Barney/Life is Suffering

[Guest guest]

Dear One:

 

Well put with generous compassion and insight. Sri Ramana has said that we can

do nothing but surrender and even that is not fully up to us. Sometimes our

suffering and misery helps us surrender.

 

Love and blessings

============================================================

"Narayana" <bhujagendra

2005/02/02 Wed PM 10:52:13 CST

Barney/Life is Suffering

 

My suggestion, if your interested:

 

* Stay with the not knowing. Dont try to repeat the process of

replacing the state of not knowing the answers with someone elses

comforting answers or beliefs about reality.

 

* Notice that believing that you are only physical and that

awareness itself is only the product of brain chemistry arrived at

through a process of physical evolution only brings a sense of

tremendous emptiness and pain. This definetly indicates that it may

not be true. If it were true, why would your heart rebel against it

and torment you? Just notice this point and quietly examine it

within yourself.

 

*Consider that various people throughout history have attested that

the real nature of the human being is pure, non-local existence-

awareness. They all attest to knowing this nature directly as their

own self, and that this nature can only be described as divine. The

knowledge is accompanied by such qualities as bliss, joy, love,

compassion etc. Some people have arrived at this state spontaeously

without a pre-existing belief in it, others after a long period of

time engaged in meditation or other such practices. They also attest

that when there is a cessation of even the slightest identification

with mind/body/world, there is at that time a permanent cessation of

suffering.

 

*Ramana in particular taught that you can confirm this for yourself

by continously fixing your attention on the feeling "I exist" with

the aim of finding out what it is. The two points in regard to this

practice are

1) The pure I, which your own existence awareness exists free of any

thoughts of "I am this or that or like so". Therefore as thoughts

arise, ignore them and attend to the sense of "I exist" or "I" or

the awareness to which these thoughts arise.

2) The practice must be one pointed. A mediocre effort will bring

mediocre results. Do not give up until you have learned to be one

pointed.

 

*You cannot lay your doubts at rest about the nature of the

self/awareness until you have known it directly. Therefore take the

inensity of the depair and use it to fuel the endeavor to find out

directly by one-pointedly attending to your own existence-awareness

with the aim of finding out for yourself directly what it is.

You dont have to believe that the result will be as they say. You

only have to endeavor totaly to find out if it is, or it is not, as

they say.

 

*Quietly take some time to consider that the only alternative to

this inquiry will be to continue as you are, spinning round and

again with otherwise unanswerable doubts and questions and the

torment this brings.

 

 

N.

 

 

Love, serve, and be helpful, but without getting disgusted, tired, pessimistic,

and exhausted. Blessings dear souls, blessings!