thepeoplesashram

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

In Uncategorized on November 22, 2012 at 6:57 pm

“Universal Consciousness is one’s own nature…

Knowing the individual consciousness as one’s

own nature and not knowing the Universal Consciousness

as one’s own nature is bondage.” Siva Sutras, vss 1&2

 

 

Kiss the sensations of the day

Worship the pink of an elderly man’s cheeks

Invite the vibrant white of a young woman’s

blouse to pulse thru your bones

 

Be very still and feel

the friction of blue jeaned

thighs swish-swishing

against your breast,

penetrating your skin

and vibrating along

your spine

 

Some say we are surrounded by impermanence

they say–‘contemplate the impermanence

that everywhere deceives

and hides the real behind the unreal,

the true beneath the untrue’,

‘Seek that,’ they say,

that is not this,

or this,

or this…

 

I say,

Not a moment passes

that is not full of ME,

 

I am your baby’s

soft skin-

Observe me

and you will

know yourself

 

I am the melody

of your thoughts,

listen to me

and all songs

become One.

 

I am the gravity

in your footsteps-

feel me and

walk the length

and breadth of

the cosmos

 

To live with

abiding joy,

one need only

surrender the illusion

that each is not One,

that always is

not Now,

that the infinite

is not Present.

 

 

 

 

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DRINKING FROM THE SOURCE

In Uncategorized on January 29, 2012 at 3:13 pm

Meditation fulfills its promise when it becomes effortless.

When you have invested your heart and soul to your daily meditation practice, the time will arrive when you will simply sit and enjoy.  What required effort for so long now proceeds automatically.  The body releases tension, the need for busy-ness in the mind ceases.

When surrender reaches its full potential effort is no longer required to experience the divinity of the temple of the body/mind.  You sit and you drink from the Source.

You begin to recognize that the Source is the substance of your living experience.  Actions come not from thought, but from the wholeness that is the Source.  The instrument of the body/mind may reflect upon choices available to you, but from the Source comes the choosing.

Traditions call this meditative experience variously, samadhi, contemplative absorption, etc.

Trika tradition calls this stage of evolution, abiding in the Heart.

For Trika tantra, all knowledge, will and actions arrive from the divine Agent, and all beings are that Agent.  One universal subjectivity exists as the temple of the Universe.

When we drink from the Source, when we abide in the Heart, we recognize the essential belongingness that characterizes Our Universal Being.  All that can be recognized belongs.

Drink from the Source and you will see, hear and feel–you will recognize all the world as your own body.  Your skin will not end at your fingertips.  Your sight will not cease with the disappearance of the sun, you will hear with the ears of the Universe.  All that is, belongs to You.

I am all that I am.

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SIMPLE, NOT EASY

In Uncategorized on January 19, 2012 at 7:12 pm

The path to an extraordinary quality of life is simple.  Two words: Let Go.

Let go, let go and let go some more.

Of physical tension, emotional stress–well, just everything.

You are driving to work.  Try this little assessment exercise.  Tune in acutely to what happens to the temple of your body/mind while you drive.  You try to maneuver to the right lane.  The car behind you speeds up.  Tension in the body–feel it, be aware of it.  Tension in the mind.  The mind and body are NOT separate.  What occurs to one, also happens to the other.

You see the driver ahead of you talking on a cell phone.  Tension in the mind/body.  Traffic bunches up, you may be late for work if things don’t clear up.  Stress in the body/mind. 

You had a disagreement yesterday with the co-worker who sits across from you.  Tension in the body/mind.

Your son didn’t receive a single grade better than a C on his grade report.  Tension in the body/mind.  You look at the sky.  It might snow.  Your tires are not in great shape.  Tension in the body/mind.

Our days and nights are filled with hundreds of “microtensions.”

It is not just the big things that cause us to suffer.  It is all those little stresses that accumulate throughout the days, weeks, months and years. 

We learn to “numb” ourselves to the existence of constant physical and emotional tension.  We literally divorce our awareness from parts of our bodies where stress causes muscles to clinch.  We avoid thinking about so many things.  We live in denial.  There is so much pain!

So, Let go!

Yeah.  A simple dictum to understand but not so easy to accomplish.

Do you want to evolve as a person? As a human being?  Don’t wait for ineffable truths.  Don’t look for secret formulas.  Don’t rely on another human being–guru, teacher or otherwise.

Practice–that is the secret.  Not what you know or believe.

Surrender physical tension by initiating breathing exercises.  Before you get up in the morning.  When you lie in bed at night.  Lay flat on your back with your arms at your sides and practice long, deep breathing.

Practice breathing every chance you get.  Challenge yourself to extend your breath capacity over time.  Cultivating breath control will help you to begin to get in touch with the temple of your body/mind.  With greater awareness of the sensations of your body, of the content of your mind, comes the increased capacity to let go.  First you face, then you release.

Surrender mental and emotional tensions by performing simple chants.  Make up your own prayer.  Something simple.  Find a mantra you like, Om Namah Shivaye.  Om Tara tuttare…etc.  Here’s one that I made up for myself years ago: The One is the breath, the breath is the blood, the blood is the bone, the bone is the flesh, the flesh is the many, the many is the One.

