There is nothing wrong with thought and it can be used whenever necessary. But in every moment you can choose to follow your thoughts or you can recognize that which is not thinking. Don’t try to stop thinking, let it happen. Just recognize that which is not thinking.
A spiritual teaching is a finger pointing toward Reality; it is not Reality itself. To be in a true and mature relationship with a spiritual teaching requires you to apply it, not simply believe in it.
Many spiritual people are involved in a radical denial of what is happening. They want to transcend it, get rid of it, get out of it, get away from it. There's nothing wrong with that feeling, but the approach doesn't work because it's escapism in spiritual clothing. It's wearing spiritual clothing and spiritual concepts, but it is really no different than a drunk in the gutter who doesn't want to feel the pain anymore. When you abide and accept everything completely and fully, you automatically go beyond.
It is not the pursuit of greater and greater states of happiness and bliss that leads to enlightenment, but the yearning for Reality and the rabid dissatisfaction with living anything less than a fully authentic life.
Serving the Truth becomes our life instead of just an isolated event. It takes the abstractness out of spirituality. That's the opportunity of real spirituality: to be in service to the silence of the heart.
No one can give you the strength of character necessary... Only you can find that passion within that burns with an integrity that will not settle for anything less than the Truth.
At any moment, we are either giving humanity the gift of our clarity or our confusion. And that clarity or confusion is affecting the humanity around us, the world around us. It is manifesting. It is taking form.
As you rest into stillness more profoundly, awareness becomes free of the mind's compulsive control, contractions, and identifications. Awareness naturally returns to its non-state of absolute unmanifest potential, the silent abyss beyond all knowing.
When you get out of the driver's seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver's seat, it can drive itself so much easier-it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the “me” is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.
All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit
is to stop seeking something more or better or different,
and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.
Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top of the highest stakes table. Place yourself as the bet. Look God in the eyes and finally, for once in your life, lose.