Teachings

The all-creating, inseparate Trinity has the three aspects: The Absolute, Universal Awareness and Great Consciousness.

This sounds remarkably like the Holy Trinity of Christianity. In the basic idea of ‘three in one’ there is indeed a match. But where Christianity uses terms personifying the three aspects – Father, Son and Holy Ghost – I use words which try to describe the actual qualities of these aspects. And I use "all-creating" as a factual description to avoid the many possible connotations of "Holy".

That which underpins all. A non-experiential, ineffable state which is the foundation of all else. It is one of the three aspects of the all-creating Trinity. Possible to know, via logic and trust, but impossible to describe adequately.

Primeval Awareness before any individuation – noticing without subject / object. It contains and connects all Noticing. The Self. The ocean.

As demonstrated by quantum mechanics, the observation (Noticing) of Awareness creates the manifestation – there are no pre-existing ‘things’ independent of Awareness.

See also Divine.

Great Consciousness performs the processing of Universal Awareness: It is mentation, i.e. things like comprehension, discernment and intention. The Stories of Consciousness shape manifestation (whereas the Witnessing of Awareness causes the manifesting).

Great Consciousness is like the snake ouroboros - on the one hand it tells the stories which Universal Awareness makes 'real' by observing them; and on the other hand, it then mentally processes those perceptions, and thus keeps the stories moving, evolving, expanding... The ultimate perpetuum mobile, stories without end.

See also Divine.

A convenience term to denote Universal Awareness and Great Consciousness. Together they create and shape all manifestation. One cannot say that either was before the other, nor that one acts and the other consumes. They really are just different facets of one process.

The Absolute plays no direct part in the mechanism of manifestation. This is not intended to imply that it is less important – without it, the other two, the Divine, would not exist.

The Self with a capital S is often described by great Sages as the Witness, or pure Presence, or pure Awareness. I use the term Self synonymously with Universal Awareness.

Beingness is the term I use for the quality or essence of Universal Awareness - the Self. There is no subject or object in the Self, just primeval, all-encompassing and all-manifesting Awareness. When an individual thinks 'Cogito ergo sum' - I think, therefore I am - then this is a mental process with a subject: "I". But the Self is before individuation, and before any cogitation, so it can't be thinking "I am".

The ‘ness’ extension indicates a quality rather than a statement of existence. I use it to mean the quality of noticing existence in individual beings, with no further adjectives applying, i.e. something very basic. It does however have a subject: The ‘I’. Thus: The subjective noticing of the fact of one's own existence.

The state of an individual (still) caught up in Clinging, Resisting and Ignoring. These habits bring with them all the things we don‘t want, like subjective suffering, uncertainty and fear. "I want this but not that, I‘m ignoring the painful and push it down into my subconscious". The strongly judgemental attitude creates the maelstrom from which, at this level, there is simply no escape.

A persons value judgement (holding on, pushing away, not wanting to know) has relaxed – into preferences rather than things which they insist on to be happy and satisfied – allowing them to see things, and accept them, as they are.

The relaxation of the judgemental attitude has a very welcome side-effect: Not judging oneself. This makes space for you to become aware of something which was there all along, but unnoticed, eclipsed: I love myself, I accept myself totally.

I am and you are, no ‘thingness’ and no judgement. We mutually notice each others awareness.

So mutuality, though lacking in ‘thingness’, is still a subject – object relationship. The effect of experiencing mutuality is to expand ‘I love myself’ to cover the beings which you are mutual with. When you do this with a lot of beings (and not just human beings), you effectively extend loving to all beings: I am love.

Beingness is the term I use for the quality or essence of Universal Awareness, bringing all of manifestation into being.

Enlightenment is the state where the essential non-separation (of all phenomena, including all beings) has become a persons real knowledge – through actually noticing it for themselves.

In this state, the Noticing of an individual organism happens within a larger context without separation, without separate individuals.

An (apparent) individual is certain that the Absolute, a non-experiential state prior to awareness and consciousness, is indeed the foundation of everything. The path to realisation is logic and trust - but at the end of this path, the Absolute has, magically, become your certain knowledge.

The illusion of identification as an individual has been relinquished. The individual has totally accepted its manifestation as an integral part of the whole. The concepts of individual doership and personal karma have been ditched, the grip of ego is dissolved. The individual no longer poses internal questions about self-worth or self-acceptance, and may even tell you that he/she does not exist.

As experiencing: A noticing without separation, without separate individuals. The level before individual I Amness, the deepest level where experiencing in any form happens.

An individuals thought processes are greatly reduced (by up to about 80% or even 90%), they are free from the hamster wheel of personal thought processes, from the constant (and non-productive) babble of repetitive thinking. The person has become free of ‘horizontal time’ (Ramesh Balsekar) / ‘psychological time’ (Eckhart Tolle). One is said to ‘awaken’ (Buddha = The awakened one). Christ described this as ‘the peace which surpasses all understanding’.

Such a person has become a channel for Great Mind to express itself through, without hindrance or filter.

Sanskrit for not two, or, one substance not two. A hinduistic vedantic doctrine that identifies the individual self (atman) with the ground of reality (brahman). Characterised in the Sanskrit ‘Neti Neti’ – not this, not this. Discard all forms and names, everything perceivable and conceivable, as Not this, Not this.

Posh word for Noticing: I use it in respect of individual beings, noticing that something exists or is happening, but before any further mental processing happens with it. Put simply: personal sensory perception. The associated quality, when we 'notice our own noticing', is I Amness, the sense of existing.

