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anaitkes
USA
12 Posts |
 Posted - Oct 13 2009 : 04:39:17 AM
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Almost everything I read, from every tradition of the world, seems to push 'the goal' farther and farther away until it is nothing more than a distant mirage.
You must know this.
I was just watching the documentary "Yogis of Tibet". It was mentioned that due to the crumbling of the Tibetan culture, the tradition of its yogis and masters is soon to be extinct. Bullsh*t, I thought. If it's worth anything it will survive. The teachings and practices are known. I don't buy into the idea that there are superhuman masters who are treasuries of knowledge which cannot be found anywhere else. And what doesn't survive can't be worth much. Nothing remains, anyway.
It was also mentioned that without the years and years of solitary living for study and practice, the fruits of both will be unattainable. More bullsh*t, I thought. I'm not into dedicating years to book learning, whether it's in ordinary schools or esoteric religious schools. I finished high school and decided enough was enough - let me reclaim my own mind. Enough of what others have to say, what do I say?
Practice ... perhaps. Certainly the fruits of meditation practice do not seem to be immediate. But at the same time I am not fond of the idea that it takes a lifetime of cave dwelling to reach whatever one is reaching for in meditative paths. How is that of any use?
I have lived very reclusively since the beginnings of 2008, both due to my natural solitary inclinations and my meditation practice. In less than two years I feel that I have aged a decade, both mentally and physically. My body is like an anchor that I am unfortunately dragging around. It is miserable to have a body. Full of aches, always tired, weak, weakening, reliant on food and drink, urinating and excreting. That is hell. And mind too is a misery, a terrible prison. Likes and dislikes, memories, subtle impressions, dreams, hallucinations, limited intellectual ability, ego. Full of duality and confusion. Absolute nightmare. My dreams haunt me, each dream is now a mixture of flickering self-awareness and total confusion. Sometimes in dreams I assimilate insights and explain these to dream characters. When I wake, I try to expand the point and find in it a confused mixture. Last night I explained to a burly fellow that after counting from one to three, if the mind is suddenly caught at the end of three and is not allowed to move on its natural course to four, one can make it fully introverted so it contemplates on its own nature rather than the object of awareness.
'Samsara', to me, means this hellish life of being confined as we are, and in a world of similarly confined beings in all shapes and sizes. Even in my happiest moments in mundane life there is a misery lurking in the shadows. What is that happiness? Just a momentary flash already fading and moving on. I want it all to end. I want the world to burn up and dissolve. What is this idiotic cycle we're involved in?
I do not think, upon honest reflection, that I was born to survive very long here. I am not fond of the earth life. My body is weak and there is no will to survive in it. At the first touch of excessive cold or excessive heat I'm ready to just dissolve into death. When I am physically tired I feel my inclination is not towards sleep as much as extinction. It is not that I desire sleep to be re-energized to live again, but to vanish to live no more.
All of this is made worse when the traditional spiritual paths are considered. Ascetics taking entire lifetimes from birth to death to perfect their realization? What is that? What if an airplane crashes into the house seconds before realization? Obviously I'm being deliberately absurd about this but there's some truth here.
Personally I'm not too bothered about the whole thing. I recognize the flexibility of my belief systems - at different times I've believed different things - so now I believe nothing. If death is dissolution of body and mind and there is no soul which transmigrates or does anything, that it is just like a light being turned off, then I am fine with that. In fact, I would welcome such an end to this human life. I look at human history like the morning activities of ants. I see the evolution of life on our planet and the universe at large like bacteria forming. The state of no-mind in meditation has given me this view. Compared to that - and that is nothing - what is everything else? I am not very impressed by the meditative states overall. I think of it more like a black hole full of consciousness that limited mind dissolves into. What's there to be impressed with in a black hole? Who is there to be impressed?
I often think of death. I can't wait to experience it. Just for the experience of the body and mind coming to and end. Then, if we remain inwardly conscious as best as we can, we will come to know what there is to know about it. Until then, we can only rely shakily on the traditions - written by living people - or our own speculation. So many people fear death, such an absurdity. It is absolutely inevitable, so it might as well be welcomed. To run from it is the highest foolishness. To seek the deathless, as in meditation, is admirable and does not constitute running from death but seeking transcendence of it.
Perhaps just as the gross body enters the subtle body which enters the subtlest body in meditation, and so on, death will be. Like shedding skins. I'm not very intelligent and certainly not educated but I like to play with the idea that the center of our beings that we experience as the consciousness which illumines our lives is actually emptiness in the most apparent sense. So the center is literally like a black hole and death is just re-absoprtion into its depths.
