Letters

Awakening to the Dream

The Gift of Lucid Living

ATTD News Letter number 5

5/05/2003

Q & A
If or when you have a question you'd like to see answered in this newsletter mail to: author@awakeningtothedream.com

Question: Just stumbled across your website tonight and read the excerpt from the last chapter of your book. Nicely done. Your description of this enlightened state is done with simple elegance.
Have you personally experienced this state? It's a state I yearn for.
Answer: That enlightenment would be an experience or a state for someone to be in, constitutes the enlightenment myth. Enlightenment is not so much an experience for someone as that it is freedom from being a someone. Yes there are wonderful experiences (peak experiences or mystical experiences), which often get confused with enlightenment. True enlightenment is already fully present, but as long as the mind thinks it's some kind of an experience it gets overlooked.
Your true identity is the ultimate subject and is effortlessly aware of everything. To this ultimate subject -this witnessing presence- everything that appears is an object; including thoughts, the ego and the mind. Seen from this angle the mind appears in awareness. Shift the attention from the experience to the experiencing itself, from the seen (the mind) to the seeing and from the known to the knowing and it will all be clear. Seeing can never be seen by the eye and this 'knowing' can never be an object to itself, which is the reason that it is -as so often said- beyond the mind.
I wish you the clarity you yearn for, but be careful as it will annihilate the 'you' that yearns for it.

-=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=-

Where is Shiva not?

Somewhere I read a small anecdote about an Indian sage.
One day the sage was sitting in a temple and his foot was pointing to the statue of Shiva. Pointing one's foot to the temple deity seems to be a big no no in India. A priest, on entering the temple, discovered this unacceptable behavior and told the sage to not point his foot at Shiva. The sage answered: "I'll gladly point my foot away from Shiva, if you can point out to me where he is not."

Dreaming and awakening

When we dream we do not know that we are dreaming. In our dreams we may even interpret our dreams. Only after we are awake do we know that we have dreamed.
But there comes a great awakening, and then we know that life is a great dream. But the stupid think they are awake all the time and believe they know it distinctly. _{Chuang Tzu (399 - 295 B.C.) Chinese philosopher.

http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Philosophy/Taichi/chuang.html}

-=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=-

Awakened Poetry

I MIGHT ACT SERIOUS
If God would stop telling jokes
I might act
serious.
Tukaram
_{From: Love Poems From God Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West by Daniel Ladinsky}

-=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=-

The angels fly because they take themselves lightly
(G.K. Chesterton)

Quote of the moment!

Nothing else ruins the truth like stretching it.
_{Diana Hunt}

-=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=--=*=-

ATTD links
You are invited to use the Awakening Forum at:
http://www.awakeningtothedream.com/forum/
Here you can respond to the contents of this newsletter or start your own topic.

To subscribe or unsubscribe click here.
If you do not see a link go to:
http://www.awakeningtothedream.com/home.html
and click on the newsletter link.

Awakening to the Dream web site: http://www.awakeningtothedream.com/

Awakening to the Dream

Order

quick links

Publishers