From Life to Stillness & Beyond

Stop – have you ever asked yourself what would happen if everything around you would just stop, if all those on going impressions & events of your life would just stop acting on you for a while to give you a break? A break in which you become free of sense overload and the constant demand to respond, to interact and to complete and fulfil what is expected of you, day in and day out.

But the wheel of life is rolling, unfolding and revealing its contents at any given moment in time. Whether we like it or not is irrelevant. The driving force of cause and effect, action and reaction has gained its own momentum. And from the very moment our innocent soul took its first step out of unity into duality by means of its ultimate freedom of choice, each of its actions ignited an equally strong reaction that was ordered according to the unfailing judgement of universal laws. Multiplying themselves in myriads of endlessly aggrandising events, ultimately manifesting the world as it is known to us today, including each of our personal lives we are bound to relate to and deal with every second of the day, which will be the case until the day we will die.

We might not easily accept this truth, but deep inside we all know that life can’t be stopped, and that it is not in our power to stop the unfolding of life, because life simply just happens.

Stop – have you ever asked yourself what would happen if everything within you would just stop, if all those thoughts, emotions & your inner voice would just stop acting on you for a while to give you a break? A break in which you become free of your uninterrupted and sometimes compulsive thought patterns, as well as your constant considering about the never-ending incoming impressions and events of life, day in and day out.

But the wheel of your mind and thoughts is rolling, creating and unfolding its contents at any given moment in time. Whether we like it or not is irrelevant. The driving force of all what we have acquired, all our deeply engrained habits, conditionings and non-conscious states, have gained their own momentum. And from the moment our innocent soul inhabited our physical body gradually becoming the slave of our five senses, our initial pure state of being was forgotten and got buried below the waves of our ever-changing and uninterrupted thought and mind activity. Multiplying themselves in myriads of endlessly aggrandising features and contradictions, ultimately manifesting as mechanical set ways that make us respond to the different events of life the same way again and again. Repeating and meeting the same cycles and life patterns again and again will be the case for most of us until the day we will die.

Stop - simply just stop for a moment and wake up to the fact that you can’t stop life or the event you are experiencing right now, that is - whatever you are experiencing right now is nothing more than an incoming impression, predominantly perceived by one of your five senses, that is asking for your attention.

Become aware - that by simply waking up to this fact you are slightly further removed from the event and the incoming impressions it generates. By waking up to this simple truth you have become more conscious and your attention has naturally withdrawn and manifested a liberating sense of separation from the impression or event that now lies there in front of you. You have ‘stopped’ being one with the impression or event. You have stopped placing your whole sense of self or sense of ‘I’ into the impression or event, hence more space has been created in which you gained a greater sense of self as well as a greater awareness of the spaciousness surrounding things, which allows the impression or event to be recognised for what it actually is in essence.

You just have started changing a less conscious way of perception into a more conscious way of perception, as well as that you just have begun with what is called work on yourself by applying ‘conscious effort’, which is the beginning of self-study.

Consciously making yourself wake up to the fact that life is nothing more than a succession of incoming impressions that form an event, is called self-remembering that leads to the gradual realization of the full truth of what you are. Knowing the full truth of what you are, which includes all that had been hidden in your non-consciousness, is called self-realization or self-consciousness.

To consciously fully stop for a moment from the depth of your being, is not going to stop life and its events or incoming impressions, but will gradually change the way you respond to life. That is - each time you have stopped being the event you have automatically shifted onto a higher level of consciousness from which you are able to respond to life in a more conscious way, i.e. less mechanical. Simultaneously it will gradually teach your five senses that they will be able to work much more efficiently by not having to drag our faculty of attention along with them each time they are stimulated by an incoming impression.

To truly stop and to wake up to the actual Isness of things again and again, will invite precious moments of stillness within us in which nothing needs to happen. Those moments of stillness will accumulate and will gradually penetrate deeper, all the way down to the cellular level, creating a living memory in our connective tissue. This living ‘stillness memory’ will play a vital role further down the line of our path of transformation.

