HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
It turns out we enjoy being existent. Nobody wants to stop existing, however painful it may be. Existing is cool. The idea is just to not be trapped like a rat in a maze, always having your choices handed to you, and being forced to think that those choices are yours. It's better to have true ideas of your own.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
You're actually living a multitude of lives simultaneously. Your senses are bound to this life and thus you think this is the totality of life. This is the life of the body but the mind is more like a hologram.
In fact, most of your spiritual practice is taking place in alternate lives. We use the life of the body to produce a magnetic force powerful enough to anchor the force of the totality of life. Once the transmission of grace occurs, the ocean of consciousness pours in and affects all your lives. You'll start to have memories of events that you don't remember doing because they actually happened in alternate lives.
All of what we call yoga is not designed to get us to enlightenment; it's designed to help us survive enlightenment. Spiritual life is a way of keeping up with what's happening to us during the process of awakening, finding a way to deal with it. That's why you meditate.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
We as perceivers are so absolutely affected by everything it is inconceivable. The template that you declare to be the open portal through which you view your existence is so radically conditioned by past action that the entire framework of your present experience is based on what you have already experienced.
What happened to us before completely conditions how we experience what happens to us now, which will so utterly condition the possibility of what will happen to us in the future.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
We have produced such an irrational fear of the death experience that we hold ourselves back from the onslaught of enlightenment, desperately clinging to the very identity that binds us to the wheel. When enlightenment appears in your life, it begins to wipe everything away. It doesn’t say, “Well, this is a good thing so we’ll preserve this, and this is a bad thing so we'll get rid of this.”
It’s as if you were an egg floating around in the ocean, an infinite ocean of consciousness. The enlightenment process is like someone coming along and unscrewing the top of the egg; the ocean just starts to pour in. It conducts itself through the entirety of your being. It's only a matter of time before everything is reduced down to its most basic components—electrons, protons, atoms.
This is the transmission of grace. You are brought back into touch with the ocean of consciousness. What you’re afraid of is that when the ocean of consciousness pours in, it zeroes out everything you’ve ever been, everything you are, everything you'll ever be. Everything dissolves back into the ocean, extinguished. You exist, and yet it's as if you never existed. So you ask, “Why would I want this to happen?”
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Your identity is built upon a string of memories and their associated emotions. You carry this identity with you like a passport and everything that you experience in your life checks itself off against this passport. It is your face to the world. You use it to define yourself to yourself, to define yourself within society. Your attachment to this definition of yourself is so great, that you will destroy yourself before you will change your idea of who and what you are.
The process of enlightenment is the annihilation of this passport, the annihilation of your personal identity. It destroys all links that you have to yourself. It destroys all links that you have to the world. This why it has been said that enlightenment is a calamity; yet this fear of enlightenment is irrational and only arises from the extreme attachment that you have to the lists of qualities on your passport.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
We refer to enlightenment as liberation from the wheel of Samsara; the eternal cycle of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth. This idea of liberation implies that there is a sequence of events, a subtle pathway through the maze that leads to an exit, to freedom from the wheel. Thus the idea that some kind of action—positive actions of goodness, of generosity;will lead one to liberation.
Yet there is no perceivable causal relationship between action of any kind and enlightenment. The process of enlightenment lies somewhere at the intersection of what we would call intent and luck. Enlightenment is something you catch by running into it, propelled by a complex weave of chance and the dynamic of destiny, the intention of existence.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
There is only one mind. There are not two minds. There’s not one mind that is universal in which everything arises simultaneously and spontaneously, and another mind that is relative in which everything arises linearly. Mind is a singularity that operates at different frequencies.
For the person deep within ecstatic equilibrium, everything arises simultaneously with no relativity. From the point of view of the individual identity within mundane consciousness, everything’s relative. This is where the idea of phenomena arises.
There has to be a second thing to observe a first thing. A perceiver has been carved out of infinite consciousness, and the perceiver begins the chain of events called perception. Perception produces a product. That product is called phenomena.
