- The purpose of spiritual studies is not to create a new identity. The purpose is to change. But why is it so hard to change? Part of the problem is that we don't know what real change is.
- Real change is always due to a revelation, a shock that shows us a part of ourselves that doesn't want to change. Shocks reveal everything that is not real change but claims to be.
- The world's idea of change is simply another image to identity with, which is an imagined escape route, an avoidance of real shocks.
- We presently perceive our experience of the world to be separate from the world we experience.
- The real change is not to simply change what is seen, but a change in the nature of the seer.
- Unconscious desire is blind because all it can see is the object that it is running after.
- Authentic change requires negation, not addition. Changes happens naturally with seeing the pain of what is produced by adding more barriers between ourselves and the shocks of revelation.
- "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." -- C.S. Lewis
- Conflict begins when the observer tries to change what is observed, an attempt to separate itself from the actual experience of the observation.
- Whenever the observer tries to change what is observed, which is always really within, it creates a sense of 'I', which itself is a perceived distance between the observer and the observed.
- We need another set of eyes to see that our reaction and the condition in the world that brings up the reaction are one thing.
- The condition that you fear is not separate from the "you" that fears it.
- "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other' doesn't make any sense." -- Jalal al-Din Rumi
- Negative states are connected to the idea that there is something that is getting in the way between me and what I want.
- Change is when the observer and the observed are brought together and the "third party" appears to reveal the active and the passive simultaneously.
- "O scion of Bharat, I am also the knower of all the individual fields of activity. The understanding of the body as the field of activities, and the soul and God as the knowers of the field, this I hold to be true knowledge." -- Bhagavad-Gita
- The place of change is humility itself because there is no longer someone there by your name. In fact, the "you" by your name is the thing that was in the way.
- Exercise: 1. Stop trying to change what you don't want to see. 2. And use the awareness of that resistance to be a witness to a) what you don't want, and b) the sense of self that is not-wanting. Be all three and be free.