Discard every self seeking motive

Discard every self seeking motive as soon as it seen and you need not search for the Truth; Truth will find you.

If you seek Reality you must set yourself free of all backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking. Even the idea of being a man or woman, or even human, should be discarded.

Some pearls of wisdom from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

True Communication!

True communication is communion – the realization of oneness, which is love. Usually, this is quickly lost again, unless you are able to stay present enough to keep out the mind and its old patterns. Although brief glimpses are possible, love cannot flourish unless you are permanently free of mind identification and your presence is intense enough to have dissolved the pain-body or you can at least remain present as the watcher. The pain-body cannot then take you over and so become destructive of love.

Eckhart Tolle

Awakening

Awakening is a shift in consciousness in which thinking and awareness separate. For most people it is not an event but a process they undergo.

Even those rare beings who experience a sudden, dramatic, and seemingly irreversible awakening will still go through a process in which the new state of consciousness gradually flows into and transforms everything they do and so becomes integrated into their lives.

Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you are awake you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life.Awareness takes over from thinking. Instead of being in charge of your life, thinking becomes the servant of awareness.

Awareness is conscious connection with universal intelligence. Another word for it is Presence: consciousness without thought.

The initiation of the awakening process is an act of grace. You cannot make it happen nor can you prepare yourself for it or accumulate credits toward it. There isn’t a tidy sequence of logical steps that leads toward it, although the mind would love that. You don’t have to become worthy first. It may come to the sinner before it comes to the saint, but not necessarily. That’s why Jesus associated with all kinds of people, not just the respectable ones….

Awakened doing is the alignment of your outer purpose — what you do — with your inner purpose — awakening and staying awake. Through awakened doing, you become one with the outgoing purpose of the universe. Consciousness flows through you into this world. It flows into your thoughts and inspires them. It flows into what you do and guides and empowers it. Not what you do, but how you do what you do determines whether you are fulfilling your destiny. And how you do what you do is determined by your state of consciousness.

From the book, A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle

The secret of happiness

To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, you have to start with yourself and take responsibility for your inner state at any given moment. That means now. Ask yourself, “Is there negativity in me at this moment?”Then, become alert, attentive to your thoughts as well as your emotions. Watch out for the low-level unhappiness in whatever form it takes, such as discontent, nervousness, being “fed up”, and so on. Watch out for thoughts that appear to justify or explain this unhappiness but in reality cause it.

The moment you become aware of a negative state within yourself, it does not mean that you have failed. It means that you have succeeded. Until that awareness happens, there is identification with inner states, and such identification is ego.

With awareness comes disidentification from thoughts, emotions, and reactions. This is not to be confused with denial. The thoughts, emotions, or reactions are recognized, and in the moment of recognition, disidentification happens automatically.

Your sense of self, of who you are, then undergoes a shift: before you were the thoughts, emotions, and reactions; now you are awareness, the conscious Presence that witnesses those states.

Eckhart Tolle, Chapter 4 of A New Earth

The ultimate spiritual practice

To welcome whatever arises in this moment is the ultimate spiritual practice. If you practice just this one thing, you won't need to read any more books or learn any other meditation techniques. Welcoming whatever arises in this moment, outside or inside of you, brings freedom. The conditioned mind will tell you not to do this, for it believes that by resisting, it will become free. The opposite is true. By resisting, you become even more stuck. When you no longer believe what the mind is saying, you realize that the quickest way for transformation to happen is to welcome what is. In that moment, life is free to move through you. The conditioned mind is no longer obstructing life.

Eckhart Tolle