God As Essence
by A. H. Almaas

To truly find God, truth needs to be found
independently from the opinions of others.
The truth has to be found in our hearts.

I WAS BROUGHT UP in a Muslim community, with a belief in God. There was a strong emphasis on the teachings of God, but I remember that I could not accept at face value what was taught to me. I felt that I needed to find out for myself what the nature of reality was, whether it was God, and what the true nature of God was.

At the beginning of my spiritual journey I became aware of the experience of what I now refer to as the "essence" of the human being. There was an arising within, experienced intimately and directly, of a living presence, a palpable feeling of a living, self-aware truth. For many years now, this presence has revealed itself within me as pure spiritual qualities, first the differentiated qualities of its presence, which include truth, awareness, spaciousness, love, compassion, joy, and contentment; then its undifferentiated pure presence of Being, which revealed the various subtleties inherent in its experience, both within and beyond concepts.

Soon after the beginning of my spiritual journey, I recognized that this presence exists, and is true, for every human being; that it is the essential nature of everyone, and, hence, it is independent from any one person's history or life circumstance. Essence is something we are born with - our birthright. Essence is not something we have to work toward, for it is what we truly are. There-fore, a spiritual path is really one of removing the obstructions that disguise this essence.

This presence is a practical, day-to-day kind of experience, not something abstract or otherworldly. It has an innate intelligence that is beyond anyone's mind. At first I didn't exactly think of it as God, although I may have thought of it as the God within. Eventually, this presence revealed itself to be the inner nature of everything, and I began feeling more and more that this living consciousness, this pure essence of being, was God. I called it Truth, Reality, Being, or God.

In my experience, as I open myself to seeing the truth of who and what I am, God is a truth that reveals itself on its own. It is independent from anyone's mind or preferences, and has always existed and always will exist inside each of us. God, for me, means experiencing the totality of all existence in its true nature and condition. This means perceiving the unity of all that can be perceived, all that can be seen, at all levels of reality, including all beings and everything that appears in experience. With God, nothing is separate from anything else. By this I don't mean a scientific interconnectedness, but rather only one and single presence. This unity has perfection and beauty to it.

My experience is that we are all "one being." There is no separate individual experiencing God. This conception of God means that my experience of myself as a separate individual does not truly exist. This does not mean that I am God, but instead, I, like everyone else, am part of the presence that is alive and conscious.

God can be seen in His beingness and God can be seen in His essence. They are slightly different, although they are inseparable. Beingness means actual nature, physical actuality of existence, perceived existence of God or the God presence. This is the totality of all that exists, all the universe including my physical body, your physical body, the telephone, the room, the air, the light, the sound - all as one reality, one presence, one body that is pure consciousness, intelligence, and love. But that one reality has an essence, an inner nature. I call it the essence of God. This is the absolute mystery, the dazzling beauty that is beyond existence and nonexistence, the timeless source of everything.

To truly find God, truth needs to be found independently from the opinions of others. The truth has to be found in our hearts; it has to be totally personal, totally in our inner aloneness. God is our inner core and is the core of everything. It is also the true guidance, which is always guiding us. If we are really interested in the truth we will find our own answers, because the truth reveals itself to the sincere heart as the guided unfolding of one's essence.

Usually, what I teach is an earnest personal inquiry into the truth of one's experiences, the truth of one's mind, the truth of one's consciousness, and the truth of reality. My experience is that reality is self-revealing. If we open ourselves to it, it will reveal its secrets to us. By sincerely inquiring about our experiences of ourselves and of the world, the resulting understanding itself will be the ever-expanding self-revelation of the mystery of existence.

The process of opening up to the God presence is a continuing one. I don't think of myself as having arrived at the final, ultimate truth. I feel that my experience is still limited and probably always will be, but will continue to grow and change. I do not see my experience of what God is or how to reach God as necessarily the final or the only way. I don't claim that kind of knowledge, nor do I know if anyone can. To me, that kind of knowledge is something that reveals itself over time. I do know that the moment essence is recognized as one's being, one's essential nature, and experienced as such, a radical transformation occurs. One's life and experiences of God will never be the same. No longer will God be experienced as something we were taught to believe in, but rather as something we can truly experience each moment of our lives.

Awakening To the Dharma
by Joseph Goldstein

Cultivating an active mindfulness of one's
experience, moment to moment, is the path to awakening.

