Daniel Clark
Printed in the United States of America, December 2022
All rights reserved.
ISBN- 9798364656414
CONTENTS
Preface v
Spiritual Notes 1
Notes to the Self 15
It’s All the Self 18
About the Author 21
PREFACE
My
earliest memories of spiritual interest are from growing up in the First
Congregational Church in Walla Walla. During
the first part of the services, the other elementary school children would sit
with their parents and then leave for their own classes and games, but I always
wanted to stay in the sanctuary for the whole service because I liked the feel
of it.
In my junior year in college, I took a course in religions of the world, which was my first exposure to the idea that the ego and the human sense of separation from the rest of life are illusory. The Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism, the Dhammapada and other Buddhist classics, and the Tao te Ching and other Taoist writings have sincebecome lifelong friends, along with essential Western works on mysticism such as Aldous Huxley’s “The Perennial Philosophy.”
Following my graduation from college in 1965 I began to try meditation. The first unitive experience I had was in the fall of 1966 when I was sitting in a chair in the Berkeley apartment I shared with a roommate from law school. My eyes were closed, and the scene before me was a tree-lined river with a riverboat passing by. All of a sudden the river, the trees and the boat were one, completely single. The effect and the significance of this were immediate and could only be fully appreciated by experiencing it.
Another experience occurred when I took a break from studying for a law exam, and experienced myself flowing into the Divine Ground. It was as if my life up to that point had been a huge iceberg, withonly a small tip extending above the waves into consciousness. While normally conscious only of the tip andtaking that as my whole being, I now knew the greater Self that was below the waves and joined to the Ground of all Being.
The sense of Wholeness produced by this experience was so profound that I considered abandoning my law studies and doing whatever was required to cultivate that knowing, though practicality got the best of me and I finished my exams.
While working as an attorney and community activist since then, I have continued to value life’s Wholeness, and to seek to deepen my experience of it, including pursuing relationships with others who share that appreciation.
In 2012, I met someone at a Christmas party who had similar interests, as well as a specific desire to collect short statements of life’s fundamental truths. His required format for such statements, consisting of a single word title, a ten word summary, and exactly a hundred words in the body, seemed too limiting to me, and at first I dismissed the idea.
As the weeks went by, however, I was surprised to find myself awakening in the early hours of the morning in a state of Knowing. On such occasions, there are no boundaries to Being, and the resulting insights and words representing them are not simply intellectual ideas. Their Truth has been directly experienced, giving the sense of complete certainty Ralph Waldo Emerson describes in his famous essay, The Oversoul, as well as the imperative that they be written down.
In transcribing these insights, I was also surprised that they were able to fit into my friend’s limited format, and I’ve shared sixty of them with others in a book titled “Notes to the Self.”
Since then I have continued to write down such insights to help me return to the Truth of our Wholeness and also to share with others. While they are no longer confined to the original format or to a particular time of day, they continue to be concise in form and useful to both me and to some others with whom I share a selection of them on a weekly basis.
Many of the statements have been collected in “Experiences with Truth,” a single volume containing four previous titles, “Notes to the Self,” “You are the Self,” “It’s all the Self,” and “A Spiritual Journal.”
The present small publication focuses on a frequently recurring theme from the notes that seems particularly fundamental to me, and is addressed in bold portions of the spiritual notes created on sixteen separate days from 2018 to 2022, and in “It’s All the Self” (2018), and “Notes to the Self” (2014).
Daniel Clark, November 18, 2022
