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brushjw
USA
191 Posts |
 Posted - Mar 25 2008 : 9:11:51 PM
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I'll never forget the feeling of relief I felt when, after months of hearing a ringing in my ears, I finally did some research on the Internet and found out that the source of the noise wasn't mental or physical illness, but rather a symptom of meditative absorption. The fear, doubt and despair melted and in their place.... hope.
A few months later I began participating in an Internet jhanas discussion group. It was wonderful to discuss my meditation experiences with others who understood and had similar experiences. Posting helped unburden some of the fears and just expressing myself - putting into objective form my subjective experiences - I intuitively was helping me along the path. Others' responses and postings comforted me, gave me a sense of belonging to something greater than myself, and I learned a great deal.
When a kind soul directed me to the AYP site and I began reading the lessons I again felt a great sense of relief. I instantly knew AYP was "it" for me. The way Yogani wrote the lessons just clicked. I have a hard time with dogma and inflexibility so I was grateful for Yogani's words from Lesson 19, "... if your tradition is mostly serving you well, yet seems to be lacking in some way, find the courage and flexibility to try and fill in what is missing. In the end, it is you who will unfold bliss consciousness by your own efforts through devotion and application of the most comprehensive practices you can find." My sadhana is primarily Laya yoga, meditative absorption on inner sound. But I know that I also need the practice of formal meditation. Eventually I began participating in the forums and, again, it was a great relief to connect with other like-minded souls.
Recently I found an article on the Internet (Is it Depression, or is it the Loss of the Affective Ego Leading to Spiritual Gain?that once again described what I've been experiencing. My eyes filled with tears of relief and gratitude as I read:
"Imagine the ego as a room with four doors. Each door represents a particular way of ego functioning. Let’s use the Jungian terminology and call these doors sensation, intuition, thinking and feeling. Normally the room of the ego is full of activity. People are going in and out of the doors. They are talking, laughing, singing, crying, but there is always something going on. What animates this activity is what we are calling here affective energy, so the affective ego means an ego alive with seeking out things that are pleasurable, and avoiding things that are painful, and all this activity takes place instinctively and automatically. Then one day, sometimes quite suddenly, we find that the room is empty. The affective energy that set everything in motion has disappeared. We are disoriented, and wonder what has gone wrong. What we had known as life has disappeared. Has someone locked the doors? No. The doors still open and close, but instead of throngs of people going in and out, we have to open the doors ourselves and carry on our activities by planning and will power."
As I read the article I could identify almost sentence for sentence what the author described:
"All the former abilities and skills of the ego remain, but the ego seems to have entered into a zone of silence in which the normal... noise of the ego’s functions...has disappeared."
"It can happen rather suddenly so that it is quite noticeable, and it is disorienting to the ego which finds its normal life has disappeared, and goes about trying to regain it, but cannot. Therefore, it experiences a kind of death of the ego and can long for the old life that it had, and mourn for its loss."
"A sense of gratification is lost, resulting in sometimes feeling that everything is worthless, and nothing is worth doing."
"There is a tendency to overdue things without realizing it, as if the person acting has been put in gear, but the driver is somehow not fully present."
and on and on... Wow.
The first three paragraphs of this post described pivotal events on my meditation path. I believe they were so important because the process of identification is a crucial to learning meditation. Because we deal with such extra-ordinary, subjective experiences, identification, to put it simply, helps us on the path. Buddha (bhatki) - dharma (lessons) - sangha (forums).
I feel that my finding the "Is it Depression" article above may be just as important because I was able to identify. What I do know is that it seems to have dissolved the Dark Night I've been experiencing for some three months. That is a miracle.
I'm getting tired and starting to lose my lucidity but I've learned that if I don't post... I don't post. So quickly, what I'm talking about is epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Yogani is indeed on the cutting edge of spiritual advancement, in more ways than one. Shapiro's information processing theory fits in here but I won't go there tonight 
aum namaste,
Joe |
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Ananda
3115 Posts |
Posted - Mar 31 2008 : 7:17:49 PM
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Hey Brushjw
it's funny i've been just meditating and remenbered a poem i've read by an enlightened student of sri atmananda who has the name kamal joumblat and who used to be a great thinker and a politician here in lebanon.
and too bad i can't share it with u cz it's in a book filled with poems by this great soul and i can't remenber where it is and plus it's in arabic.