I HAD MY FIRST CONTACT with Buddhism and meditation when I went to Thailand. The first time I sat in meditation was for just five minutes, but even that glimpse was exciting and transformative. It opened a new possibility of understanding. I saw that almost everything else I had studied had been an exploration of externals. This experience of meditation turned my attention around: It gave me a sense that there is actually a path through inner experience, and this has been borne out in ways I hadn't dreamed of at that time.

For me the word "God" refers to something quite different from what may be meant in different traditions. Buddhism does not have a theistic notion of God as a being outside oneself. In the Buddhist tradition, the word that most closely translates as God is "Dhamma" ("Dharma" in Sanskrit), which means "Truth" or "Reality." This includes the truth or reality of our everyday experiences as well as the transcendent truth of the unconditioned, which is beyond the phenomena we normally know, beyond all our normal ways of thinking.

Most of us live in a world of conceptual perception. We put names and language on our experiences, often confusing those concepts with the experience itself. The practice of the Dhamma has as its goal a clear awareness in each moment of experience as it actually is, a state where one can drop beneath the level of concept to a clearer seeing of things as they truly are. For example, I may be sitting in meditation and start to feel some pain. In a usual mode of perception, I may think, "My back hurts" or "My knee hurts." In doing so, I create a concept of a knee or a back as well as a concept of the self who is experiencing that pain. In an intimate connection with the Dhamma, however, I drop these concepts and become one with the simple sensation that is arising in the body.

As I drop into this nonconceptual level, I perceive the process of these elements of experience differently, particularly in periods of intense meditation. For example, I may be looking at my desk. On the level of concept I may see desk; on the level of direct perception I may see color and form. On the level of deep concentrated awareness, however, I may see a reality that is not normally available to ordinary perception, just as when we view things through an electron microscope a new level of reality becomes apparent. On this unusually deep level, one sees constantly changing elements with no solid core, continuously arising and dissolving - being born and dying. There is absolutely nothing static, secure, or substantial within them. As we observe the mind and body in this way, we come to a different kind of understanding. The notion of I or self or solidity of the body completely disappears.

When this awareness is practiced continuously, we come into an increasingly deeper connection with the Truth, or the Dhamma. This connection also brings about a deep balance of mind from which we may experience that which goes beyond what we can know through the senses and through the mind. This is what Buddhism calls the "Unconditioned" or "Nibbana" (in Sanskrit, "Nirvana"). This transcendent experience is difficult to talk about conceptually, because words can-not express what is not known via our normal senses. When the mind reaches a certain place of balance, it can open to what is beyond the process of incessantly changing mental and physical elements altogether, coming to a place of stillness, silence, and peace. The Buddha called this "the unborn, the undying." He said that here earth, air, water, and fire do not arise; length, breadth, change, and imperfection could not be. We know the true nature of the Dhamma in this opening, and we |know it when we are following the path leading to this realization.

Deep experiences of the Dhamma have changed the reference point for most of my day-to-day experiences. I had perceived experience as referring to a self, to someone who was having it, for example, "I'm thinking" or "I feel angry, happy." Everything referred to a sense of "I." Now, instead of referring to a self, experiences seem to be more a sense of simply "phenomena arising and passing" without anyone behind them to whom they are happening.

A short teaching of the Buddha expresses this idea succinctly: "In the seen, there is just what is seen, in the heard, there is just what is heard, in the sensed (smell, taste, and touch), there is just what is sensed, and in thought there is just what is thought."

An amazing simplicity comes when we no longer create the concept of self or I behind experience. Life becomes so much less identified with any particular thought, sensation, emotion, or situation as being I. We are no longer imprisoned by the tight and narrow construct of self. With this awareness, our experiences become spacious and peaceful.

The process of understanding "selflessness" is progressive. There are still times when other forces, such as greed or anger or fear, may arise in the mind; there may still be temporary identifications with these elements. Although the root of self-idea has been cut, there is still much work to do on the spiritual path to live totally in this selfless domain. This becomes the ongoing work of a day-to-day spiritual practice.

Cultivating an active mindfulness of one's experience, moment to moment, is the path to awakening: taking a step, standing up, reaching for a door. When we're not mindful, different things happen. We can be going through the daily activities of life completely lost in thinking about the past or the future, about our hopes, our worries, our anxieties - without being present at all. On a somewhat more attentive level we may actually be present in our bodies, but still have the sense of "I'm standing up," "I'm sitting down," or "I'm doing this." Even though we're more present, we're still reinforcing the sense of someone solid and unchanging being there. On a deeper level of mindfulness, where our attention is very careful and deliberate, we begin to experience the reaching for a door, not as "I am reaching" but as a series of constantly changing sensations. Even in simple movements we can see so many things, so many different sensations coming and going - phenomena arising and passing - without adding the concept of self.

