I wrote an essay in which I said that God has put all of the answers on the top shelf so that we cannot get at them. What I am implying is what every mystic is implying-that it is no use asking God questions. He knows that we are the answer as well as the question. The problem is that we have two selves, The True Self and the False Self. It is the False Self that asks questions and the True Self that keeps silence.
The topic then is: “Why do I know better than I can do?” This is why we come to a spiritual teaching, to learn our lessons slowly, over time, that we are both the question and the answer.
Take me. Every day I worry myself with the question of “Should I move this spring?” It is the False Self asking. So I get no answer. Thus I stay here. This may or may not be the right thing to do, but my fear keeps me here.
I am unready to take a leap of faith. My life will go on as usual until I either come to the right answer within myself or Fate pushes me into a move.
Lewis, we are both the question and the answer to everything. We come to silence when it is obvious that our noisy minds will never say anything productive.
I could go on, but I know that I don’t know, so how can I answer these questions? We are on the horns of a dilemma that only surrender can answer. Surrender is who we are.
God is love and love has all of the power and we tend to doubt that. Nevertheless, it is so. Are you a poet? Because poets always write from not knowing!
A few minutes before reading your reply to my previous comment I had just finished watching one of your video recordings— Dropping Down into the Heart.
In that recording, you said:-‘Before you go up there and get lost in the divided mind come to me first drop down into me your heart first and suffer as much as you want to suffer without trying to fix yourself. This is a radical idea to the stupidity of the brain— it’s on automatic, it’s a rote machine, your only hope is to drop down into your heart and keep doing that day in and day out every day for the rest of your life.’ —
I like that. Dropping down into the heart is indeed to surrender into the silence.
I live near a military base, and earlier this morning while walking to work there were two fighter jets practising air combat maneuvers, the noise was incredible, and the clear and quiet of the sky being polluted by the jet’s vapor trails that left line-shaped artificial clouds and as if the sky divided into separate parts. How analogous this is to the brain busy trying to leave its mark by describing and dividing.
Entirely different/opposite to the artificial — never fully satisfying, and unending — answers provided by the brain is mysteriously felt when dropping down into the heart: in that surrender; the impossibility of noise disturbing the peace.
And as for being a poet, yes, I see what you mean, when we are without questions and something else comes through us: a different kind of expression; not the interpretation by the brain, but something of the poem’s silence is felt in the heart.
Vicki, I have on and off for many years been what they call a seeker, but since (only quite recently) reading your essays and watching your videos there is definitely a surrendering but how ready am I to take that leap of faith of trusting ‘God is love and love has all of the power and we tend to doubt that.’
There are so many questions, but rather than asking you about one, in particular, I wonder if you could please comment (even, briefly) on some of the things you mentioned in the above video recording.🙂
* * *
What do you mean by —
A state of not knowing.
The witness is who we are.
When we choose to rise above the mind. (Who is the one that chooses?)
How to remember that I am not only the role I play but everybody else’s.
I am the nothingness and so are you.
The nothingness and everything.
This emptiness is your fullness.
The paradox of your position.
As long as I think I’m Vicki, I will live a life of misery, it is only when I remember that I am not that-that I feel a sense of peace, and I can let go, and just be nobody, and do nothing. (Vicki, is it like— I am present, but not Lewis. It is I.)
* * *
Vicki, it appears obvious to say there is one world and, one life, but a difficult leap is that I am that one world and one life, although in those glimpses that appears to be the way it’s experienced: the simultaneous presence of the world and the witnessing of it, but not a world full of actual things, instead, a kind of knowing of my self through the experience of the ‘world’.
Thank you for the opportunity to ask these questions, much appreciated.🙂
I love these video’s. Thank you, Vicki. 🙂
Thanks, Lewis. If you want to throw out a topic, I will see if I can respond….
I wrote an essay in which I said that God has put all of the answers on the top shelf so that we cannot get at them. What I am implying is what every mystic is implying-that it is no use asking God questions. He knows that we are the answer as well as the question. The problem is that we have two selves, The True Self and the False Self. It is the False Self that asks questions and the True Self that keeps silence.
The topic then is: “Why do I know better than I can do?” This is why we come to a spiritual teaching, to learn our lessons slowly, over time, that we are both the question and the answer.
Take me. Every day I worry myself with the question of “Should I move this spring?” It is the False Self asking. So I get no answer. Thus I stay here. This may or may not be the right thing to do, but my fear keeps me here.
I am unready to take a leap of faith. My life will go on as usual until I either come to the right answer within myself or Fate pushes me into a move.
Lewis, we are both the question and the answer to everything. We come to silence when it is obvious that our noisy minds will never say anything productive.
I could go on, but I know that I don’t know, so how can I answer these questions? We are on the horns of a dilemma that only surrender can answer. Surrender is who we are.
God is love and love has all of the power and we tend to doubt that. Nevertheless, it is so. Are you a poet? Because poets always write from not knowing!
Thank you, Vicki.🙂
A few minutes before reading your reply to my previous comment I had just finished watching one of your video recordings— Dropping Down into the Heart.
In that recording, you said:-‘Before you go up there and get lost in the divided mind come to me first drop down into me your heart first and suffer as much as you want to suffer without trying to fix yourself. This is a radical idea to the stupidity of the brain— it’s on automatic, it’s a rote machine, your only hope is to drop down into your heart and keep doing that day in and day out every day for the rest of your life.’ —
I like that. Dropping down into the heart is indeed to surrender into the silence.
I live near a military base, and earlier this morning while walking to work there were two fighter jets practising air combat maneuvers, the noise was incredible, and the clear and quiet of the sky being polluted by the jet’s vapor trails that left line-shaped artificial clouds and as if the sky divided into separate parts. How analogous this is to the brain busy trying to leave its mark by describing and dividing.
Entirely different/opposite to the artificial — never fully satisfying, and unending — answers provided by the brain is mysteriously felt when dropping down into the heart: in that surrender; the impossibility of noise disturbing the peace.
And as for being a poet, yes, I see what you mean, when we are without questions and something else comes through us: a different kind of expression; not the interpretation by the brain, but something of the poem’s silence is felt in the heart.
Vicki, I have on and off for many years been what they call a seeker, but since (only quite recently) reading your essays and watching your videos there is definitely a surrendering but how ready am I to take that leap of faith of trusting ‘God is love and love has all of the power and we tend to doubt that.’
Hi Vicki,
There are so many questions, but rather than asking you about one, in particular, I wonder if you could please comment (even, briefly) on some of the things you mentioned in the above video recording.🙂
* * *
What do you mean by —
A state of not knowing.
The witness is who we are.
When we choose to rise above the mind. (Who is the one that chooses?)
How to remember that I am not only the role I play but everybody else’s.
I am the nothingness and so are you.
The nothingness and everything.
This emptiness is your fullness.
The paradox of your position.
As long as I think I’m Vicki, I will live a life of misery, it is only when I remember that I am not that-that I feel a sense of peace, and I can let go, and just be nobody, and do nothing. (Vicki, is it like— I am present, but not Lewis. It is I.)
* * *
Vicki, it appears obvious to say there is one world and, one life, but a difficult leap is that I am that one world and one life, although in those glimpses that appears to be the way it’s experienced: the simultaneous presence of the world and the witnessing of it, but not a world full of actual things, instead, a kind of knowing of my self through the experience of the ‘world’.
Thank you for the opportunity to ask these questions, much appreciated.🙂