iamom | On cultivating awareness of the unconditioned, by John Taylor

The following comes from a website called Choose to be Free, by a nondual satsang teacher named John Taylor. It was excerpted in Issue #2980 of the Nondual Highlights. In John Taylor's language, the Unconditioned is "you minus the conditions." He speaks of "closing the gap" wherein we believe (fallaciously) that God, Enlightenment or the Unconditioned is somewhere other than where I AM. He says that we can close that gap of misunderstanding by contemplating three statements:

You are you and you are THAT which is Significant.

There is nothing for you to do in order to be you because you are
already you.

You are already you because you have never been anyone else.

He also has some nice, lucid, and modern-sounding things to say about our Ego:

Cultivate Awareness of the Unconditioned

Most of us have been focused on the Conditioned since birth and we’ve
had quite a bit of help to have that focus. Our parents, siblings,
friends, schools and any thing else that we call society is one big
condition.

Birth and Death and every thing in between are a Condition.

The Ego believes that it can create conditions that are favorable to
it and having done that, it will be happy.

The difficulty is that this is only a belief and one that the Self
Improvement people are trying to sell to us. Yes friends you can have
it ALL! You can have the MONEY! You can have the TOTALLY HOT BODY of
all times! You can have a love relationship that exceeds the love of
Romeo and Juliet!

The above is what Ego wants and what society is trying to sell to it.
Please stop buying into this. Even if the Ego could acquire these
things it will then need to maintain them or they will be lost.

No matter how well they are maintained and that of course assumes
that one acquires them to begin with, they are destined to perish.
The reason that they are destined to perish is because they are
conditions. Conditions do not unfold. Conditions always collapse in
on themselves.

The Ego is actually the opposite of the Four Principles. The Ego does
not close the gap it creates gap. Ego does not cultivate awareness of
the Unconditioned. It prefers to cultivate awareness of the
Conditioned. The Ego doesn’t attempt to deepen in wisdom and
compassion because it’s too focused on itself to care about others.
The Ego does not trust or rest. The Ego does not unfold it collapses
in on itself as does all other conditions.

Perusing his website also taught me that he's giving satsang in Calgary, Alberta, Canada later this month, if anyone reading this is from that sunny, Cowboy town, which is also my own hometown. I moved to Nova Scotia in 1996 and have only been back for visits since then. The city has changed enormously since I left, and my family notwithstanding, I have no wish to return to live, for now. Nova Scotia and the East Coast is a sort of paradise compared with that frenetic, overly-rich city.

(x-posted to