The infinite depth of your own self

In order to discover the infinite depth of your own self, you must find a way to enter into a very deep state of meditation – such a deep state that your awareness of thought moves to the background and eventually disappears. When awareness of thought disappears, the awareness of the passing of time disappears along with it, and so does the awareness of the world and all the objects within it. If you keep penetrating into the infinite depths of your own self, eventually your awareness even of your own physical form will disappear. It is enlightening to discover that when thought, time, world, and even your own body disappears, you haven’t gone anywhere! Even without the movement of memory, you will find that the most intimately felt essence of your own self – who you always are at the deepest level – remains intact. That self that remains when time and form disappear is eternal and unchanging. It has never been born and will never die. That self is the deepest ground of your own being, in each and every moment, whether you are aware of it or not. Everything that is born, the entire evolving cosmos, arose from that empty ground, and everything that dies will return to it. In that no-place, that zero point, where there is no birth and no death, nothing ever happened and the cosmos never existed. When we discover this dimension of our own self, we find only nothing at all: desirelessness, the fullness of Being, and indescribable peace, without end. – Andrew Cohen

meditation 2

Magic

“Magic happens when the wand of language strikes a stone and makes it melt, touches a spindle and turns it into gold, or taps a trunk and makes it fly. By drawing on a syntax of enchantment that conjures fluidity, ethereality, flimsiness, and transparency, writers turn solidity into resplendent airy lightness to produce miracles of linguistic transubstantiation.

What is the effect of that beauty? How do readers respond to words that create that beauty? In a world that has discredited that particular attribute and banished it from high art, beauty has nonetheless held on to its enlivening power in children’s books. It draws readers in, then draws them to understand the fictional worlds it lights up.”
~ Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood

Magic

Oneness

If you want oneness in society, you have to teach people to go inside instead of going outside, because if they want peace, they need to find it within. I remember being at a peace rally. Everybody was yelling, (He shouts loudly, angrily.) “PEACE PEACE!” That isn’t peace! (Laughter.) Peace is inside, in me and in everybody else. If you want peace, you go down in. – Ram Dass

inner peace