Stop - have you ever asked yourself what would happen if your physical body would be allowed to simply stop, if all this sensory stimulus, all those complex movements and all those physical tensions would just stop acting on you for a while to give you a break? A break in which your body would become free of having to act out what your mind, emotions and thoughts expect from it day in and day out.

But the wheel of our physical actions is rolling, keeping this body continuously engaged. Whether we like it or not is irrelevant. The driving force of our adrenals that profoundly impact on our nervous systems has gained its own momentum. And from the moment our innocent soul took its residence in this physical confinement, it became entangled by the veil of forgetfulness, taking the back seat in this vehicle that is made of flesh and bones, humbly surrendering to the mind that took on the role of the driver without having sufficient knowledge of how to drive and deal with the servicing. From then onwards the body is being raced along by the mind and emotions facing all sorts of accidents and difficulties, as well as being fuelled with all sorts of wrong food, which gradually leads to a malfunction of the organism. Multiplying themselves in myriads of endlessly aggrandising wrong work of systems and brains, creating dis-balance and disorder that profoundly impact on the homeostasis in the body, creating physical friction and stress. The experience of physical friction and stress will be the case for most of us until the day we will die.

The practice of Meditation is in actual fact nothing more than a prolonged conscious ‘stop’, in which the physical body is finally allowed to be motionless and still. Allowed to assimilate and shut down all sorts of stressors and sense stimulus, as well as becoming passive to the demands of mind, thoughts and emotions. Once the body is allowed to fully surrender to not having to do and perform, once the whole weight of the body is allowed to fully surrender into gravity by completely releasing its hold and its tension by means of gradual undoing, and once the body has found satisfaction in sitting still and fully stop for a more prolonged period of time, actual stillness will enter and manifest, creating an even greater longing to undo. This is the stage in which every pause after the exhalation will be experienced as a profound sigh of relief that leads to a greater separation from our mind, emotions and body unit in which one experiences glimpses of absence of sense of self or sense of ‘I’, as well as prolonged moments of absence of thought in which the depth and profoundness of stillness and peace is creating the pathway to what lies beyond.     

Copyright © December 2012 Alexander Filmer-Lorch all rights reserved

Remembering the Self

Three hundred years ago a disciple asked his Master how he can come to the super-sensual life and hear god speak. The master replies: When you can throw yourself into “THAT”, where no creature dwells though it be but for a moment, than you hear what God speaks. The disciple asks him if the place where no creature or nothing created dwells is near or far away. The master answered: It is in you and it is to be reached by ceasing, even for a moment, from all thinking and willing – when you stand still from self-thinking and self-willing and can stop the wheel of the imagination and the senses. This has to be done at least once a day.

Unknown Mystic

This is a perfect parable that describes the true state of Self-remembering. All work on becoming a more conscious being as well as work on oneself depends on self-remembering. Half a minute of true self-remembering every day is sufficient enough to start with, but it has to be done completely and from the depth of our being. We should not only think & contemplate about remembering the self, but also do it. Otherwise the imprints of the impact the sheer act of self-remembering has on our state of being will fade away and be repeatedly replaced by the imprints of external impressions and events.

The initial signs of applying self-remembering properly is that we experience a clear feeling of force entering ourselves from somewhere within, as if something had opened up deep within us, creating a liberating sense of spaciousness that does not occur in our everyday state of consciousness.

That state can be found above our life and our senses, which is comprised of all our fears and daily worries, all things and people we care for, our contacts & plans, as well as all what we see and hear through our five senses.

You are on our way to work and miss your train, you see your savings & the cash in your wallet, you remember that your dishwasher is broken, you experience and see illness and despair, you witness the changes in season and you are aware of your own physical body and the shape of your face.

All that is sensual – all that is life transmitted by senses, our personal life experienced by our five senses that belong to our physical body.

This might give rise to the question if there is any other life than our sensual life?

The universal teachings say that we must transform our incoming impressions. But unfortunately we are all glued to our sensory reality, which is the reason why we cannot see beyond any particular event of life. The moment we are in an outer event, everything seems to become that event. Soon it passes and we wonder what actually has happened.

