Timeless Wisdom

Awakening

Wonder of wonders!
This very enlightenment is the nature of all beings,
and yet they are unhappy for lack of it!

Marvelous! Marvelous!
All beings are already enlightened!
It is only because of their delusions 
that they do not realize this.
		Siddhartha Gautama
		[Two translations of the Buddha's
		exclamation at the moment of his
		Awakening]

When you see that God acts through you at every moment,
in every movement of mind or body,
you attain true freedom.
When you realize the truth, 
and cling to nothing in the world,
you enter eternal life.	
		Upanishads
							    
I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter,
but is, on the contrary, a living Presence....all things
work together for the good of each and all; that the
foundation principle of the world, or all the worlds,
is what we call love, and that the happiness of each
and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The
vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the
memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it
taught has remained during the quarter of a century
which has since elapsed.  I knew that what the vision
showed was true.  I had attained to a point of view
from which I saw that it must be true.  That view,
that conviction, I may say that consciousness, has
never, even during periods of the deepest depression,
been lost.	
		Richard Maurice Bucke
		"Cosmic Consciousness" as quoted in
		William James' Varieties of Religious
		Experience, p. 399

Everything became part of a single Unity, a glorious
symphonic resonance in which every part of the universe
was a part of and illuminated every other part, and I
knew that in some way it all worked together and was
very good...I had awakened to a consciousness that
spanned centuries and was on intimate terms with the
universe.  Everything mattered.  Nothing was alien or
irrelevant or distant.  The farthest star was right
next door, and the deepest mystery was mystically
seen...as if I knew everything, as if I was everything.
		Jean Houston
		A Mythic Life: Learning to Live
		Our Greater Story, pp. 65-66

I saw the perfection of all things that had ever happened
or ever will, and how the destruction didn't matter, for 
energy goes on, transmuted, so that even destruction is
an expression of pure God-ness, love and creativity.

I saw that everything was perfect, and all was composed
of love.  I saw there is no death....all is divine, 
every atom, every particle of light, singing wildly in
its joy.	
		Sophy Burnham
		The Ecstatic Journey, p. 79

They that see the Real in the midst of the unreal,
They that behold Life in the midst of death,
They that know the One in all the changing
Manifestation of the Universe, 
Unto them belongs eternal peace,
Unto none else, unto none else.	
		Upanishads

When one sees Eternity
in things that pass away
and Infinity in finite things,
then one has pure knowledge.	
		Bhagavad Gita