with direct insight from inner wisdom and with guidance from spiritual masters, both contemporary and legendary.

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Being Aware of Awareness Meditation 01-06-2021

In this program Anne Blanchard facilitates one of the core practices of the Awakening Together community. This program provides an opportunity to be in community with others who will to find that place of no-place, that attention to our natural attentiveness, that innate humanness that can often be overlooked. Anne Blanchard facilitates this program on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 7:30 – 8:30 am ET/5:30-6:30 am MT by leading participants through gently guided Being Aware of Awareness meditation. All are warmly welcome.

 

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Debut of Herein Lies the Peace of God, Friday Jan. 8 at 8 pm ET

“Herein Lies the Peace of God,” a new program featuring Reverends Jacquelyn Eckert and Glen Ganaway, begins Friday, January 8 at 8 pm. In this program, Jacquelyn and Glen will review and discuss A Course In Miracles from a non-dual, interfaith perspective.

 

The program will discuss the main themes and key principles of the Course and how they are lived  in our shared lives.

500 Days with NTI ~ Day 4

NTI-The Holy Spirit's Interpretation of the New Testament
Day 4 Assignment

This evening (or tomorrow morning):
Do the assignments under this heading this evening, tomorrow morning, or split the tasks between this evening and tomorrow morning, whatever suits your schedule.

Read NTI Matthew 5 (v13-16).

Tomorrow:
Do the assignments under this heading tomorrow.

  1. Review this 3 times during the day:
    The world is meaningless. All that brings meaning to the world is me.
  2. Throughout the day, pay attention to see if you can notice the meaning you give to what happens during the day.
    Hint:  If you have one thought or opinion about something while someone else has a different thought or opinion, notice the meaning you are giving, and notice that meaning comes from your mind.

Gentle Healing Year 1 Tip For Lesson 328

What is Creation?

Our special theme says, “God’s memory is in our holy minds, which know their oneness and their unity with their Creator. Let our function be only to let this memory return, only to let God’s Will be done on earth, only to be restored to sanity, and to be but as God created us.”

That says it all. As we wind up the first year of Gentle Healing and prepare to begin the second year, we are asked to look at our commitment to truth, and to make our commitment whole.

We have looked at Choice A and Choice B in Chapter 5 of The Most Direct Means to Eternal Bliss a number of times now. Today, I’d like to share these same choices with you from the perspective of an awakened Carmelite Nun, Bernadette Roberts:

In contrast to the divine, the human condition is so terrible and devastating that even the worst of descriptions could never do it justice. I am not referring here to sin, evil or suffering, but rather to bare human existence itself—and the whole natural world included. What we usually think is so beautiful in this world is actually monstrous and unbearable to look at, but only in contrast to the divine. …

Those who believe man can have both heaven and this world at the same time are very much mistaken; such a notion is a total underestimation of God’s utter transcendence, … Compared to the divine estate there is no beauty or happiness in this world; thus man cannot afford to have a glimpse or taste of the final estate and still expect to find this world acceptable. The ultimate estate is not of this world; it is not even compatible with it… For this reason it is good that man does not see the reality of the divine beyond consciousness, for if he did he could not endure this world. What man does not know, he does not miss, and what he does not know is how utterly transcendent the divine really is.

That is her description of Choice B, living in the world as a self.

Here is her description of Choice A, which is Manonasa, awakening to the First Principle of God, Nirvana:

About all that can be said is that if we put together man’s loftiest experiences of ecstasy, bliss, love and all things ineffable, they fall as short of the divine condition as the size of an ant falls short of that of an elephant. Consciousness’ most lofty heavenly experiences of the divine are but the palest shadow of the ultimate divine condition or “heaven.”

It makes you wonder what we are choosing by not fully applying ourselves to awakening, doesn’t it?

I choose the second place to gain the first.

Our workbook lesson begins by saying, “What seems to be the second place is first, for all things we perceive are upside down until we listen to the Voice for God.”

I think Sister Bernadette made that perfectly clear with statements like, “What we usually think is so beautiful in this world is actually monstrous and unbearable to look at, but only in contrast to the divine.”

We put off seeking awakening with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole mind and all of our strength, because of the things we value in this world. They get our time instead.

Could our sense of priorities be very, very wrong?

Is it time for a change?

Please read today’s workbook lesson in full, and contemplate it along with Bernadette’s description of the human condition compared to realization of the divine.

Also, reconsider your spiritual aspiration. Is it sufficient to give you the motivation you need to give even more to this spiritual path, or is there another spiritual aspiration that is more motivating for you? It may help to ask this question and write until the answer is realized. I did.

