Attribution

Important note: All the posts on this blog were written by Bob Harwood (AKA 'zendancer') on the forum spiritualteachers.proboards.com. I have merely reposted a collection of them in blog format for the convenience of seekers. Some very small mods were made on occasion to make posts readable outside of the forum setting they were made in.

Have you ever experienced samadhi

...or had any other kind of unity-consciousness experience during which selfhood disappeared? If not, can you remember ever getting into "the zone" while playing some form of sports? If not, then surely you can imagine people who get so lost in an activity that time stops and they disappear into the action. The body moves around, but the body and mind become so unified and one-with the action that there is no longer any psychological separateness there. Surely you can imagine the possibility of such a thing even if you've never personally experienced it.

Well, this is what oneness is LIKE. There is no separate you. There is just "what is" doing what it does---fingers typing on a keyboard, eyes looking at words on a screen, etc. There is no "checking back" on an imagined entity. There is simply the flow of beingness.

In a way, I hate to get into this next subject (because it will probably lead to all kinds of weird misunderstandings), but as for walking on water, raising the dead, leaping tall buildings, or putting a hand through a rock wall, oneness/"what is"/THIS can do whatever it wants to do. You may not believe this, but quantum mechanics, that hardest of all hard sciences, deals with probabilities, and the chance of your putting your hand through a solid object, according to QM, is not zero. Think about that. The universe is an exceedingly strange non-thing.

St. John of the Cross supposedly stepped to the top of a forty-foot wall in his monastery. A Tibetan master supposedly grabbed his doubting disciple's hand, pushed it through a rock wall, and then pulled it back out. Jesus and Kabir supposedly raised people from the dead. The living truth is strange, and I can tell you from personal experience that THIS, "My Father's house," has many mansions indeed.

Many people who have had woo-woo experiences know, from direct experience, that sometimes the body/mind can do things that violate all of the usual "laws of science." The laws are abstractions, but the truth is not an abstraction. It is non-local. My wife, Carol, and one of her friends, had a non-local experience during a retreat several years ago, and I suspect that lots of people have had similar experiences. Chilton Pierce once wrote a book about that sort of thing titled "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg."

Our thinking is extremely provincial, but anyone who sits in silence and simply contemplates the complexity of a human hand, and what is happening biologically there, may get a tiny insight into the fact that things are not what they seem.

Bottom line? To find the truth, or to discover that one IS the truth, it helps to let go of all ideas and keep an open mind. The vastness and power of THIS cannot be imagined.