Ed,
One thing I'm finding is that the love that is initially directed to the feeling of "presence" sometimes begins to eminate of itself in a more open and less object directed way. Maybe not love of everything but a general and undiscriminating feeling of love. I am also getting a better sense of what people mean by "heart" and the importance of heart to meditation and spirituality more generally. ---F
ED:
Yes, there is a progression.
Eventually you will feel love like a flowing river, moving from the lower gut area, upwards through the heart, then upwards into the head, face, arms, fingers and spilling outwards into space.
This will gradually transmute until you feel filled with love, and the flowing outwards stops and you identify with love itself. I am love.
Over time, sometimes just a short time, that still, calm love transmutes into total ecstasy. At first of the body, then your whole sense of presence.
Lots more happens.
It is a good opening, but certainly not the whole journey, but it is an energy source for what lies beyond ecstasy.
Back at me:
Ed,
I don't think I really understood what is meant by 'God is love'. Now I understand what is meant by identifying the I with love. Also noticed being unperturbed by my wife's outburst of irritation. Very interesting.
Ed:
Other things will happen too. You will begin to understand more and more about consciousness and beyond consciousness.
Realizing the Manifest Self--the Life Force permeating our humanity--and the Unmanifest source from which it arises.
Teacher,
ReplyDeleteThis morning after doing self inquiry, as soon as I finished, right on cue, my phone rings with business to attend to.
After that, I got up and looking at my reflection in the mirror, I realized I can never see myself. All I can see are
reflections of myself, images of myself. Likewise I assume I can never know myself, I can only be the knowledge, be the
awareness, I can only be myself. This made me recall some ancient Hindu wisdom I heard in a George Harrison song, "God
does not know, he is knowledge itself, God does not exist, he is existence itself,..." I'll have to look up the full quote
and where it's from.
I suppose all I can do right now is be myself, abiding in awareness-presence-knowledge, abiding in raw pure intelligence by reducing my mind to nothing through silence.
Shawn