December 18, 2012

"Go back to that state of pure being where the 'I am' is still in its purity before it got contaminated by 'this I am' and 'that I am'.  Your burden is of false identifications - abandon them all....I used to sit for hours together with nothing but the 'I am' in my mind, and soon peace and joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state.  In it all disappeared - myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me.  Only peace remained and unfathomable silence." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

When we diligently follow the instructions of these sages, we ripen, we dawn, we blossom in recognition of our own Buddha-nature: "impersonal, devoid of mass, unfixed and capable of endless transformation..." (Yasutani-roshi).  In it all the fetters of our conditioned lives snap and we are free.  We realize the Absolute and witness everything as a dynamic flow between emptiness and form.  Form is just illusion and emptiness just a name we slap onto what we cannot define, what we can only feel.  In the end manifestation and the unmanifest, realization and potential, rise and fall like swells on the surface of an ocean and all is just as it is, unnamed, unstained, complete and perfect.   

December 5, 2012

"There are those...who simply cannot believe in the reality of such a world.  No matter how often they are taught that the relative world of distinction and opposites to which they cling is illusory, the product of their mistaken views, they cannot but believe otherwise.  To such people the world can only seem inherently evil, full of sin and strife and suffering, of killing and being killed, and in their despair they long to escape from it." - Yasutani-roshi

So we flee the illusory maelstrom and in doing so make "enlightenment" a goal, an attainment, an objective, yet another object born of mind.  The dog chases its tail unto exhaustion. It is then that the question "Who am I?" begins to truly resonate.  "I" can never be an object, only an undifferentiated timeless and space-less witness of everything our presumptive minds dream up. Abide as this witness and you will truly escape by accepting and merging with all that is. 

November 27, 2012

"If you could but keep in mind what you do not know, it would reveal to you its secrets." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

This is not cryptic. "What you do not know" is what we're left with after a thorough jnani housecleaning of "not this, not this."  It is consciousness without content.  It requires skillful and continuous abidance.  Once we abide there as our preeminent, primary mode of orientation and navigation, all else slips away.  The personal self melts like candle-wax beneath a flame. Reality is global and free and ultimately unqualified.    

August 3, 2012

"The real meaning is unexplainable, but experienceable....Don't concern yourself overmuch with formulations.  Pure being cannot be described." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

Mind grapples with itself endlessly, creating its own tether hooks and hooking itself again and again. This is the life most of us lead, oblivious to the great peace upon which everything floats.  Pure being is an experience of emptiness prior to space and of presence absent time.

July 26, 2012

Now it is time to sit quiet
Face to face with Thee,
And to sing dedication of life
In this silent and overflowing leisure. - Tagore

July 21, 2012

"Freedom unlimited and conscious." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

July 10, 2012

Is a gnani subject to emotion?

"Take anger.  I may be furious, pacing the room up and down.  At the same time I know what I am, a center of wisdom and love, an atom of pure existence.  All subsides and the mind merges into silence...Anger came and dissolved on my remembering myself." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

With a gnani, there is no "there" there.  It's like what a scientist spouted when asked what the latest discovery of the Higgs-boson-god-particle thingamajig at the heart of everything with mass means.  He seemed stumped at first, but then perked up with "now we can move on to whatever is next!"  The Heart dances ever on just out of reach of the mind.

"I have no shape, nor name.  It is attachment to a name and shape that breeds fear." - N.M.

Money is not the root of all evil.  Well before money is attachment to name and shape.  Would that we could have some early education along these lines.  Attachment places a wet kiss upon the glass of a hall of mirrors.

"...for when a thing touches Nothing, it becomes nothing.  It is like a bottomless well, whatever falls into it, disappears." - N.M.

This is to fall out of time and space, out of all fabrications born of the body-mind, all of it drawn out like air from a vacuum.

July 3, 2012

"Your mistake lies in your belief that you are born.  You were never born, nor will you ever die, but you believe that you were born in a certain date and place and that a particular body is your own." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

This is not an article of faith, but of fact, and until assimilated as such in a final abandonment of the last vestige of selfhood, it will prove a mote in the eye of spiritual vision.

June 28, 2012

"Nothing you can see, feel, or think is so. - Nisargadatta Maharaj

Is it any wonder that those who recognize and dare to profess this truth are so often persecuted as mad?

"Even if I tell you that you are the witness, the silent watcher, it will mean nothing to you, unless you find the way to your own being." - N.M.

This is our money-back guarantee that we, too, can awaken into precisely what he is. Bring earnestness in abundance.

"The impersonal is real, the personal appears and disappears.  'I am' is the impersonal Being.  I am this is the person.  The person is relative and the Pure Being - fundamental." - N.M.

This radical (from our usual point of view) truth, once recognized, will inform and absorb the seeker into a gauntlet of ineluctable ripening.

"When you start questioning your dream, then awakening is not far away." - N.M.

"The mistake of students is in their imagining the inner to be something to get hold of, and forgetting that all perceivables are transient and, therefore, unreal." - N.M.

There is no imagining, no mentation at all in samadhi, no memory, no expectation--and no absence of these either--just a noticing of what has always been so, as one might notice that daytime is riven through and through with sunlight.  There it is: no big deal: reality illuminated.

"My silence sings, my emptiness is full, I lack nothing.  You cannot know my world until you are there." - N.M.

You are already there.  You have always been there.  Now the scales must fall from your eyes.  To be "the ground of all knowledge," to be "the immutable and perennial awareness of all that happens to the senses and the mind," is to abide before thought and beyond sensation, to abide continuously in supramental and supersensuous freedom--calm, clear, collected to the world's eye, and in truth devoid of even that, pure and unqualified, naked before the inner eye.

June 20, 2012

"From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson, too, struggled to put this thing into words and resorted to lending perspective where none exists.  How else to convey?  There is no "behind" or "within" of enlightened awareness, but to share it he assigns familiar orientations for our benefit.  He is dead on with "the light is all."  This resounds later through Ramana Maharshi's cinema projector light illuminating film upon a screen.  Truly, though, our cinematic perspective of the material world is illusory, as are all perspectives from our supposed personal point of view.