When I'm meditating, my mind shifts from waking to dreaming to deep sleep, with my awareness of self flickering through each on and off, and sometimes in the deep sleep state, where there is little to no activity in mind in the usual sense, where there is no ego-I or any of that stuff, I enjoy the experience of nothing very much. All the people who conceive of heavens and paradises as places where embodied souls wander around enjoying celestial delights must have never been meditators, because I cannot conceive of that being more enjoyable than the void state. The latter seems to be where everything resolves, just as we long for sleep when exhausted. Dissolve into the black hole center for a while. Dreaming mind is the debris getting sucked into it and struggling. I guess what I'm talking about is the transcendental void sort of thing. Sounds a lot better to me than hanging around in an exclusive club of do-gooders. More absurdity, please forgive.
Are there any particular groups or teachers which present things in this way? As in, slightly extreme takes on the yogic process? Maybe I'll start my own tradition, I've never been a follower. I've destroyed many, many of my attachments. I see my personal past like a dream or a film, my family ties like seeing faces in clouds, my future as a mirage, and my present as a bubble waiting to be popped. I didn't alter any of these things - the deconditioning I have attempted on myself has not been a whitewashing of my mind. I just willed to think "What is not this?" for each thing. An attachment to the body, I ask "What is not this?" and experience space. It's like unhooking everything or untying a knot.
I have run out of gas. Hope this makes an interesting read for anybody. |
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YogaIsLife
641 Posts |
Posted - Oct 13 2009 : 07:11:21 AM
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quote:
Hope this makes an interesting read for anybody.
It did to me! Thanks so much.
Your honesty with yourself is admirable. The search for truth.
I feel a disapointment in you - the body, the mind, cages...Maybe that is soemthing else you have to accept, surrender, and come to peace with?...Then, maybe, one more circle will be complete...
While we are still here, still pumping air and blood, even if with a weak body and mind, isn't it something? Isn't it admirable? Isn't it WHAT IT IS? So, be it...it is not for us to choose anyway I say.
I say go for it, start your own tradition...just don't make it into a tradition!... make it perhaps into your own personal relationship with that which is most true and eternal within yourself...the ultimate truth...the ultimate subjectivity "nobody else" can know. And, for me, your body and mind ARE part of that, not seperate...how else could it be any other way?
All the best. |
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Lacinato
USA
98 Posts |
Posted - Oct 13 2009 : 11:34:13 AM
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Life is pretty great, I think. It's everything else you say, but why focus on the hard parts? I don't mean they should be denied, or resisted, but one can just as easily say life is amazing and we are so lucky to be here. I usually have weird dreams, too... but they are just dreams flickering past my mind. No need to ignore them nor take them too seriously. Just sit back and watch.
The solitary practice never resonated with me either, as reculsive as I can be. It seems like a cop-out, in my view. It is SO EASY to feel enlightened when no one is around. I play mind games with myself and think I'm so realized. Then I go talk to my mom and get irritated in an instant. I bicker with my boyfriend. I frown at the drunk frat boys in the street. Then I go back to my home, my room, and meditate in peace. No thoughts. Am I spiritually advanced, or am I being a jerk?
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gumpi
United Kingdom
546 Posts |
Posted - Oct 13 2009 : 3:24:06 PM
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You are being a jerk.
Only kidding!
Spiritually advanced? My word, that is some high destination somewhere someplace. Since nobody knows exactly where it is, nor can they describe it for you, i think it is best to just get on with your life and do whatever you want, all the time, every day until the day you die. |
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Kirtanman
USA
1651 Posts |
Posted - Oct 18 2009 : 6:38:03 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by anaitkes
I ask "What is not this?" and experience space. It's like unhooking everything or untying a knot.
... and ...?
Hi Anaitkes,
I seem to recall you resonated with Kashmir Shaivism, and/or Swami Lakshmanjoo.
Philosophically, I would see Kashmir Shaivism as working well for you --- primarily, because it is simply a container/template for how consciousness-reality actually works/is.
If you feel the need for a clear philosophical "anchor" that is free of any extraneous teachings .... it's as clear and accurate a map as I've found ... and I've studied most of them in great detail.
And that's not to say that Kashmir Shaivism is superior to anything else, per se; it's just that for those of us who like our philosophy, such as it's needed and/or enjoyed at all ... to be free of any "fluff" .... Kashmir Shaivism is the "purest" system I've found in that regard, while still being utterly accurate.
That's mostly because, again, it's more of a template than a system in itself ... any system or set of practices, including the yogas related to Kashmir Shaivism itself, can fit comfortably within it.
And so, hopefully that will be helpful with respect to this matter of secondary importance (philosophy / spiritual systems).
Of primary importance is daily practice.
Why?
