Adyashanti

So let us understand that reality transcends all of our notions about reality. Reality is neither Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Advaita Vedanta, nor Buddhist. It is neither dualistic nor nondualistic, neither spiritual nor nonspiritual. We should come to know that there is more reality and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all of our thoughts and ideas about reality. When we perceive from an undivided consciousness, we will find the sacred in every expression of life. We will find it in our teacup, in the fall breeze, in the brushing of our teeth, in each and every moment of living and dying. Therefore we must leave the entire collection of conditioned thought behind and let ourselves be led by the inner thread of silence into the unknown, beyond where all paths end, to that place where we go innocently or not at all—not once but continually.

One must be willing to stand alone—in the unknown, with no reference to the known or the past or any of one’s conditioning. One must stand where no one has stood before in complete nakedness, innocence, and humility. One must stand in that dark light, in that groundless embrace, unwavering and true to the reality beyond all self—not just for a moment, but forever without end. For then that which is sacred, undivided, and whole is born within consciousness and begins to express itself.

http://www.adyashanti.org/index.php?file=writings_inner&writingid=41

Evolution

Was reading some Krishnamurti - he talks about the mind's tendency to fixate on things. Objects, people, thoughts, emotions, our mind is constantly honing in on them. This, he says, is the source of a lot of our problems. See for yourself in your own life.

So I realized this morning that the more open minded you are - the less you fixate on things and judge them - the more life can evolve according to the truth. The more closed minded you are, the more you fixate on things, judge them, chew on them, and hold them in your mind, the more you are a stump in the river of life. A stump that life has to break down and go around, until you stop holding on to all the illusions, concepts, and beliefs.

Still more...

Now, pleasure has created this pattern of social life. We take pleasure in ambition, in competition, in comparing, in acquiring knowledge, or power, or position, prestige, status. And that pursuit of pleasure as ambition, competition, greed, envy, status, domination, power, is respectable. It is made respectable by a society which has only one concept: that you shall lead a moral life, which is a respectable life. You can be ambitious, you can be greedy, you can be violent, you can be competitive, you can be a ruthless human being; but society accepts it because at the end of your ambition, you are either a so-called successful man with plenty of money, or a failure and therefore a frustrated human being. So social morality is immorality.

Love, death, and sorrow are all the unknowable

Love, death, and sorrow are all the unknowable

We know only fragmentarily this extraordinary thing called life; we have never looked at sorrow, except through the screen of escapes; we have never seen the beauty, the immensity of death, and we know it only through fear and sadness. There can be understanding of life, and of the significance and beauty of death, only when the mind on the instant perceives “what is”.
You know, sirs, although we differentiate them, love, death, and sorrow are all the same; because, surely, love, death, and sorrow are the unknowable. The moment you know love, you have ceased to love. Love is beyond time; it has no beginning and no end, whereas knowledge has; and when you say, “I know what love is”, you don’t. You know only a sensation, a stimulus. You know the reaction to love, but that reaction is not love. In the same way, you don’t know what death is. You know only the reactions to death, and you will discover the full depth and significance of death only when the reactions have ceased.
The Collected Works vol XI, p 288

Krishnamurti - freedom

Freedom through complete attention

The perception, the total observation of jealousy and the freedom from it, is not a matter of time, but of giving complete attention, critical awareness, observing choicelessly, instantly, all things as they arise. Then there is freedom—not in the future but now—from that which we call jealousy.
This applies equally to violence, anger or any other habit, whether you smoke, drink or have sexual habits. If we observe them attentively, completely with our heart and mind, we are intelligently aware of their whole content; then there is freedom. Once this awareness is functioning, then whatever arises—anger, jealousy, violence, brutality, shades of double meaning, enmity, all these things can be observed instantly, completely. In that there is freedom, and the thing that was there ceases to be. So the past is not to be wiped away through time. Time is not the way to freedom.
The Flight of the Eagle, p 84