"It is undefinable, unmeasurable, but we know that it pervades and contains us"...and it can be experienced when "there is no screen or ceiling between ourselves and the infinite heavens"...when "the walls are taken away"...when we awaken to "independency of those limitations which circumscribe us on every hand."  In other words, when we transcend the limiting factors of our senses and mental processing.

Fifty years before Vivekananda brought Eastern wisdom to our shore, Emerson transcribed the experience of enlightenment.  Masters such as V then provided the detail and proof of method necessary to pollinate those of us with ears to hear.    

June 17, 2012

"The painter is in the picture" (NM) and all of it and none of it is in me.

"Whatever you may say [about the Supreme] will be both true and false.  Words do not reach beyond the mind." - NM

As a wave construed as an ocean is both true and false, so, too, are our thoughts and words "of" the Supreme but not nearly the whole of it.

"When you realize that you are not the person, but the pure and calm witness, and that fearless awareness is your very being, you are the being.  It is the source, the Inexhaustible Possibility." - NM

Fearless awareness composed of complete and total abandonment, a skeleton of ashes.

Our personal, misidentified selves intercept life as leaves intercept wind.  Our real selves intercept consciousness as daytime intercepts sunlight.

"The entire universe strives to fulfill a desire born of compassion." - NM

All of us at heart constitute a holy impulse.

"The entire field of becoming is open and accessible; past and future coexist now." - NM

As more recently stressed by Eckhart Tolle, which adds resonance and validity.

"See yourself with desireless clarity, that is all." - NM

Nisargadatta shares here a literal description, not an allusion or analogy for the benefit of teaching.  He speaks of the 360 degree global vision without center and without end, of a vision absent ourselves and beyond perspective, of consciousness without content, immediately recognized without memory or desire as our essence, our fulfillment, the end of all seeking.  It is "am" without trace of "I."  

June 5, 2012

"Because of you, there is a world." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

Look at it this way: above and beyond and through, all-encompassing and all-pervading, is an infinite field of potentiality: the Supreme Reality.  It is beyond being and not-being.  Arising from this field is consciousness, which might be compared to the vibrations of the radio spectrum pervading all of space, and like receiver tuners our body-minds pluck channels from this spectrum and interpret them locally as our reality.  Our conditioned understanding of reality, then, is actually fabricated and delimited, a colloquial concoction of our sensual and cognitive apparatus.  What's more, this apparatus and its world are both ultimately composed of consciousness; in fact, we are consciousness reflected back upon itself through the body-mind conduit, although most of us are ignorant of this.  Why is this important to realize?  First and foremost, to discern the real from the false is why we are here, to awaken, to fully realize what we truly are.  Furthermore, we lose our fear of death and with it all of the misguided misery this fear imposes upon our lives and our temporal world.  We realize deeply that when our body-minds finally blink out, the spectrum of consciousness continues and we are this consciousness.  We finally experience truth as Being-Knowledge-Bliss, a fresh perspective infused with acceptance, love and freedom.

"It's the same story the crow told me,
It's the only one he knows.
Like the morning sun we come,
And like the wind we go."
 - Robert Hunter
    

June 2, 2012

Nisargadatta on the gnani: "In relation to consciousness, he is awareness.  In relation to the universe he is pure being"

In relation to clarity he is the living water, and God the fountain of form.

May 31, 2012

"For the phenomenal universe is in perpetual transition from 'was' to 'will be'; while the Atman is eternally 'now.'  And though the human, time-bound mind can make this statement, it cannot possibly understand what it really means." - Christopher Isherwood

It can be experienced, however, sans concept and percept or any trace of ego, as pure, undifferentiated consciousness.  Vigilance is a must.  Mind is an inveterate polluter, ever interjecting itself as a pot calling the kettle black--from a place of total darkness.  Thus, the term "no-mind" is used in Zen as an apt pointer to describe that which defies description.

May 14, 2012

Shankara on nirvakalpa samadhi: "There is a continuous consciousness of the unity of Atman and Brahman."  [Call it implosion, dissolution of boundaries, Ramakrishna's salt doll dissolving into the sea, call it what you will, the body-mind is no longer central.  A new orientation of emptiness unbounded fills to brimming with myriad form, and all of these apparently real forms are recognized to be insubstantial and illusory, transience born ceaselessly out of eternal consciousness.]  "There is no longer any identification of the Atman with its coverings."  [The pushing and pulling of body-mind and phenomena are witnessed dispassionately as ephemera.]  "All sense of duality are obliterated."  [This is so, and all attempts at description merely constitute further obstruction.  My own "feeling" is roughly an absence of personal self (although continually witnessed), and in its place oceanic, transparent, knowing recognition, like light of dawn permeating morning sky.  But words just obscure it.]  "The man who is well established in this consciousness is said to be illumined."  [Well established.  Ah, there's the rub, for now.]   

May 10, 2012

Zennists term it "big mind" or "no-mind."  I had assumed that this state implied a suppression of thought or separation from normal thinking.  Not so.  No-mind actually encompasses everyday thinking and sensing, but attention rests or abides beyond conceptualization in unbounded, unqualified stillness and clarity--alert, relaxed, open, surrendered.

To be engaged in a process of awakening, to have time for it in a world of perpetual distraction, to take this time--what a privilege!  Even so, the ripening can not be hastened any more than the first streaks of light at dawn--the joy is in the noticing.  This is Being-Knowledge-Bliss. 

May 4, 2012

"...the mind is not the seer, but only an instrument of knowledge, an object of perception like the outside world.  The Atman, the real seer remains unknown."  And the Atman is us.  So comments Christopher Isherwood on Patanjali's "How To Know God," the bible of yogic tradition.  He adds a wonderful analogy, comparing our mistaken identity with the body-mind to a light bulb regarding itself as electricity.  This is our fundamental error of orientation, leading to all manner of ignorance and suffering: we assign subjectivity to a system of objective components, the body-mind complex, give it our name and focus untold energies on its maintenance, while all along this fabricated personhood actually eclipses our recognition of what we really are, the ultimate subject without boundary, the Self.  The irony is deep, the consequences tragic.  But surrendering this fiction leads us into the total freedom and deep peace of Realization.