As we mentioned before, life is a series of events, and every day consists of a definite structure of events. Those events are packed into our day all the time, as well as on all different scales.

This includes our personal and family events, our local and national events and our world events. All that takes place on different scales simultaneously and is due to the many different laws we are under and are acting on us.

We obviously can never be without some sort of event, which tries to take great amounts of force from us, and that is so because we are under definite laws and are clearly not free. This takes us usually a whole life to grasp and then we are still not able to grasp it.

Have you ever noticed where you place your sense of ‘I’ or from where you derive your sense of self? Have you ever realized what kind of being you have? It is well worth pursuing this enquiry, because the moment you know your actual kind of being you will know that it weaves a thread through the way your life unfolds, continuing the same series of events. Hence our level of being attracts our life and all the events belonging to it. This happens without fail always in congruency with our level of being and as a consequence we frequently think why is that always happening to us?

To relate that back to universal ideas we have to ask ourselves if we ever have observed our own life and its events from the angle of what the ancient teachings say about being?

The teachings say that self-observation has its own limitations and can only take us to a certain point at which things start fading out and become mechanical or habitual. At this point along the scale of our development the spark of meaning and longing has lost its gravitas.  That’s the time to self-remember and once we self-remember we will experience that help will enter.

We are always thinking about the teaching but are not applying what the work teaches us, and when we refrain from any attempt to self-remember, our inner continuity with the teaching is broken, which means that the teaching is gradually moving away from us and we simply pass back into mind created life.

If we are able to catch ourselves by remembering to remember the timeless teachings the moment this happens we have to remember our true self deep within us, which opens us again to the influences of the teaching.

To truly remembering oneself is a literal surrender of oneself, in which one realizes ones helplessness. This is the meaning of a conscious positive shock in which we sacrifice something we want to keep, and a full true surrender of oneself, even if it lasts only for one millisecond is the highest form of sacrifice.

That only can happen if we understand that higher influences can reach us, influences that do not belong to mind created life but constantly surround us by higher knowledge.

Eight hundred years ago a Sufi wrote:

Self-remembering is like coming to the surface of the sea and drawing in air. This air he says is miraculous and will last a whole day, even when one is at the bottom of the ocean.

When we self-remember every day we will gradually become aware of a continuity running through our life, and when we feel the loss of this continuity we have reached a point in our development deep within our heart, which could be called the awakening of a living conscience.

Furthermore it is said that our understanding of the teaching is relative to our level of being, as well as that simply to know is not to truly understand.

So the knowledge of the teaching acts on our being and in time will give rise to true understanding.

Knowledge put into action in conjunction will give rise to true understanding. This means that the moment our being can will what it knows then it results in increasing understanding.

The teaching means us to work through action, and to work through action means that we have to apply effort. Our work is the effort to connect ones knowledge of the teaching with ones being.

The effort is to put what one knows into relation to what one is, and if knowledge and being are out of balance, whichever way round one of them has outgrown the other, we won’t truly understand.

This only becomes meaningful to us and is worth pursuing from the perspective that there is a higher level of consciousness available to us, a level of consciousness, which we realistically can reach.

We should not only know and observe, but we must remember ourselves and utilise the energy evoked by self-remembering, because only in the state of self-remembering can more refined and higher influences reach us and penetrate through all the different layers of what we have acquired and act on our being.

It has to be made very clear and we all truly have to understand that we have to be in the teachings and in our external and internal life simultaneously, and there should not be any contradiction. Some sides of us belong to life some belong to the universal teachings.

The different parts of the divided self has to be put into the right place and order, whilst having the strength not merely seeing opposites. Fact is that we need both – the teachings and life, and by establishing a perfect balance between them, we can get force out of both of them.

Its like two rooms opening up into each other and being part of the same house, and this house is you. So, no one is expected to cut oneself off life and live in a monastery, and everything we can learn from the ancient teachings will help our life and help us to ultimately attain our life-aim.

Self-remembering shifts us into a different state of consciousness, and in that particular state of consciousness we are not able to do certain things without going asleep at once, we will be able to truly see it happening, which means that we see ourselves becoming identified.

