You are always here

The fact that you are here rests upon a continuous experience of being that is very simple and never changes. Can you notice it? Notice how you feel exactly the same now as you did when you were 5. Take a moment and notice the sense of self that was exactly the same at age 5 as it is right now. It is subtle and ordinary beyond belief and hence very easily overlooked.

No matter what’s going on, you are here, and you are not affected by anything. Can you notice that? When pain is here, you are the same, when pain is gone, you are the same. No matter what else is going on, underneath it all is you, silent, unchanging, here, and absolutely certain that you are here.

Excerpt from the Tape Album 'Rules for Decision'

"Many students fall into a trap when they try to take seriously that "I do not know the thing I am." They stop taking all their roles seriously, but in the wrong way. Using an example from a student here: You never stop being a mother, a friend, a daughter, a lover, or a wife: you never stop these roles. What you begin to realize is that it is a role, it is not me. But it is a role that I have chosen so I can learn lessons in it. That is really important, otherwise you will skip over the step and say that this is silly, it is all made up — I'm not any of these things. It is important that you recognize that your identity is not in the role. But nonetheless the role is something you have chosen because you don't really believe in your true Identity. You may begin to understand that you are not the person you thought you were, but there is a part of you that still does not want to understand or remember the Self you truly are. So you need steps that will get you through your fear. Those steps are the classrooms that we choose — the roles. So the trick is really to be increasingly faithful to the role — not because it means anything, but because it is a classroom for you."

A World Waiting to Be Born. Stages of Community

"For many groups or organizations the most common initial stage, pseudocommunity, is the only one. It is a stage of pretense. The group pretends it already is a community, that the participants have only superficial individual differences and no cause for conflict. The primary means it uses to maintain this pretense is through a set of unspoken common norms we call manners: you should try your best not to say anything that might antagonize or upset anyone else; if someone else says something that offends you or evokes a painful feeling or memory, you should pretend it hasn't bothered you in the least; and if disagreement or other unpleasantness emerges, you should immediately change the subject. These are rules that any good hostess knows. They may create a smoothly functioning dinner party but nothing more significant. The communication in a pseudocommunity is filled with generalizations. It is polite, inauthentic, boring, sterile, and unproductive.

"Over time profound individual differences may gradually emerge so
that the group enters the stage of chaos and not infrequently self destructs. The theme of pseudocommunity is the covering up of individual differences; the predominant theme of the stage of chaos is the attempt to obliterate such differences. This is done as the group members try to convert, heal, or fix each other or else argue for simplistic organizational norms."