posted October 31, 2004 07:02 PM         

Osho, Take it Easy, Volume 1 Chapter 14

"You might, for instance, sense into your inner experience and realize that you are feeling irritated. The moment you say to yourself, 'I must let go of it so I can feel peaceful,' you are acting on a plan based on the belief that you should be feeling peaceful. Whenever you attempt to change what you are experiencing, you are assuming that you know what ought to be happening, which indicates that you have a plan in mind. This plan is not necessarily conscious, but it is an implicit part of your inner activity whenever you manipulate, judge, or criticize what you are experiencing. Even when you tell yourself to relax you have a plan. For most people this inner planning is incessant, compulsive, and obsessive. When we recognize this planning component of our inner activity, the delusion that we know what should happen is exposed. If, instead of trying to manipulate our experience, we stay present with it and try to understand it in an experiential way, then our process unfolds. Using our example , if you said to yourself, 'Oh, I'm irritated, that's interesting. What is irritating me right now? Oh, I see. The irritation has to do with this' - and so on, that is not planning where the process will go; you are just observing it and experiencing it, and the unfoldment happens of itself.
Holy Wisdom means understanding that you do not know what's going to happen next, and so the only thing you can do is relax. You realize that if you relax, you are. You become the presence,and when you are the presence, you are in the present. When you are in the present, real work can happen, and that real work is the unfoldment. This is not work in the way it is ordinarily understood, which is that of ego activity; real work is the unfoldment of the soul which, as we are seeing, requires no such activity. If we can allow this unfoldment to happen, the result is freedom, since your assemblage point moves according to the unfoldment. The unfoldment is nothing but the spirit moving your assemblage point from one band to another, revealing all your potential."

--Ali Hameed Almaas, Facets of Unity, Chapter 15 "Point Seven-Holy Wisdom, Holy Work, Holy Plan"

"If you can look back again and again into the source of mind, whatever you are doing not sticking to any image of person or self at all, then this is "turning the light around wherever you are". This is the finest practice."
Thomas Cleary, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Chapter VII "The Living Method of Turning the Light Around"

"There are different characteristic deteriorations of each of the three phases of Buddhism, but in spite of their differences in expression, they are fundamentally based on the same set of weaknesses in human psychology. Ignorance or nihilism may take the form of extreme quietism on the level of Hinayana Buddhism, whereas it may take the form of decadence on the level of Mahayana Buddhism or adventurism on the level of Tantric Buddhism. Greed may manifest itself as vanity on one level, officiousness on another level, and ambitiousness on a third level. Aggression may appear in the form of prudishness, in the form of proselytism, or in the form of authoritarianism; or in a combination of all three of these forms.
The deterioration of religious forms consequent upon approaching them with greed, aggression, and ignorance are not limited to Tantric Buddhism,, or to any particular religion."
--Thomas Cleary, The Ecstasy of Enlightenment