"This false identification is the cause of all our misery--for even the ego's temporary sensation of happiness brings anxiety, a desire to cling to the object of pleasure, and this prepares future possibilities of becoming unhappy.  The real Self, the Atman, remains forever outside the power of thought-waves, it is eternally pure, enlightened, and free--the only true unchanging happiness." - Christopher Isherwood

A koan forces endless mental chin-ups until eventually the mind drops from the bar altogether.  They are ingenious examples of using the thorn to remove the thorn.

May 2, 2012

Samskaras are deeply ingrained tendencies of mind conditioned in us since birth.  They are figurative grooves worn over time by our repetitive, reflexive thought and behavior, and they always stem from and support our mistaken identity with a personal self, the "I," "me," "mine" of our story.  Most samskaras are by now unconscious or subconscious to us, rooted within our pervasive fears and anxieties, and our impulsive desires, like tiny thorns buried in infected flesh.  Yoga brings them to light, where the more they are illuminated, the less power they hold.  Consider karma yoga with its stress on selfless work with no expectation of reward or even acknowledgement.  How does that tally with behaviors sown from earliest memory on praise and encouragement?  We have come to expect reward for our actions.  Most of us feel at very least uncomfortable and for some even angry when praise for our mighty efforts or helpful gestures is withheld.  Samskaras may seem benign, but they are subtly malignant and must be rooted out.  Karma yoga activates this process through selfless action, bhakti through devotion and love, and jnana through mindfulness and detachment.  Once brought to light, samskaras are drained of efficacy like moonlight on a sunny day.

"You cannot possibly say that you are what you think yourself to be!  Your ideas change about yourself from day to day and from moment to moment.  Your self-image is the most changeful thing you have.  It is utterly vulnerable, at the mercy of a passer by.  A bereavement, the loss of a job, an insult, and your image of yourself, which you call a person, changes deeply.  To know what you are, you must first investigate and know what you are not.  And to know what you are not, you must watch yourself carefully, rejecting all that does not go with the basic fact: 'I am.'  The ideas: I am born at a given place, at a given time, from my parents and now I am so-and-so, living at, married to, father of, employed by, and so on, are not inherent in the sense 'I am.'  Our usual attitude is of 'I am this.'  Separate persistently and perseveringly the 'I am' from 'this' or 'that', and try to feel what it means to be, just to be, without being 'this' or 'that.'  All of our habits go against it and the task of fighting them is long and hard sometimes, but clear understanding helps a lot.  The clearer you understand that on the level of the mind you can be described in negative terms only, the quicker you will come to the end of your search and realize your limitless being." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

May 1, 2012

"The unexpected and unpredictable is real" (N.M.) because it escapes the illusory web of cognition.

Love your neighbor, but fertilize your hedge.

Everything in which we move and have our being consists of consciousness, or, closer still, in being, consciousness takes on myriad forms, and among them moves the misidentified "I."

"Meditation will help you find your bonds, loosen them, untie them and cast your moorings.  When you are no longer attached to anything, you have done your share.  The rest will be done for you." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

Meditation begins as a sport-fishing extravaganza, but it matures into a baitless hook in still, clear water--and the fish swim by undisturbed.  There at the intersection of being and awareness the faintest glimmer, the slightest vibration initiates the Big Bang of everything known and to be known in this moment forever.

April 26, 2012

For most of us, instinct run amok has hijacked our better nature.  Greed, especially, is a flame before which we are moths.  We ever flutter towards it, and the closer we get the more we are burned.  As Nisargadatta noted, "the state of craving for anything blocks all deeper experience."  To become content and at peace, we must first recognize the other "content," the noun, the "substance" of our sensory and cognitive experience.  Our body-mind, self-identified as "I," is not who or what we really are.  Manifestation, including our misidentified personal selves, is just a speck in the eye of the Unmanifest, and only when that eye turns its gaze upon itself will we experience true contentment and peace. 

April 25, 2012

Ultimately, we segregated and solipsistic, multi-racial and poly-ethnic human beings must transcend our divisions, come together and cooperate to survive.  This would be a huge leap in social evolution and, I fear, will require some massive cataclysm for impetus, just as on an individual scale oftentimes something traumatic moves us toward enlightenment.  The better way sees us waking up en mass to the wisdom of the sages--not the religionists--the genuine sages whose message is oftentimes mined from the distortions of religion.  Religion may be the last and deepest divide of all and, if not breached, will squelch the last hope for world unity and peace and human survival.  Can we separate the wheat from the chaff in time to save our own asses?  For those who want a head start: the Beatitudes, the Eightfold Path, Advaita Vedanta, each along the lines of bhakti, karma and jnana yoga, respectively.

"I see only consciousness, and know everything to be but consciousness, as you know the picture on the cinema screen to be but light....There is only light and the light is all.  Everything else is but a picture made of light.  The picture is in the light and the light is in the picture.  Life and death, self and not-self, abandon all these ideas.  They are of no use to you." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

April 20, 2012

What we are is beyond eternal and infinite, because these are concepts and we are prior to conceptualization--or any other sifting of the primordial One.  What we are precedes emotion but resonates love.  We are always already free and pure and fecund and redolent, empty and brimming at once.  This is the open secret veiled deeply beneath layers of conditioning, foremost among them our mistaken identification with a separate and personal self.

"Be free of name and form and of the desires and fears they create, then what remains?" - Nisargadatta Maharaj

What has been, what is, what will be, all abide in this present moment.  My father is dying.  I am born.  A full-throated bird chirps from the bushes behind me.  These are not separate events but for the limiting and qualifying nature of mind, which invented time and imposed space upon the inviolate unfolding Noumenon.

"You may call it God, or Parabrahman, or Supreme Reality, but these are names given by the mind.  It is the nameless, contentless, effortless state, beyond being and not-being." - NM

"To perceive it does not need the senses; to know it does not need the mind." - NM

"All is a play in consciousness.  All divisions are illusory." - NM

On the other hand, today's paper brought me news of a 17 year-old mother who, irritated by the incessant bawling of her 7 week-old infant, poured scalding water over its head, face and body until the "skin bubbled."  The child is currently in a medically induced coma and, should it survive, faces a lifetime of torturous surgeries, not to mention the mental anguish and emotional scars.  Short of the Holocaust, that about sums up human depravity for me.  Is this just a play in consciousness?  How can searing pain be called illusory?  It can't.  Upon the level most of us live, such acts violate every shred of compassion and justice.  Even realized sages would affirm this, but from a place of greater context.  They recognize the snake eating its own tail, and more, that the snake is in fact a mirage born of a twisted length of rope.  Therein lies our elemental confusion and with it the potential for depraved behavior. 

