Ojibiwa Song of the Self

Awake! flower of the forest,
Sky-treading bird of the prairie.
Awake! awake! wonderful fawn-eyed One.
When you look upon me I am satisfied;
As flowers that drink dew.

The breath of your mouth is
The fragrance of flowers in the morning,
Your breath is their fragrance at evening
In the moon-of-fading-leaf.

Do not the red streams
Of my veins run toward you
As forest-streams to the sun
In the moon of bright nights?

When you are beside me my heart sings;
A branch it is, dancing,
Dancing before the Wind-spirit
In the moon of strawberries.

When you frown upon me, beloved,
My heart grows dark—
A shining river the shadows of clouds darken,
Then with your smiles comes the sun
And makes to look like gold
Furrows the cold wind drew in the water's face.

Myself! behold me! blood of my beating heart.

From the Path on the Rainbow: Song and Chants
Of the Indians of North America

Ashtavakra Gita 2:4-5

As a wave,
Seething and foaming,
Is only water
So all creation,
Streaming out of the Self,
Is only the Self.

Consider a piece of cloth.
It is only threads!
So all creation,
When you look closely,
Is only the Self.

More of Deepak Chopra

You are dying at every moment so that
You can keep creating yourself.

You are not in the world;
The world is in you.
This, the main tenet of the one reality,
Also means that you are not in your body;
Your body is in you.
You are not in your mind; your mind is in you.

There is no place in the brain
Where a person can be found.
Your brain consumes not one molecule of glucose
To maintain your sense of self,
Despite the millions of synaptic bursts
That sustain all the things
That self is doing in the world.

So when we say that the soul
Leaves a person’s body at the moment of death,
It would be more correct to say
That the body leaves the soul.
The body is already coming and going;
Now it leaves without coming back.

The soul can’t leave because it has nowhere to go.
This radical proposition needs a bit of discussion
Because, if you aren’t already going anywhere
When you die, you must be there already.

This is one of those paradoxes from quantum physics
Whose understanding depends upon knowing
Where things come from in the first place.

When you bring a memory to mind,
You are actualizing an event.
Synaptic firings produce the memory,
Replete with visuals, taste, and smell
If you want them.

That is, you have the potential for memory,
Which is infinitely vaster than a single memory
But nowhere in sight. This field extends invisibly
In all directions; the hidden dimensions
We’ve been discussing can all be explained
As different fields embedded in one infinity field,
Which is being itself.

You are the field.

Ashtavakra Gita 15:17/ Lama Zopa Rinpoche

You are pure awareness.
The world is an illusion,
Nothing more.

When you understand this fully,
Desire falls away.
You find peace.
For indeed! There is nothing.

..........................
Our mind and our delusions
Are formless and colorless.
However,our ignorance in believing
In their existence
Is harder than a rocky mountain.
Our delusions are harder than steel.

Chopra on Flux and the Illusion of Constancy

Everyone and everything you see is in flux.
Your brain creates the illusion of constancy,
Yet in truth the person or thing you believe
To be in front of you is actually a ghost
Of what was in front of you a few thousandths
Of a second ago.

How is this relevant to spiritual growth?

In the illusion of a continual reality
There are actually many gaps.
We go away as much as we stay here.
When you go away, blinking out of existence
For a fleeting millisecond,
You aren’t anchored in physical reality.

You voyage to the quantum dimension and beyond,
For nobody knows exactly where the universe goes
When it blinks on and off.

But we do know certain things:
Physicality is an appearance created by the mind.
In its essence reality is invisible and intangible.
Events are ambiguous. The only constant is change.
Radical uncertainty is at work all the time.

Apply these truths to yourself.
Instead of struggling to make life
Stable, unchanging, unambiguous, and certain,
Accept that you are a product of
An uncertain, ambiguous creation.

This isn’t a flaw.
It’s the glory of the creative process
To constantly flow and change.
The more you can accept this,
The easier it is to accept your own transformation.

Remind yourself of the following:
I am not fixed in time. I am not fixed in space.
The person I think I am is actually a lingering memory.
The real me lies beyond the five senses.
I am participating in the flux of the cosmos
At every instant.
The whole universe conspired to bring about
This present moment.

If you replace mistaken ideas with correct ones,
Reality can replace illusion.
What makes this notion even more potent
Is that the mind creates both illusion and reality.

You have a choice which one to invest in.
Once you accept that you are constantly in flux,
You are in a position to perceive
The changeless ground of existence,
The eternal Being that is the stage for eternal change.

Prayer to the Goddess of Confusion, Chandi Patha

To the Divine Goddess who resides
In all existence in the form of Confusion,
We bow to Her; we bow to Her; we bow to Her,
Continually we bow, we bow.

Chopra on the Afterlife

It should come as no surprise to discover

That you are a believer, skeptic, or agnostic.

Yet when you look at where other people fall,

Which could be very far outside your belief system,

It may be disturbing to consider that

You might all be right.

Believers may go to the heaven (or hell)

That matches their religious background.

In the afterlife they will meet

Their most cherished version of God–or gods.

They will find themselves surrounded

By angels or bodhisattvas.

The emotional tone of that afterlife

Could be one of total bliss,

If that is the tone they anticipate,

Or it could feel more ambiguous, even sad.

The experience could even feel like nothing.

Skeptics may find that the afterlife

Is a blank, devoid of conscious sensation.

For them, dying could lead to a long sleep

Without any perception of the self.

The question is how long this state will last

Or what it might become.

For agnostic the afterlife is problematic.

They may perceive that they remain themselves,

Occupying a kind of limbo where good and bad deeds

Form a hazy cloud that never resolves decisively.

In this kind of afterlife

The same worries and ambiguities

That reside at the center of

The agnostic worldview may persist.

And the undecided or open-minded people?

They may be in for the biggest surprise,

Because someone who is truly open-minded

Dies without any expectations.

If your approach to life is to take it one day at a time,

The very last day won’t be any different.

In short, the ability of consciousness

To shape our lives

Is the most permanent thing about us,

The one aspect of the mind we can expect to continue.