When I speak of God, I am not speaking of a God that can be known with the mind. I am speaking of God as the present moment revealed. I am speaking of God as the silent Presence at the very heart of all things present. I am speaking of God who exists at the very heart of silence within you, and who is not separate from you. I am speaking of God as Eternal Is-ness. I am speaking of God as pure consciousness. I am speaking of God as the source from which everything arises and into which everything returns. I am speaking of God as everything and nothing. I am speaking of God as the beginning and the end. I am speaking of God, not from my mind, but from within the mystery.

~Leonard Jacobson

When you are present, you are love, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

You radiate love in the same way that a candle flame radiates light and it has nothing to do with who or what you love. Humanity has become hopelessly lost in love. We lose ourselves in the object of our love and in the process, we lose ourselves. We disconnect from the source of the love, which exists at the very center of our Being. Then we feel a certain kind of emptiness, because we have moved away from the center. We are afraid of the emptiness, and so we relentlessly pursue love outside of ourselves. We want to be loved. We fall in love. We lose ourselves in the object of the love, which takes us further from the center. Eventually, we become so lost in the pursuit of love and all the hope, pain, fear and attachments associated with it, that we can no longer be present. And if we cannot be present, we cannot find our way back to the source of the love, which is at the very center within us.
(more…)

From Leonard Jacobson’s latest book, Journey into Now.

There is a tendency to project the source of truth onto another. This often happens in our relationship with the teacher and it acts as a barrier to true awakening.

One Thursday evening, at one of my teaching sessions in Corte Madera, Laura raised her hand to speak. She is an earnest young woman who had recently attended one of my five-day residential retreats.

“I feel confused,” she said. “A part of me wants to give myself over to you completely. I can feel devotion arising within me. But another part of me feels afraid. I do not trust you and I want to run from you.”

(more…)

If we are fully present, there are no thoughts. If there are no thoughts, then quite literally, there is no time. There is no life outside of this moment. We can no longer function in the world of time, because there is only now. You would need a team of caretakers to take care of you, or an ashram would have to develop around you to take care of you and receive your enlightened utterances.

One such example is Ramana Maharshi. When Ramana awakened, he did not participate in the world of time. He remained in the silence and an ashram developed around him. That is the beauty of India. The Indian culture allows for one to enter into that fully awakened state and remain there. They know how to respond to one who is fully awakened.

(more…)

Humanity is caught in a never-ending cycle of abuse. One lifetime, we play the role of abuser and the next lifetime, we are the abused. The same thing manifests in this lifetime. We are either the abuser or the abused, and sometimes we are both.

We are lost in false power, which is the cause of all the abuse throughout history and all the abuse in the world today. As an inherent part of our awakening, we must discover the true nature of power.

At a deep and sometimes unconscious level, we feel powerless. This usually stems from childhood, when we were not allowed to truly be ourselves, and we had to comply with the will of our parents. In a sense, our innate sense of power was taken from us. It is not our parent’s fault. The same thing happened to them and it is simply handed down, generation to generation.

We seek to escape this feeling of powerlessness by feeling powerful, but if the power we feel is in relationship to others, then it is false power.

(more…)