A universal assembly for true discernment
Title: “Self vs. self Concept”
Description: Rev. Shawna shared how discernment through contrast helps us to uncover the Self. She also led us through some specific exercises that are informative of how the contrast reveals what we aren’t so that it becomes clear what we actually are.
Reading: Lin Castaldo read selected sections from The Teaching of Inner Ramana.
Please read and contemplate quote #721-724 in The Seven Steps to Awakening with your inner teacher. Here is the last quote:
Ignorance lasts only so long as the mind functions.
Note: The next Daily Contemplation will be available tomorrow morning after 2am ET at this link.
Please read and contemplate quote #717-720 in The Seven Steps to Awakening with your inner teacher. Here is the last quote:
Worries (or movements of thought) alone are known as mind. Thought (notion, concept) is another name for the same thing.
Note: The next Daily Contemplation will be available tomorrow morning after 2am ET at this link.
Review instructions: Spend at least 15 minutes in the morning and at least 15 minutes in the evening contemplating the lesson for the day. To keep your mind focused on today’s idea and to help absorb the idea fully, repeat it to yourself at least once hourly.
In addition, use today’s idea as much as is needed as a transition from ego thinking to spiritual intuition. For example, you can say, “This thought I do not want. I choose instead ______. And then repeat the idea for the day, and let it take the place of what you thought.” Next, ask spiritual intuition for guidance that suits the moment.
Today’s review idea:
I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me. I want the peace of God”
“Today devote your practice periods to careful searching of your mind, to find the dreams you cherish still. What do you ask for in the heart?….Consider but what you believe will comfort you, and bring you happiness.”
In Michael Singer’s book, The Untethered Soul, Chapter 12 Taking down the walls, he tell a story about a person who is so enamored with this sun filled field that he builds the home of his dreams there. The home is built sturdy to protect him and keep him safe for a long time. Trying to make himself safe, he battons his home down. He stopped going out into the world and choose instead to stay in the fortress that he has built. He forgets about his orginal dream of enjoying the sun light, and the joy he feels bathing in the sun. In fact he ends up in just the oppose space that he had orginally longed for because his home in the sunny field becomes a dark fortress.
What is it that we really want? Are we looking for financial security? Do we want to see our kids get a college education? Do we want our home paid for? Would these wants and desires bring us peace? Maybe, but it is a shallow peace. It is like giving a hungry guy a fish sandwich, as a opposed to teaching him to fish.
The limited mind knows not how limited this thinking really is. There is a place in the mind where you experience that which we cannot speak of, but that is yours for the asking. Choose the peace of God and take your walls down.
Experience this. It is there available to you. What is the source of this peace? It doesn’t come from the world. This comes from the abstact, the eternal, and the changeless. If you are feeling upset, it is only because you are choosing the ego. You are choosing separation. How one is feeling is the result of a decision, a choice. That, and only that choice brings peace or upset. Decide for God and you decide for peace.
Please read and contemplate quote #713-716 in The Seven Steps to Awakening with your inner teacher. Here is the last quote:
The best method is by inquiring into the nature of the Self which is infinite. Your mind will be completely absorbed. Then both the mind and the inquiry will cease. Remain firmly established in what remains after that.
Note: The next Daily Contemplation will be available tomorrow morning after 2am ET at this link.
Review instructions: Spend at least 15 minutes in the morning and at least 15 minutes in the evening contemplating the lesson for the day. To keep your mind focused on today’s idea and to help absorb the idea fully, repeat it to yourself at least once hourly.
In addition, use today’s idea as much as is needed as a transition from ego thinking to spiritual intuition. For example, you can say, “This thought I do not want. I choose instead ______. And then repeat the idea for the day, and let it take the place of what you thought.” Next, ask spiritual intuition for guidance that suits the moment.
Today’s review idea:
I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me.
The Name of God is my inheritance.
