A conversation with a friend: About acceptance
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Friend: Magdi, I wanted to talk with you about accepting the present moment. Does it mean to totally accept everything? To be ok with problems, suffering…
Reply: Ultimately, acceptance means to realize that there is nothing to accept and no one that is separate. Resistance is what the illusory separate self is. Resistance are thought impressions of the limited mind.

Friend: Are you saying that resistance is a form of thought ? A feeling?
Reply: Yes. I-thought and me-feelings.
Friend: They arise in our consciousness and ‘I’ observe it?
Reply: Resistance is thought and feeling (bodily sensation with a me story)
Yes, I/Consciousness is the only reality. The reality of all seeming events.
Friend: Good! I do understand all this but still i cannot separate the “I” from thoughts.
Reply: What is it that perceives/knows thought? What is it that cannot separate A from B?
Friend: Awareness
Reply: Awareness has no concerns and is all knowing. It is the mind, meaning thought that says: ‘I cannot separate thought from consciousness’.
The separate mind looks at objects and things as real and segments the whole into parts. Awareness, consciousness is not divided. It is non-dual.
One could say that consciousness takes on all forms.
Indeed, the “I” (aware presence) is not separate from thought. Sometimes, It takes on the form of thought. It takes on the form of a flower, a bird
But this form, is not separate from the “I”/Consciousness. Consciousness is non dual.
Friend: Just one thing. No separation between what is seen and the seer?
Reply: Yes. Like all dream images are not separate from the dreamer. The image is made out of the dreamer. But the dreamer is not a form, is not an object. The form is a dream form. All forms are dream forms, mins events.
Friend: I see. It’s quit interesting that the self is doing all this. Is it some kind of a test ?
Reply: It is the way home. From the sense of separate self to the realization of wholeness. From the mind to the source.
Friend: Yes. I understand. How did realization happened to you? Were there signs or something?
Reply: It happens differently for every one of us. It is actually a non-happening rather than a happening. The limited separate mind cannot figure it out. The limited separate mind wants a path to a happening in order to get busy maintaining itself on a job. But there is no path from you to you. There is no path from here to here.
Friend: Yes, so is effort needed in order to realize the Self? Is mental effort needed? Because realization doesn’t come from it.
Reply: Only if effort is effortless and comes effortlessly. Only then is effort part of the path. There is effort, mental or otherwise, that comes from love.
Impersonal desire to understand that comes from our deep intuition of consciousness.
Friend: And when awakening happens, what happens to the person and its suffering?
Reply: The person and its suffering are illusion and cease to be believed to be true. It is the belief in the reality of the imagined person that we call suffering. The person was never real to start with.
Suffering is the interest in the dream and looking away from the reality of consciousness. The person is made out of thought and personal desire. The person imagines an external world and an internal self. The sense of separation is what we call suffering. It ends with the end of the illusion of separation.
Friend: Yes , the cause of suffering is the attachment to the exeternal world
and forgeting one self.
Reply: Yes. There is no reality to the external world. Thought imagines a world and a separate self. The sense of separate self is the sense of limitation and the feelings and emotions of fear and incompleteness follow such beliefs.
Friend: Yes, I see! They are all illusions, the belief that there is a separate self is an illusion.
Reply: Yes. Consciousness is the reality of our experience. The one and only reality. Consciousness does not perceive anything external to itself.
Friend: i think maybe the belief that there is an external world is due to it’s complexity, 3D scene..Cities, people, science! they all make a real world somehow.
Reply: Thought relies on the senses and gives reality to the images overlooking the source. When thought is mistaken to be real, and when perceptions are mistaken to be real, an external world and an internal self are conceived.
Friend: My thoughts about the world aren’t true, i just believe they are.
Reply: True. Like in a dream, your dream perceptions are not real and all the persons in the dream, as dream characters and feelings are not real. They seem real as long as you are not aware it is a dream.
Only consciousness is real and it never ceases to be itself and knows itself incessantly, without interruption.
Friend: I see! Consciousness is here all the time but disappear in deep sleep. The Self remains in deep sleep the person dies.
Reply: In deep sleep, the world, body mind disappear. Consciousness/Awareness/Reality is not in time nor in space and does not appear/disappear. Consciousness is infinite and eternal. Time and space are the result of thought and perception. Time (thought) and space (perception) are the interpretation of the limited self mind.
Interprets thought as … time
Interprets perception as … space
Friend: I understand. The ego interpret time and space. Above the ego, there is the Self.
What is that which believe or denies a thought to be me? When you say contemplate…who is the you that you are speaking to ?
Reply: The only real “I” is the “I” of consciousness.
There is no you in contemplation. It is love itself. But it is not worldly love. It comes from beyond and loves the beyond. The source.
Friend: I see. Thank you.

 

Photo by Nabil Attia