Meditation Options

Guided Meditation Audios

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Gentle Healing 2 ~ Day 302 – Importance of Practice, Part 2

Today’s reading points out that there are two paths of awakening:

Surrender
Withdrawing from the world

The Teachings of Inner Ramana  teaches surrender as the primary path to awakening. This is also the path taught in The Bhagavad Gita. In Hindu tradition, it is called “karma yoga.” It is a path of living in the world and going about your usual daily tasks—work, family, etcetera—while disengaging from the ego through detachment. That is the purpose of surrender—to live an active life without being attached to mind.

As we learned through The Circus and the Meadow:

True stillness cannot be achieved by quieting the mind through meditative practices for part of the day and then being wrapped up in the stories of the mind the rest of the day. … You will never be free through partial abidance. Only total abidance can be totally freeing.

That means if surrender is our path of awakening, we want to learn to use surrender for all of our daily decisions. Learning surrender to this level will take time—it will take time for the surrender-program to fully develop in the brain—but we should continue to give it our best effort everyday, whatever our current best effort is, because total surrender is how we will awaken.

Remember, as you give surrender your best effort, awareness programs the surrender-program in the brain.

Withdrawing from the world is the path of awakening that Michael Langford recommends in The Direct Means to Eternal Bliss. That’s why he recommends meditating for 12 hours a day. Withdrawing from the world was also the path that Ramana Maharshi followed beginning shortly after his initial awakening to consciousness, which occurred when he was a teenager. However for most of us, surrender will work better than trying to fully withdraw from the world.

In The Teachings of Inner Ramana, “enlightened” is synonymous with Self-realized and true perception. “Awake” is a term reserved for the First Principle of God.

Today’s reading points out that the enlightened one doesn’t experience surrender like the deluded one does. The deluded one is attached to mental chatter as me, so to him, intuition feels like something other than me. The enlightened one doesn’t see mental chatter as me anymore, so intuition feels like the Self. Intuition is followed as easily by the enlightened one as mental chatter is followed by the deluded one.

However, the deluded one is still life-awareness, so the deluded one’s attention has the power of life-awareness in it. As she gives believing-attention to her thoughts, she unconsciously creates the world through consciousness.

That gives us an additional reason to live as if we are Self-realized.

On Day 297, you were asked to live as if you are Self-realized. That’s because living as if you are Self-realized leads to Self-realization.

Another reason to live as if you are Self-realized is because, when you do, you no longer participate in making illusion. That means that by living as if you are Self-realized, you stop contributing to the appearances that cause suffering in the world.

As Ramana Maharshi said:

Your own Self-Realization is the greatest service you can render the world.

If you don’t remember how to live as if you are Self-realized in a genuine and self-honest way, review the tip from Day 297.

Today, practice surrender, the mantra, and practice looking back at chatter after you say the mantra to see what it was saying and how you were listening as if it was you  thinking.

Thoughts of Awakening # 302

In true desire to awaken,
question everything.

When you hear yourself say, “I like …”,
question, “Who likes?”
Is it the unlimited
or limited self who speaks now?

When you say, “I believe …”,
question, “Who believes?”
Is it the unlimited
or limited self who speaks now?

Attachments are an activity of mind.
Mind is the limited and definable self.
What are you?

~From our Holy Spirit

Homework for this week

  • Practice daily meditation for 30-60 minutes each day.
  • Practice the “Loving All” Method.
  • Thoughts of Awakening, 302-308 including the Commentary on Not-Knowing (day 307) and the Commentary on Home (day 308).
  • Read Read the following messages from The Teaching of Inner Ramana: The Importance of Practice Part Two, True Understanding Comes from Seeing, Exposing the “I” Thought, Exposing the Attachment to Mind, and Clarity on Purpose. There is no reading on Days 307 & 308.

Qigong : “The Movement of Now” with Ian McArthur

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDbdDo0kQVo

In this program, Ian teaches about the traditional Mind, Body, and Spirit practice of Qigong (Chi Kung). Qi meaning life energy, referring to the energy circulating through the body, and Gong meaning cultivation or work. The two words are combined to describe a practice to cultivate and balance life energy. By following movements (forms) and a simple breathing technique, we encourage more Qi to flow which in turn allows us to feel more peaceful and at One with ourselves.

Live in the Sanctuary Sundays at 2:30-3:30 pm ET/12:30-1:30 pm MT on the 1st and 3rd Sunday of the Month.

 

 

 

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