Eckhart Tolle on The end of the ego

An eloquent summation of the dysfunctional mind pattern that is the ego

—and what happens to it in the face of awareness:    the end of the ego  

Ram Dass on The Entrance to Oneness

~ Ram Dass ~

Imagine feeling more love from someone than you have ever known. You’re being loved even more than your mother loved you when you were an infant, more than you were ever loved by your father, your child, or your most intimate lover—anyone. This lover doesn’t need anything from you, isn’t looking for personal gratification, and only wants your complete fulfillment.

You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don’t have to do anything to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success— none of that matters. No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here.

Imagine that being in this love is like relaxing endlessly into a warm bath that surrounds and supports your every movement, so that every thought and feeling is permeated by it. You feel as though you are dissolving into love.

This love is actually part of you; it is always flowing through you. It’s like the subatomic texture of the universe, the dark matter that connects everything. When you tune in to that flow, you will feel it in your own heart—not your physical heart or your emotional heart, but your spiritual heart, the place you point to in your chest when you say, “I am.”

This is your deeper heart, your intuitive heart. It is the place where the higher mind, pure awareness, the subtler emotions, and your soul identity all come together and you connect to the universe, where presence and love are.

Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not “I love you” for this or that reason, not “I love you if you love me.” It’s love for no reason, love without an object. It’s just sitting in love, a love that incorporates the chair and the room and permeates everything around. The thinking mind is extinguished in love.

If I go into the place in myself that is love and you go into the place in yourself that is love, we are together in love. Then you and I are truly in love, the state of being love. That’s the entrance to Oneness. That’s the space I entered when I met my guru.

Years ago in India I was sitting in the courtyard of the little temple in the Himalayan foothills. Thirty or forty of us were there around my guru, Maharaj-ji. This old man wrapped in a plaid blanket was sitting on a plank bed, and for a brief uncommon interval everyone had fallen silent. It was a meditative quiet, like an open field on a windless day or a deep clear lake without a ripple. I felt waves of love radiating toward me, washing over me like a gentle surf on a tropical shore, immersing me, rocking me, caressing my soul, infinitely accepting and open.

I was nearly overcome, on the verge of tears, so grateful and so full of joy it was hard to believe it was happening. I opened my eyes and looked around, and I could feel that everyone else around me was  experiencing the same thing. I looked over at my guru. He was just sitting there, looking around, not doing anything. It was just his being, shining like the sun equally on everyone. It wasn’t directed at anyone in particular. For him it was nothing special, just his own nature.

This love is like sunshine, a natural force, a completion of what is, a bliss that permeates every particle of existence. In Sanskrit it’s called sat-cit-ananda, “truth-consciousness-bliss,” the bliss of consciousness of existence. That vibrational field of ananda love permeates everything; everything in that vibration is in love. It’s a different state of being beyond the mind. We were transported by Maharaj-ji’s love from one vibrational level to another, from the ego to the soul level. When Maharaj-ji brought me to my soul through that love, my mind just stopped working. Perhaps that’s why unconditional love is so hard to describe, and why the best descriptions come from mystic poets. Most of our descriptions are from the point of view of conditional love, from an interpersonal standpoint that just dissolves in that unconditioned place.

When Maharaj-ji was near me, I was bathed in that love. 

Excerpted from BE LOVE NOW by Ram Dass  

Love came and emptied me of the self

Love came and emptied me of self

every vein and every pore

made into a container to be filled by the Beloved.

Of me, only a name is left

the rest is You my Friend, my Beloved.

Exerpt from Nobody Son of Nobody

by Abū-Sa'īd Abul-Khayr, also known as Sheikh Abusaeid or Abu Sa'eed Turkmenistan (967 - 1049)

There is a space within

There is a space within 

which is entirely empty

This is the real

Temple of Nothingness

We imagine that

it turns you into a fool,

but you are a fool

for not knowing

and being it

~ Mooji ~

Union with the Divine Principle

Men and women seek each other out; they instinctively feel something will be missing as long as they have not found someone to be united with. 


But for human beings, the only true union that can take place is the inner one with the divine Principle, which each person carries within. When contact occurs, there is a spark, and all of a sudden they feel their whole being vibrating as one with the immensity and merging with it.

Work to achieve this experience of merging at least once in your life; it will be like a drop of light living on within you. And then you must continue to maintain this union until all knowledge and all powers are perfected in you. 