April 12, 2012

Free will vs. determinism?  Windmills.

April 10, 2012

"If you trust me, believe when I tell you that you are the pure awareness that illumines consciousness and its infinite content.  Realize this and live accordingly.  If you do not believe me, go within, inquiring 'What am I?' or, focus your mind on 'I am', which is pure and simple being." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

I am not so trusting.  Most of us act with the promise of firsthand experience, so for us it is suggested we follow the path of self-inquiry.  At first, distractions of the usual illusory sort weigh heavily.  The mind is a wild mash of heavy seas.  Two half hours per day may be all we can manage for many years, if that.  With persistence, however, focus upon the barest sense of 'I am' slowly becomes the default, "always on" state to which we return from distraction like a rubber band snaps to its original shape.  This 'I am' is shapeless, without content, without edge or border or center.  Abiding here requires effortlessness and complete surrender of any personal sense of self.  From there it's just a matter of ripening.

April 9, 2012

Skin, sense, mind only apparently separate us from the One.  Realization, like gravity, is constant and active regardless of cognizance, while awakening is of a moment.  Liberation arises from dissolution of "I am," when the  totality of the known dissolves into the immensity of the unknown.

"Deal with the causes of obscuration, not with the sun." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

"It's good to be the king!" - Mel Brooks

April 5, 2012

"All you can do is shift the focus of consciousness beyond the mind." - NM

This is key.  Keep it there on the sense of "I am," detached and unaffected, as your true nature inexorably pulls the rug from under any sense of anything.  "I am" slowly fades until it bleaches white as the paper on which it is written.  Burn the paper.  Pulverize the ash.

"You are the Self, here and now.  Leave the mind alone, stand aware and unconcerned and you will realize that to stand alert but detached, watching events come and go, is an aspect of your real nature." - NM
  

April 4, 2012

"Turn within.  'I am' you know.  Be with it all the time you can spare, until you revert to it spontaneously.  There is no simpler and easier way." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

Enlightenment is our default state.  "I am"  is like morning dew, evaporating from the moment the sun of our attention illumines it, then gone.

April 2, 2012

"I see what you too could see, here and now, but for the wrong focus of your attention." - Nisrgadatta Maharaj

Attention must be goaded in the right direction, like Ramakrishna's elephant, given impetus through  concentration on the naked sense of "I am" or, closer still, "am."  In time this obliterates attachment to sense or thought and, stroke by stroke, strips the painting of the body-mind to bare canvas.  Focused concentration opens into wide lens release without center or boundary.  Personal self dissolves into everything.  Everything dematerializes into emptiness, but this is a very special emptiness beyond conceptualization.  It resonates potential and shines as noumenon.  Once we get out of our own way, we instinctively recognize all of this as though emerging from a dream.   

March 30, 2012

"My life is a succession of events, just like yours.  Only I am detached and see the passing show as a passing show, while you stick to things and move along with them." - NM

So, my stint in the rat race really amounted to no more than "Glengarry Glen Ross," only I never knew it to be a movie.

"The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused." - NM

March 29, 2012

""Don't you see that all your problems are your body's problems.  Food, clothing, shelter, family, friends, name, fame, security, survival--all these lose their meaning the moment you realize that you may not be a mere body." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

The currents of this life, which appear to us as a riptide of birth, struggle and death, continuously swell and subside without altering the ocean in the least.  I am this ocean first and foremost, though the currents play havoc with this body-mind.  

March 25, 2012

"When pure awareness is attained, no need exists anymore, not even for 'I am', which is but a useful pointer, a direction-indicator towards the Absolute.  The awareness 'I am' then easily ceases.  What prevails is that which cannot be described, that which is beyond words.  It is this 'state' which is most real, a state of pure potentiality, which is prior to everything.  The 'I am' and the universe are mere reflections of it.  It is this reality which a jnani has realized." - Douwe Tiemersma

"Having gone beyond the I-am-the-body idea, he had acquired a mental state so joyful, peaceful and glorious that everything appeared to be worthless compared to it.  He had attained self-realization." - Maurice Frydman speaking of Nisargadatta Maharaj

To speak of that "which is prior to everything" is about as close as language will take us.  

March 24, 2012

"We are free; the work is to know it." - Vivekananda

March 19, 2012

"...what is lost in time may be made up by speed in work.  So, says Vedanta, religion is to be realized now.  And for you to become religious means that you will start without any religion, work your way up and realize things, see things for yourself; and when you have done that, then, and only then, do you have religion." - Vivekananda

V is not speaking of religion in the conventional sense of organized, pew-sitting religion, but about spiritual tradition that culminates in actual Realization for the seeker.  He urges us to begin now regardless of circumstance or belief, nor is he ignorant of real-life concerns that divert so many of us off-course:

"It is very hard work to get money.  It is harder work to keep it.  You fight the whole world to get a little money together and fight all your life to protect it.  Therefore there is more anxiety for the rich than the poor....This is the way it is." - V

No wonder Republicans are so high strung these days.

March 17, 2012

"All sentient beings, if only they were able to realize it, are already in Nirvana." - Ashvaghosha

Such a huge statement, how is it that we live our lives largely unawares?  Well, huge distractions exist, beginning first and foremost with the frenetic buzzing of our minds and the stampede of our senses rushing to and from ceaseless stimuli.  There is the past.  There is the future.  There pervades our every thought and action instincts to survive and  to propagate and protect..  There is ego everywhere.  If we are to penetrate these many veils, we must act, and this involves taking up some manner of genuine spiritual exercise and with the purest of motivation.