All things are the same in God. Focusing on differences is the life blood of the ego. The thinking mind must focus on differences in order to organize its review of the past or plans for the future. What we all share, we all share here and now. What we all share is awareness-life-presence. Use your Name of God mantra today to focus on the sameness that unites us all.
Join us at 10:15 am ET/ 7:15 am PT for our Weekly Gathering with Rev. Shawna SummersTopic: Self vs, self Concept
Description: Shawna will share how discernment through contrast helps us to uncover the Self.
*Weekly gathering is held every Sunday morning at 10:15 am ET/7:15 am PT in the Awakening Together Sanctuary. Join us after the Gathering for our Fellowship Time, hosted by Rev. Jay McCormick.
Regina Dawn Akers reads selections from books by Bernadette Roberts. The purpose of this inspired book study is to learn from one who walked through the final doorway to no self, no world, no God–Only Reality.
Please join us as we welcome Ron Raitz for his sharing for the Speaker Spotlight. You may know Ron from his ongoing program called A Journey Beyond Words that is on the first, third, and fifth Wednesday of each month.
Craig Holliday continues his examination of what it means to be both free and human.
Please read and contemplate quote #710-712 in The Seven Steps to Awakening with your inner teacher. Here is the last quote:
The mind of the knower of the truth is no-mind.
Note: The next Daily Contemplation will be available tomorrow morning after 2am ET at this link.
Review instructions: Spend at least 15 minutes in the morning and at least 15 minutes in the evening contemplating the lesson for the day. (You might use that time to review the original lesson in the Course, to review the original tip, to write in your journal or to move into awareness-watching-awareness meditation using the idea for the day as your ‘anchor thought,’ a thought that helps you transition from attention on thinking to attention on awareness.)
To keep your mind focused on today’s idea and to help absorb the idea fully, repeat it to yourself at least once hourly.
In addition, use today’s idea as much as is needed as a transition from ego thinking to spiritual intuition. For example, you can say, “This thought I do not want. I choose instead ______. And then repeat the idea for the day, and let it take the place of what you thought.” Next, ask spiritual intuition for guidance that suits the moment.
Today’s review idea:
I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me.
I call upon God’s Name and on my own.
Repeat God’s Name slowly again and still again. The mantra is a means of removing attention from thought and returns it to awareness of one’s true nature. We are asked to spend today repeating the Name of God, remembering that His Name is our own. Choose a mantra that will bring your attention back to stillness within, if only for a moment.
“Become oblivious to every name but His. Hear nothing else. Let all your thought become anchored on this. God’s Name becomes our only thought, our only word, the only thing that occupies our minds, the only wish we have, the only sound with any meaning, and the only Name of everything that we desire to see, of everything that we would call our own.”
To have a single unified point in mind like this announces that our desire is single pointed and that we want only God and nothing else. NTI John Chapter 1 tells us, “God is welcomed into the presence of man by the desire to know God before man.” The mind has to willingly empty itself. Bentinho Massaro says, “As soon as you relax your thinking mind for even as much as two to five seconds, a window of consciousness becomes aware of the essence that remains when we are not over laying it with thoughts.”
Today’s review says, “The Name of God is my deliverance from every thought of evil and of sin, because it is my own as well as His.” Every thought has a source. Ego thoughts, chattering thoughts are certainly not coming from God, but real thoughts must come from God. The eternal comes from the eternal. ACIM Teachers Manual says, “It is to this unsealed and open mind that truth returns, unhindered and unbound.”
Today we use the idea for the day followed by a Name of God mantra to gently replace all frivolous mind wandering. Use any Name of God mantra that opens your heart, quiets your mind, and places attention on awareness.
Click here to review “Instructions for Using the Mantra” from The Teachings of Inner Ramana
Please read and contemplate quote #707-709 in The Seven Steps to Awakening with your inner teacher. Here is the last quote:
You are the Self, not the mind.
Note: The next Daily Contemplation will be available tomorrow morning after 2am ET at this link.