In different words if we do certain things and simultaneously remember ourselves, rest assured we will do them in quite a different way.

Just say to yourself  “I am not me”. If you truly say that from the depth of your being and really mean it, it will give us a very strange feeling as to who we are. This feeling is usually combined with a sense of the dissolving of ones own personality, and the objective of most universal teachings is to make once personality inactive so that the real part within us – our essence can grow.

Say to yourself “ what is …your name… up to? This will create a degree of inner separation and awareness, that one is not ones acquired personality only.

That one is not this ever changing figure, with all its contradictions that life has built up deep within us, and that one takes as oneself by simply not knowing any better. Such a tremendous feeling, such a true inner sense is the arising of self-remembering.

Our further inner evolution can only start when we realize that we are not what we thought ourselves to be and pretended to be. The moment the teachings really hits our home, this so stoic house of cards we take as ourselves begins to fall to pieces faster than we can think.

“There is a necessity that we come to the point that we realize our own nothingness, but this is usually mercifully delayed and can’t be artificially realized. You cannot pretend to be nothing, and it is very painful to see a person pretending to be nothing. To remember yourself as you are now is not self-remembering. Self-remembering comes down from above and full self-remembering is a state of consciousness in which personality and all it pretends to be ceases to exist.

In this process you become nobody, yet the fullness of this state, which is real bliss, makes you for the first time – somebody.” M. Nicole

Copyright © Alexander Filmer-Lorch 2012 all rights reserved 

“Out beyond wrongdoings and right doings there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

A summary of a talk, held at the Jivamukti Yoga Centre in London mid August 2012, based on a 'Rumi' poem.

Once your enquiry takes you further into the depth of the universal teachings, you gradually will come to the conclusion that meditation & philosophy can’t be separated. Together, they can be seen as the two different sides of a coin.

Philosophy gives meaning to meditation and satisfies the mind and intellect, whilst meditation gives life to philosophy and transforms the substance, of which true knowledge is made of, into actual experience.

Higher knowledge is constantly surrounding us everywhere we go, whether we are receptive to it or not is irrelevant. It meets us in specific forms of influences that are acting on us in our life. This particular knowledge can’t be found in mind created life, which nowadays penetrates through almost every corner of this world as well as what lies beyond  our limited world of perception.

This higher knowledge we are talking about, is mainly transmitted through the fine arts & sciences of this world, safely contained and disguised within architecture, philosophy, literature, as well as nature, religion & poetry.

The more abstract ideas of universal teachings that lay beyond the understanding of our conceptual mind and intellect, are often embedded within the powerful influence of poetry. They are mainly directed towards our heart and aim to awaken our finer emotions that connect us with the transformative force of meaning.

Poetry points towards something eternal and can induce a state of self-remembering in us.

If we truly want to absorb these ideas and be nourished by the meaning of poetry we have to keep the door to our hearts wide open.

“Out beyond wrongdoings and right doings

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

'Rumi'

      

‘Between wrong doings and right doings’ that form the horizontal line of life, including past, present and future, there is a centre point or a middle, represented as a fulcrum called ‘neutral’, which can take us above our two dimensional way of perception that is mainly active on this horizontal plain in life.

Here - our mind rules in form of a ‘Me’, as subject and everything else, or ‘Them’ as the object, manifesting the ever-changing external world of our experiences.

As a consequence, this leads to the appearance of forces that oppose each other in form of ‘yes or no’, ‘positive or negative’, active or passive, as well as good or bad etc. Those forces are comprising the 'law of opposition'. 

So, the meaning behind ‘wrongdoings or right doings’ is revealing the teachings & methods that re-connect us with, as well as facilitates us to further develop a strong sounding conscience that is alive and not deeply buried by our countless contradictions. Those colliding contradictions form part of the divisions within the ‘Self’, which separate us from all that is noble and divine in us.

This gives rise to the realization that we can’t become more conscious without an alive, clear and fully developed conscience. And the methods that will take us towards this objective are applied ‘self-study’ & facilitated ‘self-enquiry’.

