Echoes from the past

[Guest guest]

Dear All:

 

I came across some texts of a 13th century anonymous monk that,

strangely enough, echoes (from the past) Bhagavan's teachings and also

Nisargadatta's as well. Under the umbrella of mystic christian

thought, and with a very deep emotional and poetic language, one can

see that the pointer is pointing to the Nondual Self (as every true

tradition does ultimately)...

Hope you'll enjoy

All the best,

Mouna

 

......

 

Know for certain that, although I urge you to forget everything but

the blind awareness of your naked being, what I want (and this has

been my intention from the beginning) is nevertheless that you should

forget even the awareness of your own being in favor of awareness of

God's being. That was the reason why I showed you in the beginning

that God is your being. But it seemed to me that, on account of your

inexperience in spiritual awareness, you were not yet capable of being

lifted up at a stroke to spiritual awareness of God's being; and so,

to enable to climb up to it step by step, I told you first to gnaw

away at the naked blind awareness of your own being, until the time

when, by spiritual perseverance in this secret work, you would became

capable of the high awareness of God. For your own intention and

desire when you engage in the work of contemplation must always be to

experience God. So although at the beginning because of you simplicity

and spiritual immaturity, I tell you to cloak and enfold awareness of

God in awareness of yourself, afterwards, when perseverance has made

you wiser in purity of spirit, you must strip, despoil and completely

unclothe yourself of every kind of awareness of yourself, so that you

can be clothed in the gracious awareness of God's self….

 

.....

 

And so descend to the lowest level of your understanding (which some,

on the basis of actual experience, hold to be the highest), and think

in the most ignorant way (but to some it is the wisest way) not what

you yourself are but that you yourself are. For it takes great skill

in learning and cleverness on your part, and much intricate searching

in your natural intelligence, to think what you are in all your

attributes…But to think that you exist is something you can achieve in

your own ignorance and simplicity without any great cleverness of

learning or natural gifts.

 

.....

 

When you come to be by yourself, put aside good thoughts as much as

evil thoughts…see that nothing remains in your active consciousness

but a naked purpose, reaching out to God, not cloaked in any specific

thought of God in himself, what he is in his own nature or in any of

his works, but only that he is as he is. Let him be so, I pray you,

and do not make him anything else; pry no further into him with

intellectual cleverness. Let that belief be your foundation. You must

think and feel this naked purpose, freely fixed and rooted in sure

belief, to be nothing but a naked thought and a blind awareness of

your own existence: as if you said inwardly to God in your mind, `The

fact that I exist, Lord, I offer to you, with no concern for any

attribute for your being except simply that you are as you are—nothing

beyond that.'

Let this humble darkness be the mirror in which you see yourself and

your whole consciousness.

 

 

.....