Disambiguation: When I write 'awareness' with a small 'a', then the above is what I mean, and not Universal Awareness - the Self - which is primeval, non-individuated Awareness.

See also perception and consciousness.

Without boundaries, all of existence would be one vast continuum, one huge bowl of porridge. Boundaries within manifestation allow structure to exist, at all imaginable levels; and they also create the illusion of separateness.

Furthermore, boundaries make conglomerations possible: Each cell of your body has a boundary (cell wall), but together they make up your body. A large conglomeration of stars makes a galaxy.

So boundaries and conglomerations are two very basic facets of manifestation.

Compassion literally means "to suffer together." Among emotion researchers, it is defined as the feeling that arises when you are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to relieve that suffering. We can observe it often in everyday life (praise be) - and from the enlightened state of noticing and knowing the non-separation, it becomes the only possible type of response.

This is where we start to think about what we have perceived. All too often we make a value judgement about it.

For example, if perception has recognised a cardboard moving box, then consciousness might say 'That could be useful – unless it’s the one already filled with my books, in which case I must be careful trying to lift it'.

Disambiguation: I use 'consciousness' to mean personal mentation - not to be confused with Great Consciousness, which is the storyteller of ALL stories, thus shaping all of existence.

See also awareness and perception.

Analogous to 'RTFM' (Read The F***ing Manual), my exhortation is 'Do The F***ing Exercises'. This is the only way to knowledge - to make experiences with perception based exercises and to reflect on what they imply about how manifest Existence comes into being and how it works. If you simply read something, or hear it in school, then it is not more or less than that - something you read or heard. Whether it is really true or not, remains to be seen.

DTFE is about not believing everything you are told, but finding things out for yourself. It goes beyond simply questioning local consensus viewpoints, and urges you to look deeper, to recognise and cast aside assumptions. Ultimately, DTFE is an effective path for spiritual growth, which in the course of time will supplant assumptions with experiences - and thus lead to true knowledge.

Eckhart Tolle, born 1948, is a spiritual teacher and best-selling author. He is a German-born resident of Canada best known as the author of "The Power of Now" and "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose". Tolle said he was depressed for much of his life until age 29 when he experienced an "inner transformation." He then spent several years wandering "in a state of deep bliss" before becoming a spiritual teacher.

The Oxford Dictionary defines God as:

1. (in Christianity and other monotheistic religions) the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being.
2. (in certain other religions) a superhuman being or spirit worshipped as having power over nature or human fortunes; a deity.

But in fact there is no creator separate from existence, nor any superhuman deities. Existence is the Divine.

The conventional ideas of individual reincarnation and personal karma are incorrect. New births and the evolution of concepts and belief patterns do happen in general; but it is not personal. Rather it is all part of one gloriously huge and all-interacting evolution of Consciousness itself. Therefore personal Karma does not exist.

The word 'love' is used with many meanings - use this tag to see some of what I have written about it. There's a lot more on Love in my book.

With 'mind' I mean a set of cognitive faculties. So I say 'small mind' to denote the thinking of an individual being; and 'great mind' to indicate the mentation of Great Consciousness. The latter is in all probability beyond the ken of any 'small mind'.

Morphogenetic Field means a field in which the information for organising the shape of an (embryonic or other) development is held. In the light of ‘morphic resonance’ we can add that an individual organism would then be influenced in the shape, or decisions, it takes by the relevant aspect of the prevailing morphogenetic field. Morphic means having a specific form or shape; so morphic resonance basically means that a particular shape or structure is propagated via resonance.

This beautiful word is (a) wonderfully clear – either you notice something or you do not, (b) wonderfully vague in that no mechanism is implied or excluded how you notice something, and (c) very accessible – i.e. in common everyday use, without feeling at all intellectual. I use it, in the context of individual beings, to mean sensory perception. This happens prior to any cognitive processing of the 'input'.

I use this term in respect of individual beings, to signify when Noticing is processed to a recognition or mental picture. If I notice a large three-dimensional form (cuboid, box) in front of me, then perception is that it is a cardboard moving box. So perception is before any conscious thinking about what you may want to do with or about the thing recognised.

See also awareness and consciousness.

Reincarnation is the concept that the same 'soul' may die and be born again and again, a myth of personal continuity after death.

There is in fact a sort of reincarnation, as the patterns of Consciousness swirl around, mix up, develop and bring forth new clumps which manifest as individuals - but it's completely impersonal.

Think of yourself as a soap bubble full of air: If you identify with the membrane, your life will end when it bursts. But if you identify with the air...

Relationship can only exist between discrete entities. Since separation is ultimately an illusion, so is relationship. Think of it like two waves on the sea - it looks like they are separate and one follows the other, but ultimately it's all just the sea.

Self-acceptance is not a psychological state - if it were so, then it could be found and also lost again. A sage has achieved the state of total self-acceptance: Since a sage has no illusion of being a separate individual, nor of personal doership, all reasons to internally pose questions like self-acceptance or self-worth (as an individual) have disappeared.

For many, this may initially be hard to believe - and if so, then only due to our life-long conditioning as separate individuals and the way people in general routinely judge themselves. But in truth, there are no lasting or satisfying answers to such questions, the only solution is to not pose the question.

Behind the manifest world, and causing it – much like a cinema projector throws a picture onto the cinema screen – is an evolving, expanding web of mental patterns - Great Consciousness - and what it does we can very appropriately call ‘telling stories’. The stories, which happen on all scales - from the subatomic to the whole universe - together shape the apparent reality in which we make our personal experiences.