A simpler mantra.  Yim-yeem-yame-yam-yahm-yum-yohm-yoom.  Eight syllables that have the power to displace negative thoughts, repetitious thoughts, persistent dialoguing, constant scripting, etc, etc.

You know as well as I do that 90% of the thoughts in your head, the images, the reinforcements, ad infinitum, are unnecessary.  Simple as that.  We don’t need ’em.  Evolve, my friends. Displace and replace.  Displace all that wasteful content.  Replace with your mantra.  In time, you will discover that the mantra will be replaced by silent stillness.  Quiet will reign where once a tempest roared.

And meditate.  Don’t wait for instruction.  Just set your alarm, get comfortable–but not too comfortable.  Put in some earplugs and learn who you are from the inside.  The sounds, the sensations.  Troublesome at first, perhaps, but in time, these sounds and sensations will become the gateway whereby the temple of the body/mind moves from stress to stillness, from tension to tranquility.

There is no sound in the universe more sacred and powerful than the inner OM that you will discover when your mind and body become quiet.  You thought that all that OM stuff was just some Hindu or Buddhist mythology?  You didn’t realize that there truly is an OM and when your body/mind are sufficiently still and silent, that you will hear that OM?  You saw the bumper stickers and thought, “another hippie yoga idiot.”

OM is real.  When you hear OM, you will never forget it.  When you focus your attention on OM you will descend into a quality of blissful stillness that, quite frankly, you are at this moment incapable of imagining.

For the path of Trika, there is a pyramid of evolution: the Sound, the Light and the Sensation.

The sound is OM.  The light is the recognition of the One Light that illumines all things everywhere–from the thoughts inside your head to the grass and trees and buildings.  The Sensation is Kundalini.  When you awaken to the sensations of your body/mind you awaken to the sensation of the universe and to that One Sensation that is the originating vibration of all things everywhere.

Meditate on the Sound, the Light and the Sensation.  Let go of everything that stands between your perception of Sound, Light and Sensation. 

You will arrive at that great lake of universal awareness–that lake of consciousness where no separation exists between the One and the many.  One consciousness: one will, one knowledge, one action.  There is no transcendence, nor immanence.  No witnesser or witnessed.  There is the constant experience of the dynamic identity of the one with the many.

Practice, discipline, arrives at the experience of truth.

Truth will never be one stop shopping.  There won’t ever be an absolute undeniable “truth” that all persons will perceive equally and alike.  There’s only the truth of experience.  And when you let go of thoughts, beliefs, opinions, prejudices–when you surrender all the tension in the temple of the body/mind–when nothing that you see, hear or feel separates you from the living experience that only One Identity exists, you will be free to enjoy and perform on the stage of life free of strife.  No pain, no suffering.  Period.

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Enlightenment: for, by and of The People

In Uncategorized on November 23, 2011 at 7:27 pm

Imperialism is alive and well in the 21st century.  

It exists wherever hugely powerful institutions vie for the right to colonialize the consciousness of the human being.

Political systems, institutional religions and multinational capitalist entities all compete to dominate the bodies, minds and activities of every human being on our planet.

Our minds are structured from birth to respond to the appetites of the so-called “free market.”  Our bodies are being appended by devices created by the marketplace that demand our attention, our compliance, our obeisance.

Technology no longer exists simply to improve the quality of human life.  Science almost exclusively serves its profit beholden masters.  Lacking expectation of profit, the institutions of science and indeed, the institutionalized support of knowledge, art and culture for the sake of our evolving humanity, fade into memory.

The human being alone must reclaim the sovereign terrain of personal consciousness.  We must not allow the oligarchs of capitalism, the tyrants of religious extremism and the political agendas of nation-states to colonize away all hope of a consciousness that embodies the human being’s constant search to freely learn, grow, consecrate and perpetuate minds and bodies that are capable of exploring the entire topography of human potentiality.

 Enlightenment exists as an extraordinary gift for persons to explore, cultivate and develop the art of human being.  Enlightenment can be both a pursuit and an accomplishment that allows an individual to act in the world with the greatest possible freedom and independence.

Certainly, the word “enlightenment” can indicate differing expectations and outcomes for particular traditions.

Let me introduce you to what I mean when I use the term, ‘enlightenment,’ and the role that enlightenment can play in the project of reclaiming the sovereignty of human consciousness.

Enlightenment indicates a fundamental reversal of the foundation for how we experience the world. Typically, we believe that the content of our minds and the events of our lives constitute the nature of personal identity and provides the ground for human behavior.  We believe that the content of our minds, emotions, feelings, sense of personal history, beliefs, opinions–even our awareness of time as a chronological phenomenon, establish the foundation for our “personalities.”  We believe that our sense of well being, how we feel about ourselves and the world, is the effect caused by our mental self-perceptions, our feelings about the events of our lives, our successes, failures and everything else that dominates the space of our flow of experience.

Meditation and the various disciplines of tantric and yogic science can be instrumental in developing and establishing a quality of life that is grounded not in activity, but in silence, not in temporal chronology, but in absolute stillness.  It is possible to establish silent stillness as the predominant character of our constitutional awareness.