"To believe that their use either constitutes enlightenment, or guarantees it, is mere idolatry and superstition.  To neglect them altogether, to refuse to find out whether and in what way they can help in the achievement of our final end, is nothing but self-opinionatedness and stubborn obscurantism." - Aldous Huxley

The "final end" is not so much an achievement but more an unraveling of distractions.  It is a ripening of "alert passivity in relation to Reality" that persistently subverts distractions, takes back the weed bed, so that "when distractions appear in the foreground of consciousness, we take notice of their presence, then, lightly and gently, without any straining of the will, we shift the focus of attention to Reality which we glimpse, or divine, or (by past experience or an act of faith) merely know about, in the backgound.  In many cases, this effortless shift of attention will cause the distractions to lose their obsessive 'thereness' and, for a time at least, disappear." - A.H.

For me what began as an act of faith is now daily experience.  The path has taken many turns over 25 years, and ultimately it has found a home in Advaita Vedanta. For me, blind faith  in dogma will never endure.  To take this path, I need the promise of personal revelation and confirmation of those who went before me.

"They could go beyond the bounds of senses and catch a glimpse of that which is beyond.  We shall believe that when we are able to do it ourselves, and not before." - Vivekananda

March 3, 2012

When I blow out that candle tonight on my 60th birthday cake, along with the usual wish for everyone's health and happiness I will also wish that each of us use his or her mind as a vehicle of transcendence, that each take each to its limits beyond this body, this planet, beyond this universe and all of the infinite unfolding multiverse, beyond the furthest bound of thought, and then rest just beyond, there.

March 1, 2012

"Dispassion is not possible unless there is satiety through enjoyment." - Bill W. Ramakrishna

How can one realize God?  "By directing your love to Him and constantly reasoning that God alone is real and the world illusory.  The aswatha tree alone is permanent; its fruit is transitory."

This calls to mind the anonymous monk of the Dark Ages whose "The Cloud of Unknowing" urges a kind of bhakti approach toward a God beyond the ken.  Spray enough arrows of love and one eventually finds the mark.  Maintain a beam of devotion until it illuminates the mother ship.  Pray with a yearning heart, expecting nothing.

February 29, 2012

"Some frequent the company of holy men in order to smoke hemp.  Many monks smoke it, and these householders stay with them, prepare the hemp, and partake." - Ramakrishna

So, there has been a long line of hemp-smoking moochers after all.

"Discriminate and turn the passions away from worldly objects.  When the elephant is about to devour the plantain-tree in someone's garden, the mahut strikes it with his iron-tipped goad." - R

Oh, that fucking iron-tipped goad!  I know it all too well.

February 28, 2012

"They say that when your eyes are painted with collyrium made from the ashes of a frog's head you see snakes everywhere.." - Ramakrishna

"You may discriminate, saying that the ego is nothing at all; but still it comes, nobody knows from where.  A goat's legs jerk for a few minutes even after its head has been cut off." - R

Homespun Advaita from the loom of a true child of God.

February 27, 2012

"By being lowly one can rise high....Cultivation is not possible on high land; in low land water accumulates and makes cultivating possible." - Ramakrishna

"'I' and 'mine' - that is ignorance.  Reason it out.  Are you the body or the flesh or something else?  At the end you will know you are none of these.  You are without attributes." - R

February 26, 2012

We are both source and sustenance of suffering.  Buddha cited attachment as its root, meaning our attachment as human beings to things, things from the greatest to the slightest, from the material to the conceptual, from what we believe real to what in the end proves illusory.  Our first instincts are to avoid and to end suffering, and we spend the rest of our lives running this gauntlet.  We grasp and clutch, possessed by our possessions, driven by "woman and gold" as Ramakrishna termed lust and greed, yet restlessness and discontent, frustration and the incessant gnawing prompt still more grasping after transitory things - such a vicious circle!  And we are so thick-headed and slow to awaken.  Liberation for most of us requires round after round of failed attempts to find freedom in things, in a gauntlet of temporary surcease run to exhaustion.  The big boys like Buddha and Jesus and Ramakrishna can assist with method, but run it we must until, completely spent, we surrender every trace of selfhood in a final swoon across the finish line, free at last.

"Bound souls who constantly dwell with 'woman and gold' do not think of God even for a moment.  How can you expect noble deeds of them?  They are like mangoes pecked by a crow...." - Ramakrishna   

February 23, 2012

"What is the use of giving an elephant a bath.  It will cover itself with dust and dirt again and become its former self.  But if someone removes dust from its body and give it a bath just before it enters the stable, then the elephant remains clean." - Bill W. Ramakrishna

"The dogmatist says 'my religion alone is true, and the religions of others are false.'  This is a bad attitude.  God can be reached by different paths." - R

February 20, 2012

"The worldly man is like a snake trying to swallow a mole.  The snake can neither swallow the mole nor give it up." - Ramakrishna

"The worm that grows in filth feels very happy there.  It thrives in filth.  It will die if you put it in a pot of rice." - R

"People worship God according to their tastes and temperaments.  The mother cooks the same fish differently for her children, that each one may have what suits his stomach." - R

Personally, I prefer deep-fried Advaita Vedanta.

R on spiritual practice and liberation:  "The goldsmith is up and doing while melting gold.  As long as the gold hasn't melted, he works the bellows with one hand, moves the fan with the other, and blows through a pipe with his mouth.  But the moment the gold melts and is poured into the mold, he is relieved of all anxiety."

Comments on any of his stuff are superfluous, except to say that they confirm spiritual experience in words and images that are perfect and complete,and wonderfully surprising, much like the revelation of great art.

February 19, 2012

"The mind is like white linen fresh from the laundry; it takes the color in which you dip it.  If it is associated with falsehood for a long time, it will be stained with falsehood." - Ramakrishna

"...a  man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest..." - Paul Simon

"Amen, brothers!" - Roger Ailes, FOX News

"Not all birds have crooked beaks." - Ramakrishna to Roger Ailes

"I feel exactly like a fish released from a pot into the Ganges." - R, simply and precisely putting the ineffable into words.

February 16, 2012

"Living in the world and entangled in many of its duties, the aspirant, during the first stage of spiritual life, finds many obstacles in the path of concentration.  While the trees on the foot-path are young, they must be fenced around; otherwise they will be destroyed by cattle.  The fence is necessary when the tree is young, but it can be taken away when the trunk is thick and strong.  Then the tree won't be hurt even if an elephant is tied to it." - R

Earnest and persistent self-inquiry establishes a fence along the foot-path of concentration.