Simply because: the best way to become really familiar with (for example) swimming, or playing the guitar, or meditation, or enlightenment, or whatever ... is to practice it, daily.
You'll learn a lot more about swimming in a year of daily swimming than you'll learn in reading all the books ever written about swimming ..... yet not getting in the pool.
Limited thought-mind can make all this very frustrating .... because we've (limited thought-minds) all been conditioned that thinking and rationality are the arbiters of truth and reality.
They're not.
Far from it.
Especially where non-duality and enlightenment are concerned.
It's like trying to get to 1 or 0, with only the numeral 2 for a tool .... an exercise in frustration at best (and I'm not a mathematician; there may be some elegant mathematical means for facilitating this .... I'm just giving a silly, surface example, to make a point  ).
Which is?
Which is: limited thought mind (aka "me", aka "I" aka "my thoughts", aka "my intellect" aka "rationality" aka "reason" aka "belief", etc. etc. etc.), being an effect of the fundamental misperception called "duality", is *not* the best arbiter of what is "good" or "bad" with respect to knowing One Self as Reality (aka "reaching enlightenment", or whatever other colorful and myriad terms may apply).
Enlightenment is simply one term among zillions for the natural maturation and fulfillment of human consciousness.
"Adult rationality" is not the maturation of human consciousness; we (limited thought minds) have only been conditioned to think it is.
It ("adult rationality") isn't even incomplete; it's just ..... a dream.
Enlightenment isn't mysterious; it's real .... it's all that's real.
Actually.
As limited thought-mind, we "are who we think we are", an unstable, ever-vacillating aggregate of memory of conceptual limitation.
What *could* this have to do with reality?
And so ..... "back away from the limited thinking" ... and ... well ... then .....
WELCOME HOME.
You said it yourself:
quote:
Originally posted by anaitkes
I ask "What is not this?" and experience space.
Unenlightenment is simply the attachment to conceptual conditioning, and its own fallacious interpretations.
Enlightenment is any moment that misplaced attachment is absent.
All this talk of consciousness, real and unreal, etc. .... can be very confusing to limited thought-mind.
Words are the veil of Maya .... until they no longer are; until they're realized as one facet of the infinity that is the creative consciousness I AM, now (who is also a 48 year old man, sitting here in running pants, with a smirk on my face, drinking a Coke, with LIVE cranked to "11", and greatly enjoying my Sunday! ).
It's not about "real or unreal" as much as re-orienting perspective ... like with one of those "optical illusion" pictures, that's an old woman from one angle, and a young woman from another angle.
"Life sucks and then you die" only applies when we take the memories of conceptual conditioning we think we are, to be real.
The unreality of duality only applies when we (who "think we are who we think we are") think we know what it is ... and mistake duality for actual, by thinking that duality is all there is.
Reality is simple, glorious ..... and always already here now.
We've never not been the ocean of reality itself, now.
We've just thought .... just dreamed ... we were other than the ocean of reality itself.
And sure ... "ocean of reality" is another "high falutin'" expression that's meaningless, if it's not understood.
And so, I'll try to help explain it:
"Ocean of Reality" just means this:
Awareness/Consciousness .... the Awareness/Consciousness that is reading these words (the actual awareness, behind the processing of the faux-mind we think of as "mind") ... is infinite.
Simply, and actually.
The only "line" you can draw, and say "it's here, but not there" ... is in and via the machinations of limited thought-mind; the conceptual delusions known as "samsara".
And so, on the one (infinite) hand, we have .... infinity, eternity ... limitless awareness.
Those of us who experience samadhi (or, more accurately, who are samadhi) ... know this, in experiencing ... this is the "attainment" of becoming a jnani, a jivanmukti ... a Buddha ... a Christ ...... blah blah blah blah blah.
And no disrespect intended ..... and .... yes, I'm quite serious: the point being:
ALL the lofty terms and states and titles and names .... most of which serve to keep the thought-me thinking that they're a long way from attaining whatever it is they think they need to attain in order to be complete .......... point to the reality of what we are and simply knowing it by living from it ................ this spacious awareness ....... inner silence/pure bliss consciousness ..... This Loving Awareness Living Unbound.
As soon as the cloud-cover of conceptual memory-limits is released .... the One Reality is Known In-As Experiencing, Now.
For many of "us", even (so-called) "advanced sadhana" can be a sticking point for quite some time, because there's a turning to limited thought-mind to evaluate and confirm ("Was that really samadhi?" "I'm enlightened! Wait ... I hate my job; I can't be enlightened ...."; "There has to be more to it than that!!" "There has to be less to it than that; I read that the true Self is completely formless, and I don't think that formlessness was completely formless!!" ..... and so on, and so forth, repeated ad nauseum as-in-on the ever-cycling wheel of thought-birth and thought-death).
