Empathy

The Observer

Tempus Fugit… Time flies… When I watch the date of my latest post I must admit that my writing becomes very rare these times. Being too much involved into mundane concerns I find my blog standing still. Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi once said “God never forsakes one who has surrendered.” These days I work very hard to acquire some knowledge to help people in most difficult mental situations. We are the world that we have created and we are the only ones that can change ourselves and hence, change the world. The change is not out there. It is not in time or in space. It is in this present moment, in this precious moment… Have you ever found a solution in the future or in the past? Where is the solution to our problems? If you go deep into it you might say that the solution is always in the present now. But what is the size of this present NOW? Can we measure it? Is it a second, or a fraction of a second, or may be a fraction of a fraction of a second? We can continue like that endlessly, dividing this fraction into new fractions and still we will find a lapse of “time” with a beginning and an end. How tiny is then NOW? Is it measurable? If you really go very deep into that question you might discover that NOW is beyond time, immeasurable… infinity. It is the gate to love, compassion and empathy as it destroys all distance. In NOW there is no space anymore. Time and space always come together. Empathy occurs only if we listen with our whole being. It is not listening that is in the ears, neither the understanding of listening that is in the mind. It is the direct reflection of what is here right now in our awareness. There is not the tiniest amount of space possible between awareness and its content. We create that space in time with our preconceived ideas and judgments. Empathy and compassion occurs when there is no space and hence no time; in this precious, vast, infinite present moment that is the NOW.

— Personal reflections

From Afar

Rabindranath Tagore

The ‘I’ that floats along the wave of time,
From a distance I watch him.
With the dust and the water,
With the fruit and the flower,
With the All he is rushing forward.
He is always on the surface,
Tossed by the waves and dancing to the rhythm
Of joy and suffering.
The least loss makes him suffer,
The least wound hurts him–
Him I see from afar.
That ‘I’ is not my real self;
I am still within myself,
I do not float in the stream of death.
I am free, I am desireless,
I am peace, I am illumined–
Him I see from afar.

— Rabindranath Tagore – The Later Poems

(Imagesource: Famous Poets and Poems)

Always say “Yes” to the present moment!

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have.
Make the Now the primary focus of your life.

— Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now (p. 35)

You have to dive deep to find answers

You and I know many people who have been searching for many, many years, twenty years, thirty years, forty years, for the answers to life, for reality, yet they’re still in the same place they started twenty years ago. They have gone through all kinds of things. They’ve been to many places. They met certain teacher, but they’re still the same.

For they’ve never really investigated themselves. They say they do. They say they’ve been working on themselves for years, nothing has happened. But have they really been working on themselves? What they’ve been doing is sort of just thinking about it a little bit, reading books. But they’ve never dived deep enough in the Self to find the answers. And this is exactly what you have to do.

You have to dive deep, deep, deep within yourself, deeper than you can ever imagine. And the only way you can do this is by giving up the external world, mentally, not physically. In other words, by not reacting to things. To observe things, watch the world go by, leave it alone. It’s neither good nor bad. It has nothing to offer you.

— Robert Adams – Who Are You?

Our self is ever-present now

Our self is ever-present now and we do not experience a succession of nows. This present now is the only now there is. The now in which the body was born is the very same now in which these words are appearing. It is the only now there ever truly is.

For this reason our own being is said to be eternal. This doesn’t mean that we last forever in time. It indicates that we are ever-present now. There is simply no time ever actually present in our experience in which our self could exist, other that this present now.

Our self did not appear at a particular time and will not disappear at a particular time. There is no time present in our actual experience in which something could appear or disappear. There is just this ever-present now and this now is not a moment in time; it is timeless awareness, our true nature.

Our culture has lost this knowledge and therefore equates the eternal with the everlasting. However, these two belong to completely different realms, one real and one imaginary. ‘Everlasting’ is related to time and denotes something that supposedly lasts forever. ‘Eternal’ is related to the timeless and denotes that which is ever-present now. It is not about life everlasting. It is about eternal life.

— Rupert Spira – Presence: The Art of Peace and Happiness

The Word of the Silence

A bare impersonal hush is now my mind,
A world of sight clear and inimitable,
A volume of silence by a Godhead signed,
A greatness pure, virgin of will.

Once on its pages Ignorance could write
In a scribble of intellect the blind guess of Time
And cast gleam-messages of ephemeral light,
A food for souls that wander on Nature’s rim.

But now I listen to a greater Word
Born from the mute unseen omniscient Ray:
The Voice that only Silence’ ear has heard
Leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day.

All turns from a wideness and unbroken peace
To a tumult of joy in a sea of wide release.

— Sri Aurobindo – Last Poems – The Word of the Silence

The mind anchored in habits and desire

We carry on like machines with our tiresome daily routine. How eagerly the mind accepts a pattern of existence, and how tenaciously it clings to it! As by a driven nail, the mind is held together by idea, and around the idea it lives and has its being. The mind is never free, pliable, for it is always anchored; it moves within the radius, narrow or wide, of its own center. From its center it dare not wander; and when it does, it is lost in fear. Fear is not of the unknown, but of the loss of the known. The unknown does not incite fear, but dependence on the known does. Fear is always with desire, the desire for the more or for the less. The mind, with its incessant weaving of patterns, is the maker of time; and with time there is fear, hope and death.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti – The Book of Life

What is Creation?

What is creation? Not of the painter, or the poet, or the man who makes something out of marble; those are all things manifested. Is there something that is not manifested? Is there something that, because it is not manifested, has no beginning and no end? That which is manifested has a beginning, has an end. We are manifestations. Not of divine something or other, we are the result of thousands of years of so-called evolution, growth, development, and we also come to an end. That which is manifested can always be destroyed, but that which is not has no time. We are asking if there is something beyond all time.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti – The Light in Oneself – Page 49

Substance is like a river in perpetual flux

Repeatedly dwell on the swiftness of the passage and departure of things that are and of things that come to be. For substance is like a river in perpetual flux, its activities are in continuous changes, and its causes in myriad varieties, and there is scarce anything which stands still, even what is near at hand; dwell, too, on the infinite gulf of the past and the future, in which all things vanish away. Then how is he not a fool who in all this is puffed up or distracted or takes it hardly, as if he were in some lasting scene, which has troubled him for so long?

— Marcus Aurelius – Meditations – Book V – 23 (Translated by A S L Farquharson)

Life is but a moment

In a man’s life, his time is but a moment, his being a mere flux, his senses a dim glimpse,
his body food for the worms, and his soul a restless eddy …
the things of the body pass like a flowing stream;
life is a brief sojourn, and one’s mark in this world is soon forgotten.

— Marcus Aurelius