There are many ways to go about one's search for a personal relationship with the Dhamma. One traditional way is to leave the world and become a monk or a nun, to lead a life of renunciation such that one's lifestyle supports this experience of the deepest reality. However, this is not an option for most people.

A form that has evolved, which I think works well for many people, is the practice of intensive meditation retreats. People start with one weekend and then pro-gress to retreats lasting from ten days to a month. During these retreats, people devote themselves full-time to intensive practice. Throughout the day they alternate between sitting and walking meditation. The intensity of the meditation is all that happens; there's no reading, no talking, no studying. It's all done in silence. In our fast-paced culture, a retreat provides a counterbalance to the rest of our lives and an opportunity to explore the usu-ally unseen aspects of ourselves. It provides a space for us to develop, quite strongly, the power of the mind, the power of concentration. The challenge thus becomes one of learning how to integrate these two aspects of our lives: how to leave an intensive meditation retreat and carry the truth that we've seen inside ourselves into the business of our daily lives.

This integration is an ongoing process. Over and over we come on retreat, go deep in our practices, go back into the world, and explore how to integrate what we learned. Once or twice a year we go through this process. Over time the increased integration begins to happen and we begin to live it more and more deeply in our daily lives. This is how we make the Truth our own - by bringing it to life each day from our deepest experience of the Dhamma.

Compassion In Action
by Mother Teresa

The fruit of love is service, which is compassion in action.

TO ME, GOD AND COMPASSION are one and the same. Compassion is the joy of sharing. It's doing small things for the love of each other - just a smile, or carrying a bucket of water, or showing some simple kindness. These are the small things that make up compassion.

Compassion means trying to share and understand the suffering of people. And I think it's very good when people suffer. To me, that's really like the kiss of Jesus. And a sign, also, that this person has come so close to Jesus, sharing his passion.

It is only pride and selfishness and coldness that keep us from having compassion. When we ultimately go home to God, we are going to be judged on what we were to each other, what we did for each other, and, especially, how much love we put in that. It's not how much we give, but how much love we put in the doing - that's compassion in action.

One's religion has nothing to do with compassion. It's our love for God that is the main thing. Many Christians and non-Christians alike come to help in our houses in Calcutta and throughout the world. We have volunteers of all religions working with our aides day and night. Religion is meant to help us come closer to God, not meant to separate us... true religion, no? All God really wants is for us to love Him. The way we can show our love for Him is to serve others.

You may ask how the contemplative life fits together with compassion in action. It fits together by bringing union with God. Jesus said, "Whatever you do to the last of my brethren, you are doing it to me." If you do everything for Him, you are acting as a contemplative in the heart of the world.

There is the contemplative life where people sepa-rate themselves completely from the world and live a life of prayer, of sacrifice. We are out in the world doing that - being contemplatives in the heart of the world.

We need a life of deep prayer to be able to give until it hurts. It seems the more we have, the less we give. And the less we have, the more we can give.

The need is great for food, clothes, medicine, and tender-love-and-care. This is the greatest need. We have homes for the dying, for lepers, for children, for the poorest of the poor. And now, in the United States, we have homes for people with AIDS also.

My message to the people of today is simple. We must love one another as God loves each one of us. To be able to love, we need a clean heart. Prayer is what gives us a clean heart. The fruit of prayer is a deepening of faith and the fruit of faith is love. The fruit of love is service, which is compassion in action.

Religion has nothing to do with compassion; it is our love for God that is the main thing because we have all been created for the sole purpose to love and be loved.

© 2008, Richard Clark, PhD., All Rights Reserved

Excerpted with permission from the book Handbook for the Spirit, ©2008. Edited by Richard Carlson & Benjamin Shield. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800-972-6657 ext. 52.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Carlson, PhD. was considered to be one of the worlds foremost experts on happiness and stress reduction. Benjamin Shield, Ph.D., is an educator, lecturer, and therapist. In Handbook for the Spirit, they gather some of the most revered teachers in religion, psychology, and spirituality to provide much-needed spiritual nourishment.