Western Wilson
A guide to spiritual awakening, showing how to quiet the ego and live more fully in the present moment.
It’s worth questioning where the inner voice comes from. Once you unlock the watcher of the voice, it feels like your inner world expands, and as a consequence your experience in the physical world too.
Quotes
Most people are only peripherally aware of the world that surrounds them, especially if their surroundings are familiar. The voice in the head absorbs the greater part of their attention.
What a liberation to realize that the voice in my head is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to thought, the space in which the thought or the emotion or sense perception happens.
The inspiration for the title of this book came from a Bible prophecy that seems more applicable now than at any other time in human history. It occurs in both the Old and the New Testament and speaks of the collapse of the existing world order and the arising of a new heaven and a new earth.
The Buddha is said to have given a silent sermon once during which he held up a flower and gazed at it. After a while, one of those present, a monk called Mahakasyapa, began to smile. He is said to have been the only one who had understood the sermon.
Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable.
All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg.
Some economists are so attached to the notion of growth that they cant let go of that word, so they refer to recession as a time of negative growth.
One thing we do know: Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.
If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, thats just more ego.
In the days of the white settlement, the natives of North America found ownership of land an incomprehensible concept. And so they lost it when the Europeans made them signs pieces of paper that were equally incomprehensible to them. They felt they belonged to the land, but the land did not belong to them.
Since you cannot find yourself through having, however, there is another more powerful drive underneath it that pertains to the structure of the ego: the need for more, which we could also call wanting. No ego can last for long without the need for more. Therefore, wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having. The ego wants to want more than it wants to have.
Non reaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.
Thought can at best point to the truth, but it never is the truth. That’s why Buddhists say The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.