"...like the water of a lake, which appears green, blue, or black from a distance.  Go near, take the water in your hand, and you will find that it has no color.  The sky also appears blue from a distance.  Go near and you will see no color at all.  Therefore I say that in the light of Vedantic reasoning Brahman has no attributes.  The real nature of Brahman cannot be described.  But so long as your individuality is real, the world is also real, and equally real are the different forms of God and the feeling that God is a Person." - R

Earnest and persistent self-inquiry erases the last vestige of individuality.

"It is like a seed that has been left on the cornice of a building.  After standing many days the house crumbles, and the seed falls on the earth, germinates, and at last gives fruit." - R

"It is like the light inside a lantern.  One feels as if one could touch the light, but one cannot on account of the pane of glass." - R

Earnest and persistent self-inquiry demolishes this pane of glass.

"Speaking of householders [regular working stiffs] entangled in worldliness, the Master said: 'They are like the silk-worm.  They can come out of the cocoon of their worldly life if they wish.  But they can't bear to, for they themselves have built the cocoon with great love and care.  So they die there.'"

February 15, 2012

"Mere muttering of magic words doesn't cure one of the pain of a spider or scorpion sting.  One must also apply the smoke of burning cow dung." - R

"Pray to God that your attachment to such transitory things as wealth, name and creature comforts may become less and less every day." - R

And so he blows burning dung smoke directly into the nostrils of materialism.

February 13, 2012

"I have seen a prostitute dying in the Ganges and retaining consciousness [focused spiritual concentration] to the very end." - Ramakrishna

So I don't wanna hear it when you whiners bitch about rat races and ceaseless hubbub.

Addiction: "The camel eats thorny shrubs, and blood gushes from its mouth; still it will eat thorns." - R

I am, in a wonderful, exhilarating way, a complete waste of flesh. - Sri Hippie Speedball

February 11, 2012

The will to survive is the basic instinct.  Because it is conducted by humans, science is harnessed to this tenet first and foremost.  All of our scientific breakthroughs, no matter how far reaching, are doomed to frustration not because regardless of the miraculous new palatives which may even some day cause death to surrender its sting we die, but because immortality of the body-mind is fools' gold.  What we are precedes and succeeds immortality.  So when I read of a new Alzheimer's drug of great potential I have mixed feelings.  On the one hand I hope it succeeds and relieves the human suffering, and on the other hand I wonder whether these ever more sophisticated efforts to prop up the body-mind divert our attention from true liberation.  We waste time trying to polish a mirror that does not exist.

"Do your duty with one hand and with the other hold to God.  After the duty is over, you will hold to God with both hands." - Ramakrishna

February 9, 2013

"Truthfulness alone is the spiritual discipline in the Kaliyuga." - Ramakrishna

Awakened vision is usually described as "light" because it shares with light all-encompassing, all-pervasive, boundless clarity, which through our normal sensual channels amounts to light.  But in fact we disappear into clarity, not light.

"The nearer you come to God, the more you feel peace.  Peace, peace, peace--supreme peace!  The nearer you come to the Ganges, the more you feel its coolness.  You will feel completely soothed when you plunge into the river." - R

"One ultimately discovers God by trying to know who this "I" is.  Is this 'I' the flesh, the blood, the bones, the marrow?  Is it the mind or the buddhi?  Analyzing thus, you realize at last you are none of these.  This is called the process of 'neti, neti,' 'not  this, not this.'  One can neither comprehend nor touch the Atman.  It is without qualities or attributes.." - R

February 8, 2012

"I once met a man fifty years old.  He was playing cards.  As if the time had not yet come for him to think of God!" - Ramakrishna

I am of the first cradle-to-grave TV generation.  My children are gestating in a marinade of computer-generated verisimilitude with no end in sight.  To think of God midst the mists of modern distraction--is this possible?  The next Ramakrishna will be pulling his samadhi-stiffened hair out by the roots.  Good luck to you, sir.  And so it goes.

"The path of knowledge is difficult.  One cannot obtain knowledge unless one gets rid of the feeling that one is the body.  In the Kaliyuga the life of man is centered on food.  He cannot get rid of the feeling that he is the body and the ego,  Therefore the path of devotion is prescribed for this cycle."

Most of what we see today in avowed religion or worship or spiritual aspiration would seem to originate in bhakti, the path of devotion.  At best, though, it still leaves a seeker begging at the door of something sought, a dreamer still trapped in a dream, adrift in fabrication, separate.  Jnana, the path of knowledge, dissolves this final veil.  It awakens us into pure non-duality, perfect and free of the slightest tint of discrimination.




" 

February 7, 2012

'The Reality is one and the same; the difference is in name and form." - Rama

February 6, 2012

"You see, you are a devotee of God.  The very sight of you gladdens my heart.  One hemp-smoker feels very happy to meet another.  Very often they embrace each other in an exuberance of joy." - Ramakrishna

Here was a friend of intoxication whose drug of choice was God.

February 5, 2012

In answer to a question of whether one must practice spiritual disciplines all one's life, Ramakrishna replied, "No. But one must be up and doing in the beginning.  After that one need not work hard.  The helmsman stands up and clutches the rudder firmly as long as the boat is passing though waves, storms, high wind or around the curve of a river; but he relaxes after steering through them.  As soon as the boat passes the curves and the helmsman feels a favorable wind, he sits comfortably and just touches the rudder.  Next he prepares to unfurl the sail and gets ready for a smoke.  Likewise, the aspirant enjoys peace and calm after passing the storms of 'woman' [lust] and 'gold' [greed]."

Ah, truly.  Freak flag unfurled and partaking of the holy smoke, I'd best keep my hands off rudders altogether.

"The mind of the yogi is always fixed on God, absorbed in the Self.  You can recognize such a man by merely looking at him.  His eyes are wide open with an aimless look, like the eyes of the mother bird hatching her eggs.  Her entire mind is fixed on the eggs, and there is a vacant look in her eyes..."

Ramakrishna was uncanny in his ability to come up with perfect analogies, direct pointers, resonant images.  A mother bird hatching her eggs means everything to the seeker who employs self-inquiry.

"Pointing to his body the Master said with a smile, 'just a pillow-case.'"
  

