Patrick Sweeney discusses the
quality of his teachers that attracted him the most: their radical freedom to be
spontaneous in the present moment. He shares how profoundly he has been
influenced by the work of Ken Wilber, in particular.
Patrick Sweeney continues his
beautiful discussion of nondual consciousness, the nameless, effortless,
self-liberating quality of awareness in which all distinctions between self and
other, this and that, inside and outside fall away completely, leaving only the
brilliant clarity of this very Moment, exactly as it is. Although this "Ordinary
Mind" is and always has been the ever-present condition of consciousness, the
separate self somehow rarely seems to notice that which it always already is—in
fact, it is fair to say that the majority of our actions and intentions as human
beings are in avoidance of this simple recognition, with all its ego-shattering
implications. However, we have all experienced this radical One Taste many times
in the course of our lives, if even for the briefest of moments.
Patrick
mentions accidents, orgasms, and death as typical moments of spontaneous and
profound realization, but these experiences tend to occur whenever the normal
continuity of life becomes suddenly disrupted—during which people tend to report
radically altered states of experience, including a sense of time dilation, an
overwhelming feeling of peace or oneness with the world, and everything simply
becomes much more vivid, vibrant, and present. Unfortunately, it can be all too
easy to miss these experiences without a stable contemplative practice, which
helps train our capacity to be persistently aware of ourselves and our
environments, making it much easier to recognize our own Original Face whenever
it chooses to reveal itself.
For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin -
real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten
through first, some unfinished business, time to still be served, a debt to be
paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were
my life.
This perspective has helped me to see that there is no way to
happiness. Happiness is the way. So, treasure every moment that you have. And treasure it
more because you shared it with someone special, special enough to spend your time … and remember that time waits for
no one…
So stop waiting
until you finish school,
until you go back to school,
until you lose ten pounds,
until you gain ten pounds,
until you have kids,
until your kids leave the house,
until you start work,
until you retire,
until you get married,
until you get divorced,
until Friday night,
until Sunday morning,
until you get a new car or home,
until your car or home is paid off,
until spring,
until summer,
until fall,
until winter,
until you are off welfare,
until the first or fifteenth,
until your song comes on,
until you've had a drink,
until you've sobered up,
until you die,
until you are born again
to decide that there is no better time than Right NOW to
be Happy…
Once we come back to our Self, then whatever is created is happening not so much from a perspective of “What do I want?” but from a pure intention. Not an individual intention, not a collective intention, but the intention, the primal intention. It’s not an intention with a choice or a chooser. It’s a primary creative energy that comes from the source.
When we really have returned to the source, creation is no longer distorting itself through our wants or desires. That’s when we’re seeing, “What is? That’s what I want. What is actually happening? That’s what I desire.” And I’m no longer interested in creating anything, because I realize that everything, as it is, is what I always wanted it to be. It was always my intention; I just didn’t know it. I didn’t really want to manifest my individual intention, I wanted to come into the purity of intention itself.
This realization doesn’t obliterate duality; it liberates duality. When we come into the ultimate Truth, then our thoughts, feelings, and actions come from this self-realization. At that point, there’s no sense in choosing or not choosing. There’s just the watching. When the Truth is conscious instead of unconscious, it can come through and manifest purely—without any desire to do so.
You created me to remind you of this. We all create exactly what we need. When we are not conscious enough, when our self-concept is not big enough to allow us to have the wisdom that we are, to let in the divinity that we are, to let in the Buddha nature that we are, then we’ll project it somewhere else. Maybe we’ll create a guy called Adya. Then we’ll go into a relationship, and through that relationship we’ll start to realize, “That’s who I am—Adya’s not really Adya and I’m not really me.”
Then it just gets clearer and clearer, until our realization and our self-concept have gotten full enough and complete enough that we don’t need to create a relationship of apparent two-ness to remind us of what we already know. But even when we see that, we’ll keep doing it for the fun of it.
It’s a circular process. I love this Truth so much—and by this I mean Self-love in the biggest sense—that I create you, and through you asking questions, which is really me asking questions, I get to tell myself the answers. I get to display who I am and what I know to myself. But it’s actually one being: I’m not stuck being Adya. You’re not stuck being you. We are stuck being It.
And we realize it doesn’t matter which side we’re on. We’re either looking for our Self with the help of creating a so-called somebody else, or we’re just in the joy of revealing our Self to our Self over and over. The more we realize it’s all one, the more we realize, “You know, we’re really having fun.”
But human life is only dust and ashes without love. If you investigate and
inquire into the world without love, you don’t find anything worthwhile. If you
look at a tree or a frog or anything at all without the eyes of love, then you
obtain only loveless, heartless knowledge. When such knowledge is ac-cumulated
and applied to practices of scientific technology, it becomes the most
destructive form of knowledge ever discovered. Even the worst black magic cannot
vie with the destructive capacity of science. Its very method is to destroy what
it looks at in order to discover its elements.
When we start to doubt, hope is the anchor that binds our faith to love. I am
speaking in the vocabulary of Christianity. It is a pity that this vocabulary is
so degraded. The first English translation of what is now called “the holy
ghost” was by John Wycliffe, who translated it as “our healthy spirit.” That is
the manifestation of Divinity within and through our own nature. All our
natures, with this healthy spirit are sparks of light in the same fire. That
immediately unites us. That companionability in the light of our healthy
spirit—which is light and love and the way and truth and life—is what I have
become less embarrassed about affirming in the course of the last thirty years
or so.
Zeitgeist: Addendum attempts to locate the root causes of this pervasive
social corruption, while offering a solution. This solution is not based on
politics, morality, laws, or any other "establishment" notions of human
affairs, but rather on a modern, non-superstitious based understanding of
what we are and how we align with nature, to which we are a part. The work
advocates a new social system which is updated to present day knowledge,
highly influenced by the life long work of Jacque Fresco and The Venus
Project .