You wanna know the craziest-sanest thing of all?
There's no wheel of samsara; we just think there is!!
In samadhi ... there is no space (or only space), no time, no form; just isness; just infinity; limitation and delineation are projections of limited mind ..... or rather, the belief in the actuality and supremacy of these things ... are the projections of limited mind.
Step *all* the way back: the One experiencing this moment has no form; thought-mind is a sense, and (pre-enlightenment) a gummed up-filter, thought to be a self.
That's all; you're just the awareness you've always been.
Knowing this, all the appearances of form, now ... are inherently liberated, and free to be enjoyed.
There's nothing that's unenlightened, or wrong, or incomplete, until limited thought tells us this is the case ... and there's attachment to the idea of being a form that believes this crazy idea.
Enlightenment is the human-awareness equivalent of a woodchuck waking up one day, and realizing "Whoa, I'm a woodchuck!"
We are not these meat body-appearances.
We are not the conditioned memory thoughts which evaluate (anything).
True nature is simply the space, not the form.
Awareness is a total field .... always .... ever.
If you find the end of the field of awareness ....... do let us know.
And so:
"Ah, I'm the space, not the form."
The forms are in me ..... I'm not one of the forms, moving through this infinite mysterious space.
It's like looking at your kitchen from one side of it, instead of the other.
Perspective is completely reoriented .... yet much is exactly the same.
Awareness is unitary space.
Objects in awareness are multiplicity of form.
Mind/Consciousness is the bridge between the two.
Shiva
Shakti
Shivashakti (Union)
Father
Holy Spirit-Mother
Son
And so on, and so forth.
Nothing conceptual can ultimately help liberate you; it will only keep you thinking you're you .... and thus keep you confused (as the thought-you; dualistic mind can never not be confused; it's based on a false premise ... that duality is either all of reality, or its primary part ... as opposed to appearance occuring within the self ... the one actual field of awareness we each and all actually are, now).
Just turn around ... away from the form, into infinity ... open awareness.
Enlightenment is simple.
It's all the pre-conceived ideas about enlightenment, and the reactions of the limited thought-mind .... that feel so uncomfortable and confused.
Relax.
Open.
It's all always already here.
And so are you.
Caitanyamatma
Liberated Awareness is Self
Shiva Sutras 1.1
_/\_
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Edited by - Kirtanman on Oct 18 2009 6:54:37 PM |
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brother neil
USA
752 Posts |
Posted - Oct 22 2009 : 9:16:44 PM
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so you are free, enjoy the scenery
look in the mirror, can you believe what you see? WOW |
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Kirtanman
USA
1651 Posts |
Posted - Oct 22 2009 : 9:56:34 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by brother neil
so you are free, enjoy the scenery
look in the mirror, can you believe what you see? WOW
Yes, We Are (aka Yes, I Am).
And no, fortunately I can't believe what I see, and thus, I can actually enjoy all .... there's just this knowing-loving it as All I Am Now.
"The world is not my concern; it is myself."
~Adyashanti
"Love your neighbor as yourself."
~Jesus Christ
"Emphasis added" ~KM
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Edited by - Kirtanman on Oct 22 2009 9:57:25 PM |
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Ananda
3115 Posts |
Posted - Oct 23 2009 : 12:15:39 AM
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thank you for being so open anaitkes, i have nothing to say or express but my respect for your openness and that i have you in my prayers.
and in deep gratitude to all the lovely beings who took part in this topic this community is truelly smthg.
and i would like to offer a special bow to the K-man you're a beautiful source of inspiration to others and honestly between me and you each time i see one of your replies i am put on hold as in wow this reply is too longgg but it feels right and good and it's vibrating with That(emptiness sort of the zen like) and time after time always when i delve into one of your posts i benefit a great deal (in gratitude brother)
namaste beautiful ones |
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Kirtanman
USA
1651 Posts |
Posted - Oct 23 2009 : 10:50:04 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by Ananda
and i would like to offer a special bow to the K-man you're a beautiful source of inspiration to others and honestly between me and you each time i see one of your replies i am put on hold as in wow this reply is too longgg but it feels right and good and it's vibrating with That(emptiness sort of the zen like) and time after time always when i delve into one of your posts i benefit a great deal (in gratitude brother)
namaste beautiful ones
Thank you, Ananda; your very kind sentiments are truly appreciated.
_/\_
All love and honor to you, and all; we're all in this together; the power of the community is what's creating this; not any "one" of us (but rather, This One: Us! )
PS- And just between you and me .... I often feel my posts are too long, too ... ... (yet, they still feel right and good; I couldn't post 'em, if they didn't ... y'know?) |
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