February 4, 2012

"The bee buzzes as long as it is not sitting on a flower.  It becomes silent when it begins to sip the honey.  But sometimes, intoxicated with the honey, it buzzes again." - Rama

The jnani's use of reason to discriminate--between real and unreal, between permanent and transitory--is the buzzing of the jnani bee.  The bhakti buzzes through yearning and methodical ritual.  And then there is the spacious buzz of Sri Hippie Speedball, encompassing everything, interpolating nothing.  G'day now.

"But in the Kaliyuga, man, being totally dependent on food for life, cannot altogether shake off the idea he is the body." - Rama

The Kaliyuga is the last of the four cycles of human history.  It should be no surprise that we are immersed in a time of minimal virtue and great excess of vice.  Those rishis weren't born yesterday, or maybe they were, but they were extremely savvy and street smart just the same.  The delusion of a separate self poisons us with greed.  Every human conflict stems from this delusion, its din a constant siren-call from the echo chamber of Kaliyuga.

"If you see someone engaged in reasoning even after he has realized God, you may liken him to a bee, which also buzzes a little even while sipping honey from a flower." - Rama 

January 31, 2012

Ramakrishna would often ask of his guest, "what aspect of God appeals to your mind--with form or without form?"   He was simply aligning what he was about to say with the perspective of his listener.  "With form" would suggest a listener of bhakti persuasion, that is, someone who preferred God as an object or person of love.  "Without form" concludes the jnani who has traveled the path of "neti, neti." discrimination to the ultimate One without a second, the non-dualist God without form or attribute.  Either way was just fine with Ramakrishna--different strokes for different folks--it all embodied the same truth.  Remember, this may be the first avatar in history who made the effort to sample each of the major religions and to conclude each to be valid in essence.

'I had to practice each religion for a time--Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, [many others]...I realized that there was only one God toward whom all are travelling, but the paths are different," - Rama

In part, with or without form implies with or without emotion.  Some folks use emotion, principally love, as a catapult into the arms of a God with form, that is, a separate God.  However, beautiful as this may be, even a blissful emotion such as love is a barrier to unity.  Ramakrishna seemed to literally sway back and forth between the two attitudes, doing so we can be sure as a living teaching for his disciples.

I have asked many people how it is possible for God to exist in a world rife with misery and suffering. Many of the many become theological pretzels in their efforts to defend God and their own beliefs.  Salt-of-the-earth types like Ramakrishna had no problem with that one:

"There is poison in a snake, and others may die if bitten by it, but the snake is not affected by the poison.'

He tossed them off in just the way Jesus did, the way the Beatles and Mozart tossed off music. They resonate with each other like bells harmonizing truth.  Jesus tells us that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike and Ramakrishna says "one man may read the Bhagavata by the light of a lamp, and another may commit a forgery by that very light, but the lamp is unaffected.  The sun sheds its light on the wicked as well as the virtuous."

  

January 27, 2012

They cut another pre-cancerous mole out of me a couple of days ago.  I sit here about a month shy of 60 having been diagnosed the past couple of years with what my doctor calls "older" persons' complaints: melanoma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, sleep apnea, glaucoma--and with my history nobody has to tell me why.  I love the colorful way Ramakrishna puts it:

"Sin begets its own result.  This is God's law.  Won't you burn your tongue if you chew a chili?  In his youth Mathur [a dead friend] led a rather fast life; so he suffered from various diseases before his death.  One may not realize this in youth.  I have looked into the hearth in the Kali temple when logs are being burnt.  At first the wet wood burns very well.  It doesn't seem then that it contains much moisture.  But when the wood is sufficiently burnt, all the moisture runs back to one end.  At last water squirts from the fuel and puts out the fire."

Can you say "burning the candle at both ends?"  I'm about to squirt.  

January 26, 2012

Many consider Ramakrishna the Jesus of the 19th century.  Anyone who samples "The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna" would soon see why.  He, too, was a salt-of-the-earth figure whose spiritual parables and metaphors resonate very deeply on multiple levels for a wide audience, which attracted the erudite and those less educated alike.  For example, because I am too well read in matters Advaitan, I can complicate the simplest instructions of Jnana yoga, which muddies something like self-inquiry meditation with all manner of misdirected conceptualization.  Ramakrishna puts it ever so simply in order to reach overheated people like me:

"...cultivate discrimination between the Real and the unreal.  God alone is the Real, that is to say, the Eternal Substance, and the world is unreal, that is to say, transitory.  As soon as a man finds his mind wandering away to the unreal, he should apply discrimination.  The moment an elephant stretches out its trunk to eat a plaintain-tree in a neighbor's garden, it gets a blow from the iron goad of the driver."

Is there a better way to instruct us on concentration?  If only Jesus had had somebody like the fortunate scribe, "M," who sat at Ramakrishna's feet by day and wrote it all down that very night for four successive years. The New Testament came in parts anywhere from 10-60 years after Jesus' death, depending on the gospel and which researchers you choose to believe (with some of Paul's letters a little closer in time).  "The Gospel of Ramakrishna" has not been handed down through centuries of translation and political and social prejudices extant in the Judeao-Christian bible.  It is still pure.  

January 17, 2012

Do I believe in reincarnation?  Put it this way: the day scientists are able to resurrect human beings from mug shots and fingerprints, you will find Sri Hippie Speedballs aplenty in Pennsylvania and Florida.

"...consciousness--does the body create it or does consciousness create the dream of body, the dream of somebody?" - Eckhart Tolle

This is the chicken or the egg conundrum of metaphysics, very ticklish.  Science and personal experience point to that chunk of meat between our ears as the creative source.  Advaita Vedanta would have it that all is consciousness, including the meat and everything it tunes into, or, in the vernacular, that Brahman (Existence-Knowledge-Bliss) alone is real and the world illusory.