anyways in it he speaks about the road toward liberation and that on the way there comes a time where the student falls into experiences that make him lose interest in what used to matter which leads in it's turn into depression or uncarlesness.
but then he says that this is but a stage toward true enlightenment or true liberation as he would like to call and so do i meaning that it's like a test for the individual.
and building on that i remembered krishnamurti's saying that we should seek liberation that's true, but at the same time we shouldn't forget the others along the path.
we should help get them closer to god and ease there suffering thus by helping them with there karma and try to make this world a better place to lead others on the way and i remembered by krishnamurti's expressions in his poems that he wants to lead all creation toward the realisation of there true self thus realizing god.
i don't know if what i wrote up there relates to your case in the same way u've mentioned it cz maybe i misunderstood.
but it was stuck in my head and i needed to get it out and maybe it could be of help for me to find a better explanation to what you posted or it can relate to u.
and by the way all of this came over my head while meditating, i've been having this new habbit of getting sudden msgs in my head while meditating concerning myself or other people my head is turning like a mobile phone for sms lolzzz.
and then after i get these smses i try to share them with the other person whom comes to mind and this time it was you.
Namaste, and sorry if i sounded a little bit weird up there lolz.
Ananda |
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brushjw
USA
191 Posts |
Posted - Jun 16 2008 : 3:24:08 PM
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After struggling for four months I finally surrendered and asked my doctor to adjust my medication. I knew if I didn’t get help I’d do something to hurt myself.
Ten days after the change I was travelling with a friend in his car, looking out the window at the scenery, when an egg broke in my head. All of a sudden softness spread itself through my head, then my body. I became lighter, free. I finally felt again as if I belonged in the world. It was an incredible relief just to “be”.
quote:
The restless ego, seeking ornaments for an improved self image, will find that any school of [yoga] practice becomes difficult, and there's an entry point or crisis point at which one has to really drop their pretenses. Right at that point we tend to give up the practice, or we go to a better teacher or a better school, rather than actually going into the type of inner work that is the purpose of the school in the first place.
from The Yoga Matrix audio CD by Richard Freeman.
One effect of this prolonged Dark Night is that I seem to have let go of fears I have had regarding the effects of my meditation practice. For example, I listen to music at work via online radio (Pandora). I keep the volume down so the music can only be heard a few feet away. If my Internet browser window is not active for a certain length of time, Pandora stops playing and a dialog box appears asking if I want to continue hearing the music. However, because I play the music so softly and there are often faint introductions to songs, sometimes if the browser is not active I cannot tell whether the music is playing or not. The silence is filled with “sound” I can “hear” and I’ve often been filled with frustration, even to the point of tears, to literally not know. I usually would have to open the browser to check Pandora to verify. It seems so simple: either the music is playing, or it isn’t, right? Wrong.
Sometimes I listen to drone/ambient music (what one emusic.com reviewer calls “darkish, elegiac slabs of ethereal sound.” I love that!). On Friday I noticed a song by Andrew Chalk was playing in Pandora. A half-hour or so later I was surprised to hear the song being played again. I searched Pandora to see how many songs ago it had been played, because Pandora is very good about not repeating too often. I couldn’t find it in the history. Baffled, I looked at the current song and it was the one I'd heard before by Andrew Chalk. But it was not playing(!) As I expanded my consciousness outwards I heard the faint sound of a lawnmower far in the distance. The drone of the lawnmower what what I was hearing, not music from Pandora. For some reason I thought that sound was coming from my computer speakers. So I not only confused location but sound itself in a pretty major way.
On a more positive note I am slowly becoming able to raise my eyes in sambhavi and am feeling the estatic current up my spine. Last night was the first time I have been able to do sambhavi while seated. I felt the connection of the deep inner silence with the rising ectasy. It felt very right, almost like I’m relearning something I’ve known before.
Namaste,
joe |
Edited by - brushjw on Jun 20 2008 1:33:14 PM |
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jillatay
USA
206 Posts |
Posted - Jun 18 2008 : 11:32:10 PM
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Dear Joe,
Hi. It is great to see you doing so well.
Thanks for the link to the Inner Explorations site. What a wealth of information! I have shared it with others on the JSG list.
Love,
Jill |
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Divineis
Canada
420 Posts |
Posted - Jun 19 2008 : 12:51:50 AM
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| nothing to know, much to be known. *mumbles off in the distance* |
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Identification and Learning