If we choose to stay in a linear state of perception, or are simply not interested or receptive to the transmission of knowledge that is continuously surrounding us, pointing towards a way out of those powerful laws that are constantly acting on us, we will keep bouncing back and forth within the dynamics of those forces in external life, as well as in our internal world. This means that the possibilities to change, transform or further evolve will diminish more and more the older we get, and in time we will become completely immersed by the vale of ‘blissful denial’ that will stay with us to the day we will die.

So, a third force is required to take us out of this linear state of perception, and the teaching that will lead us to this specific force can be found within the meaning of the word ‘doings’.  

‘Doings’, are governed by an active force that can take us into opposite directions, depending on the positive or negative charge of our intentions once we apply the idea of scale to them. Everything around us and everything within us contains the idea of scale. For example, the scale of our emotions, or the scale of our house, or the scale of a mountain range.

So this active force within doings can take us towards right-, as well as towards wrongdoings and the moment we find the equilibrium between both of them, a triad comes into manifestation in the form of an interval in which the possibility of change appears. If change does not manifest during this interval, then at least something else can happen that lies outside the limitations and confinements of different opposing forces and their linear ways of perception.

We have two futures according to the universal teachings, one in time & one in scale. Additionally we have two bodies, our physical body and our psychological body.

As we all know, our physical body moves along the horizontal line of life, hence in time, whilst our psychological body can rise up and down a vertical line known as the vertical scale or the ‘scale of eternity’.

The teachings of this vertical scale, which is literally infinite can be found within the meaning of the words of ‘out beyond’, which contains the teaching of ‘self-observation’.

To be able to observe our selves, we have to remove ourselves to create enough distance and space, by which we can truly see what lies in front of us. We then can see both ends of the pendulum simultaneously and can allow both ends to simply ‘be’. Hence ‘out’ symbolises a neutral place or state that lies above the horizontal line in which things can be seen from their actual ‘Isness’ point of view and can be put into a greater perspective. Whilst ‘beyond’ symbolises the neutralizing force, that can transcend the dynamic of wrongdoings and right doings into a new proposition that lies above all doings, as well as positive or negative connotations.

Within the meaning of ‘there is a field’ we will come across the teaching that man is a self-evolving organism and can further evolve his consciousness & state of being by means of conscious effort.

‘There is a field’, might give rise to the question what actually happens on a field? A field is an environment on which something can grow like the seeds in the ground can germinate and sprout to further grow and develop into crops. Instinctively the sprout is attracted to the sun and by absorbing and assimilating the sunlight it grows and flourishes on all levels.

Similarly, once we can see beyond the limitations of our mind created life, and once the meaning of the finer influences have had a chance to penetrate through the outer layers of our personality and make us look inwards to perceive our internal world of experiences by means of self-study & self-enquiry.

In time we will realize our internal world to be a large a field within that holds the seed of our inherent potential of further growth and evolution. Initially this field requires a tremendous amount of work and constant care and it will cause us a lot of hardship, friction and resistance.

There are many weeds to be eradicated that try to prevent the seed from blossoming, and there is a lot of sticky clay as well, in which we get stuck again and again, slowing our work down. Additionally there are tough weather conditions comprised of storms, fog and floods that are holding us up to complete the work and succeed with our objective.  

With a bit of patience and a sufficient amount of conscious effort, as well as help from others, we will slowly get there.

The more we grow within, the stronger the inner longing becomes. And the more its inherent magnetic pull like qualities take us further into the divided nature of our self, the more our heart is thriving for union.

‘I’ll meet you there’, symbolises the pure nature of real ‘I’, in which the divided nature of ourselves meets the undivided nature of our internal being. We now have come to a place of peace & silence within that vast field of our internal world, in which we are entirely on our own. Stripped & freed of everything we believed ourselves to be, we might be carried away by the universal pulse of consciousness right through the heart of our awareness towards the unchanging nature within, when they see fit.

  

Copyright © Alexander Filmer-Lorch October 2012 all rights reserved