Seeing Through the One Who Sees by Sharon Rockey

It was a bright autumn morning --the kind that makes you want to go out and kick up crispy leaves on a hiking trail. But I'd have been happy doing just about anything other than sitting there under those flickering florescent lights waiting for the laundromat dryers to stop spinning.

Nothing about the morning had hinted that I was about to journey back into a beautiful defining moment in my life. Not until that teenage boy pulled up on his bicycle, grabbed a stack of free magazines from his wire basket and brought them inside.

I picked one up and gave it a quick glance. The articles didn't offer anything special and I was about to toss it aside when something caught my eye. Even for a New Age publication, it seemed like a silly request--"Send us a description of your earliest childhood concepts of God."

I could already picture the scene in the editor's office with a desk buried under countless letters all describing the same mythic image--the Great White-Bearded Patriarchal Scorekeeper watching everything from somewhere in the sky. As I was pondering the dubious value of such an exercise, my mind flashed on a vivid childhood experience--one that transcended all my own concepts.

It was during one of our cold clear Midwestern winter nights. The backyard was heaped with snowdrifts glistening in the light of a full moon. I rubbed my hands together to stay warm and watched as my father removed his heavy binoculars from the case, adjusting them for the narrow face of a seven year-old.

He helped me focus the eyepiece on the round cratered surface rising above us. While moon-gazing was a favorite pastime, no amount of childish searching for the face on the moon could have prepared me for the shock of this brilliant white image that came blazing through the lenses.

There for the very first time, was something that had been there all along--an enormous and wondrous sight with dimension, shadows and light, and details of unbelievable beauty. A flood of thoughts and feelings swept through me too quickly to identify. I felt as if I had just been initiated
into an inner circle whose secrets would never be revealed in second grade science books. At the same time, there was a fleeting uneasy stirring like some vague connection to dark and ancient occult mysteries. The sensations swirling around me were almost too much to bear.

My father was taking great pleasure in having led me to this discovery. He helped me balance the binoculars against a fence post and for a few moments he quietly withdrew to another corner of the yard leaving me all alone with the moon. I stood there in helpless silence until my awe and wonder could no longer be contained. It was then that something unexplainable broke through.

First, a rush of warmth and stillness, then as if being lovingly plunged into liquid space while some vast unseen lens was brought into focus, all sense of separation between the moon and me dissolved. No more "a moon and a me", but rather a timeless witnessing in which all my thoughts
effortlessly ceased to exist.

After what must have been only a moment or two, I became aware of a longing for more and instantly I was back, binoculars in hand, a child looking at the moon. I didn't understand what had just happened or why it had seemed so organic and intimately familiar. I only knew that it had somehow left me feeling naked. Maybe that's why I never mentioned to my father or to anyone else what had really happened that night. What exactly does one say about an experience for which there are no words?

It would be many years before the mystery would gradually begin to unravel. The answer was waiting in the writings and teachings of poets and masters like Sri Ramana Maharshi, Rumi, Eckhart Tolle, and others. Each imparts the message in their own way, but all have realized that there is no observer, that there is nothing to observe, that there is only Observing.

Or, in the words of the poet Wu-Men, "One instant is Eternity. Eternity is the Now. When you see through this Instant you see through the One Who Sees."

Sharon Rockey is a freelance writer, ghostwriter and a website content developer. She lives in Portland, Oregon and still spends a lot of time gazing at the moon. www.webspinstudios.com

Truth & Mesmerism --- Ben Gilberti, H.W., M.

Chapter 1 ~ Truth & Mesmerism

The Truth is that God is all there is. There simply is nothing else. The appearance of anything else (like pain, distress, disease, misfortune, poverty, crime, war, hatred, fear, etc.) is nothing but the mesmerism that grows out of the mistaken belief that something else besides God could exist. The miracles of Jesus Christ, or the miraculous healings of modern day mystics, occur by deliberately knowing the Truth right in the midst of the mesmerisms caused by the beliefs in something other than Truth.

This is not easy to do because we are so surrounded by the mesmerism. It is necessary that we learn to become very still so that the self-evident certainty that God is all there is can emerge. The principle can be summarized quite clearly and simply. Anything other than that which is, is not. And hence that which is, is all there is, because all else is not. And since that which is is all there is, it is therefore entire, total, complete, whole, one, harmonious, perfect, absolute, infinite and eternal (or, in other words, God). And since God is all there is, there cannot be anything at all that is less than, or other than, or opposed to God. And since awareness necessarily must exist in order for you to know this, then awareness, the pure "I," must be God.But even though the logic of it is simple, clear and certain, the sheer magnitude of its implications require that we become aware of a highly intimate inner knowing that we can discover only in silent contemplation. Indeed if God is all there is, all that "I" can be is God. But we must become still enough to know this to be true in the most intimate way imaginable, to sink in meditation past all the pandemonious mesmerisms about ourselves until we arrive at that absolute center of consciousness where "I" and God (the sole reality that is all there is) are one and the same. Do it now. Close your eyes. Become still and quietly know that God is all there is and all there ever can be, and then become completely silent so that you can know this at a depth deeper than words or thoughts. Now, if you will simply do that every hour of the day, the mesmerism will continually subside, and you will become more and more an oasis of True Godliness to those still believing in the mesmerisms.Once you dehypnotize yourself out of the trance of experiencing yourself as a being less than the fullness of God, you will know yourself as you actually are -- the living Truth being all that it is. And even though the universal mesmerism that creates the vast dream of humanity may linger, your effect within that dream will be to catalyze, through the inspiration of what your life in the dream will become, the desire and ability to awaken on the part of those aspects of yourself who, in the dream, still appear to be "others." You will be an effective agent in the symphonic rising crescendo of the Great Awakening wherein all of humanity, and all consciousness everywhere, will let go of all illusions and realize and experience all the universe as the one infinite consciousness you now only dimly refer to as God. And so layer by layer you let go of every sense of selfhood that falls short of God's nature while at the same time becoming more and more clearly aware that God's nature is all you possibly can be. The spiritualized intellect thus leads you, like Moses, to the brink of the promised land, and, like Moses, must stay behind as you take the final step of realizing that the absolute center of your consciousness, the I of you before it forms itself into "I am this particular human being," the pure I as awareness itself rather than any form, concept or perception that awareness may at any time be aware of, that absolutely pure center of your consciousness, is nothing less than God, appearing to be much less than that only to the extent you insist that "I am limited, human, isolated, vulnerable, etc."Evermore do you more clearly realize that this one God that can be the only reality anywhere, this one God that is entire, total complete, perfect, absolute and infinite, is the "I" of you before your erroneous beliefs distract you from the Truth. As you let go of the erroneous beliefs, less and less do they distract you, and as the distractions subside, in the stillness they leave behind, you discover the "I" you always have been and always will be, the "I" that is, like Melchizedec, "without mother, without father, without beginning or end of days," the I of you that says to the cacophony of your distractions, "Be Still, and Know that I am God," the I of you that says "I and the Father are one."

website of the author: http://www.qm21.com/Moses.html