That is where true work begins; once you have gone over to the other shore, you are on the path of perfection, but there is still a great distance to cover before reaching the goal. You have captured a drop of light, and, thanks to this drop, you can drink now, you can rejoice. But you are still not immersed in the ocean. So, you must keep on going until you become one with the ocean of divine light. Only then will you have truly found yourself.

Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov

When Jesus said...

When Jesus said: ‘The Father and I are one’, he was summarizing the greatest mystery of religion. And one day we too must be able to say the same words.

Some will say, ‘Yes, but we’re not Jesus. He was the son of God, whereas we are sinners.’ The Church has tried to make Jesus the equivalent of God himself, the second person of the trinity, the Christ, a cosmic principle, thus creating an infinite distance between him and human beings. But is this the truth? Jesus himself never said such a thing; he never claimed to be essentially different from other people. 

He said he was the son of God, but he did not claim this divine lineage for himself alone but emphasized the divine nature of all humans. Otherwise, what would be the meaning of the phrases: 


‘Our Father in heaven,’ ‘Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’ and also: ‘The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these’?

Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

Whence and Whither ~ The Soul's Journey

What is this journey taken by the soul from the source to manifestation, and from manifestation back to the same source which is the goal? Is it a journey, or is it not a journey? 


It is a journey in fact and not a journey in truth. It is a change of experience which makes it a journey, a story; and yet a whole journey produced in moving pictures is in one film which does not journey for miles and miles, as it appears to do on the screen.

Do many journey, or one? Many while still in illusion; and one when the spirit has disillusioned itself. Who journeys, is it man or God? Both and yet one the two ends of one line. What is the nature and character of this manifestation? It is an interesting dream. 


What is this illusion caused by? By cover upon cover; the soul is covered by a thousand veils. Do these covers give happiness to the soul? Not happiness, but intoxication. The farther the soul is removed from its source, the greater the intoxication. Does this intoxication help the purpose of the soul's journey towards its accomplishment? It does in a way, but the purpose of the soul is accomplished by its longing. And what does it long for? Sobriety. And how is that sobriety attained? By throwing away the veils which have covered the soul, and thus divided it from its real source and goal. What uncovers the soul from these veils of illusion? The change which is called death. This change can be forced upon the soul against its desire, and is then called death. This is a most disagreeable experience like snatching away the bottle of wine from a drunken man, which is most painful to him for a time. Or the change can be brought about at will, and the soul throws away the cover that surrounds it and attains the same experience of sobriety while on earth, even if it be but a glimpse of it. This is the same experience which the soul arrives at after millions and millions of years, drunk with illusion; and yet not exactly the same.

The experience of the former is Fana, annihilation, but the realization of the latter is Baqa, the resurrection. The soul, drawn by the magnetic power of the divine Spirit, falls into it with a joy inexpressible in words, as a loving heart lays itself down in the arms of its beloved. The increase of this joy is so great that nothing the soul has ever experienced has made it so unconscious of the self; but this unconsciousness of the self becomes in reality the true self-consciousness. It is then that the soul realizes fully that 'I exist'.

But the soul which arrives at this stage of realization consciously has a different experience. The difference is like that of one person having been pulled, with his back turned to the source, and another person having journeyed towards the goal, enjoying at every step each experience it has met with, and rejoicing at every moment of this journey in approaching nearer to the goal. What does this soul, conscious of its progress towards the goal, realize? It realizes with every veil it has thrown off a greater power, and increased inspiration, until it arrives at a stage, after having passed through the sphere of the jinns and the heaven of the angels, when it realizes that error which it had known, and yet not known fully; the error it made in identifying itself with its reflection, with its shadow falling on these different planes.

It is like the sun looking at the sunflower and thinking, 'I am the sunflower', forgetting at that moment that the sunflower is only its footprint. Neither on the earth-plane was man his own self, nor in the sphere of the jinns, nor in the heaven of the angels. He was only a captive of his own illusion, caught in a frame; and yet he was not inside it, it was only his reflection. But he saw himself nowhere, so he could only identify himself with his various reflections, until his soul realized, 'It is I who was, if there were any. What I had thought to be myself was not myself, but was my experience. I am all that there is, and it is myself who will be, whoever there will be. It is I who am the source, the traveler, and the goal of this existence.


'Verily truth is all the religion there is; and it is truth which will save.' 



Hazrat Inayat Khan


exerpt from Volume I: The Way of Illumination - The Soul, 
Whence and Whither? 
online edition