January 15, 2012

"There are three classes of conditions that hinder one from advancing along the path of Enlightenment.  First, there are the allurements arising from the senses, from external conditions and from the discriminating mind.  Second, there are the internal conditions of the mind, its thoughts, desires and mood....In the third class of impediments are placed the individual's instinctive and fundamental (and therefore most insidious and persistent) urges--the will to live and enjoy, the will to cherish one's personality, the will to propagate, which give rise to greed and lust, fear and anger, infatuation, pride and egoism." - Ashvaghosha

One person may call these things impediments while another calls them reasons to live.  To most of us, you try to take away things like "the will to live and enjoy" or, god forbid, the will to propagate, and your cold, dead fingers won't get very far, no sirree. That's the stuffy stuff of monks, not me.  But they are only hindrances when they occur under the radar, subconsciously inducing our behavior and distorting our world-view.  Instincts will carry on of their own momentum regardless of our external efforts to suppress them--in fact they will likely metastasize into greed and lust and the rest of it because of that very suppression.  No, freedom lies in bringing everything into the light and recognizing that none of it, neither the least nor the most unsettling of our senses, thoughts, or instincts, need cut us off from spirit. Jnana and mindfulness illuminate the impediments as just so much flotsam in the brief existence of the body-mind, and the body-mind as just so much jetsam headed back into the sea of consciousness from which it came.   

January 11, 2012

"This state of no-mind exists, as it were, on a knife-edge between the carelessness of the average sensual man and the strained over-eagerness of the zealot for salvation.  To achieve it, one must walk delicately and, to maintain it, must learn to combine the most intense awareness with a tranquil and self-denying passivity, the most indomitable determination with a perfect submission to the leadings of the spirit." - Aldous Huxley

Huxley discerns the central paradox of any path to enlightenment, which must employ striving without striving, but I get the feeling that he is a mechanic who has yet to drive the car.  It is much easier than all those nuts and bolts would suggest.  Like Nisargadatta, he recognizes earnestness ("indomitable determination") as the essential attitude and he emphasizes the ultimate wisdom as beyond thinking.  But then he goes off course with words like "achieve" and "maintain" balanced against "passivity" and "submission" in his attempt to convey a confluence of opposites, none of which exist in awakened sensibility because there is and never has been anyone to awaken.

Here is someone who drives the car:

"Pursue not the outer entanglements,
Dwell not in the inner void,
Be serene in the oneness of things,
And dualism vanishes of itself.
. . .
When the deep mystery of one Suchness is fathomed,
All of a sudden we forget the external entanglements;
When the ten thousand things are viewed in their oneness,
We return to the origin and remain where we have always been." - The Third Patriarch of Zen

No matter.  Huxley was terrific at pooling wisdom literature for posterity, just as Eckhart Tolle does today with damn good stuff like "Stillness Speaks."  They lead a modern horse to water.  From there, cultivation of abandonment, surrender and acceptance resolve into all-pervasive love, which ultimately evaporates into peace beyond understanding. 

January 8, 2012

"How does it feel
To be on your own
No direction known
A complete unknown?" - Dylan

How does it feel, this realization so sought after with bated spiritual breath?  It feels global, omnipresent and omnidirectional, without center and without limit.  It is sensing without objectivizing, it is void, vacant, yet vibrant, apprehended both empty and full at once (though ultimately neither, which can be understood intellectually as well as intuitively).  It begins in abandonment, surrender and acceptance, and it ends in complete equanimity, utter peace, regardless of the freak show thrown up on the screen by the body-mind.  It is a warm hearth midst the storming world.  I watch my personality roil with emotion and respond conditionally to situations, like a fire flaring up even as it consumes the last of its fuel, but I am not this personality.  I am the place in which a fire burns without consuming what I am.  I am not a part of something bigger because I am not apart. 

January 3, 2012

"...they (the awakened) are constantly recollected, so that at every moment they know who they are and what is true relation to the universe and its spiritual Ground." - Aldous Huxley

They are "recollected."  They are prior to the explosion of senses and thoughts, always abiding just there even as the world emerges with all its sturm and drang.  It is effortless and undefiled abiding in our own true nature.

"What life can compare with this?  Sitting quietly by the window,
I watch the leaves fall and the flowers bloom, as the seasons come and go." - Seccho

Seccho expresses effortless and uncluttered recollection.  

December 31, 2011

We are our own worst enemies.  We grind ourselves into disease and dust with our constant resistance to "what-is," no matter what it is.  The grass is always greener and the mind a many-tentacled thing.  Nevertheless, I resolve again this New Year's to take notice of my ceaseless restlessness as it happens, to stop squandering this peaceful present moment, and to cultivate awareness of no-mind until it becomes the autonomic default undergirding nothing, no matter what.

"...it is the One before whom words recoil." - Shankara

"...human craving can never be satisfied except by the unitive knowledge of God..." - Aldous Huxley

December 30, 2011

"It's a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body, through identification with our psyche, on to an identification with our souls, then to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification." - Ram Dass

It's a ripening.  We identify with letters until we awaken to alphabet soup.  

December 25, 2011

"If it seemed to be possible should we not have done it long ago?" - Wei Wu Wei

And so in its place we are given Christmas, another in a long line of attempts by our limited minds to posit the possibility of enlightenment dawning here and now.

December 23, 2011

"Perceiving non-inferentially" is how WWW terms awakened sensibility: living in presence absent the tugging and pulling of past and future, of conditioned consciousness.  This is not a matter of attaining, but of attuning.    

December 22, 2011

"...ask yourself whether you are not still looking as from a phenomenal center that has only an imaginary existence.  If so, you will be misled.  If not--you will understand at once." - Wei Wu Wei

Thus, the effectiveness of protracted self-inquiry.  Holding "I am" in attention is like tossing styrofoam into sulfuric acid: it withers, melts, disappears into the solution.  So, too, does our fabricated self and all of its attendant mind-stuff.

December 21, 2011

"Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?
Sleeping or waking?  Mad or well advised?
Known unto these, and to myself disguised!" - The Comedy of Errors

Shakespeare knew which questions to ask.  He also seems aware of his chief blind spot: himself.

"He that commends me to mine own content,
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop.
Who falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother, in quest of them, unhappy, lose myself."

Because Shakespeare intuits the deepest truths, he at times channels the Perennial Philosophy in the course of his writings.  I doubt he even knew it, as far as rational, conscious knowing, because he is intimating non-rational, unconscious wisdom here as intricate and profound as anything Wei Wu Wei might posit: "What we are looking for, trying to know, seeking to find, is what is looking, trying, seeking...but your conditioned objectivising bangs the door shut as soon as it opens."