This new ground of dynamic emptiness initiates within the space of the mind a profound quality of unconditional contentedness.  We begin to realize that our lives dance on the stage of this perfect ground of tranquility.  When the activities of our days and nights unfold on the stage of absolute silent stillness, no longer are the events of our lives, our relationships, our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, the determiners of our abiding state of serenity and satisfaction.  When our minds and bodies are grounded in profound relaxation and stillness, we are liberated to act free from fear, doubt and uncertainty.

Make no mistake, my 99% friends, we are at war.  Allied against us are armies of advertising and media and technology at the command of the unrestrained greed of the 1%.  If we are to win the war for the sovereignty of our minds and hearts, we must use the most powerful tools at our disposal.  No more powerful force exists to defeat greed, dogmatism and zealotry than the pursuit and attainment of enlightenment.

99%ers awaken!  Reclaim your right to cultivate lives of serenity, wisdom and compassion.  Unleash your hidden powers of creativity.  Combine the personal with the transpersonal.  Recognize the world as a single living entity. Humanity holds no greater promise than a life activated and motivated by abiding joy and the natural morality that succeeds perceiving all things as one’s own undivided, sacred self.

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The Sensation of Surrender

In Uncategorized on November 8, 2011 at 9:37 pm

The path to freedom is blazed with surrender.

Let surrender become the heart of all your practices.  Freedom is truly as simple as relinquishing your attachments.  To your memories, your feelings, thoughts, emotions.  To the very idea that who you are is based upon the activities of your mind, body and the events, past, present & future, of your life.

When you no longer identify with your “personality”–the sum and substance of the who that your conditioned self, your “ego” self suggests that you are–you will awaken to an experience of “personality” that remains unaffected by the activities of the body/mind.

You will discover abiding joy and contentment.  Your memories, your beliefs and convictions will continue to exist in the temple of the body/mind.  You just won’t think about them very often.  You will act on them, yes.  But you won’t agonize, serialize or belabor.  The temple of an awakened body/mind no longer suffers from constant repetitions and dialogues.  Nor does it suffer from any stimuli offered from the persons and circumstances that comprise the worldly intercourse of one’s life.

The habit of surrender can be cultivated with all of your daily activities.  Learn to surrender the tension of your muscles with hatha yoga, or any sort of regular exercise routine.  Learn to surrender your established patterns of thought with persistent mantra recitation.  Discipline yourself to let go of all your habitual emotional reactions to the little annoyances of your life–waiting in lines, driving behind slower drivers, breathing someone’s cigarette smoke.  Practice surrender in your meditations. Gather the sensations of your body/mind into a single sensation.  Then surrender that sensation.

Letting go possesses a unique energetic frequency.  The sensation of that particular vibration is what you are seeking.  When you begin to recognize and cultivate the very sensation of surrender, how surrendering pain, tension, stress, thoughts–the whole shebang–actually feels in the temple of your body/mind, you will be able to practice surrender whenever and wherever you are.

Your meditations will become exciting and fruitful.  Why?  Because once you make letting go a habit–more, a way of life–you’ll be able to just wave away those stray thoughts and random images that seem to come from nowhere.  You’ll find yourself sensing some thought or other disturbance approaching the silent stillness that you are enjoying and push it away before it arrives.  There exists no greater gift a human being can enjoy than hours of pristine contemplation.

Your daily discipline of surrender will become the heart of your liberation from doubt, fear and pain.  It will become the means by which you will recognize that while all the activities of the embodied temple belong to the Self, the Self does not belong to the activities of the temple.

Commit yourself to the Performance of a Lifetime–Live Surrenderingly.


Build a temple
  and Grace will arrive.

Surrender the temple
  and Grace will abide.

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Pregnant Pause

In Uncategorized on November 4, 2011 at 2:11 pm

The sensations of our bodies are potent tools for meditative transformation.  Let’s remind ourselves of our goal: to steadily gather all the sensations of our bodies into a single, astonishingly powerful sensation.

Let me offer you a challenge today.  It is almost guaranteed that something will occur to piss you off as the day transpires.  (More than likely, your day will be full of small events of annoyance, and maybe one or two larger events.)  Someone will say something or do something that will produce an instant sensation of stress in your stomach, your diaphragm, your neck or shoulders.  That little sensation of dread at having to deal with a small, (or large) injury will occupy your mind.

Find that sensation of stress.  Locate where in your body you feel it strongest.  Find a time and place for a moment of stillness.  (Might be just at your desk while no one’s around to bother you.)  Isolate the sensation of the injury, the tension produced by the stress of it…breathe into that sensation of pain.  Don’t ignore it–in fact, if you need to, remind yourself of the person’s face–stimulate the sensation of the stress.

Let all the inner scripts, dialogues and replays go.  Release them.  Focus only on the sensation, the subtle energetic frequency of stress in your body.  Here’s the most important part of your exercise: USE THE PAIN OR DISCOMFORT AS A FOCUS POINT TO RELEASE ALL THE TENSION IN YOUR BODY.  USE THE SENSATION OF STRESS, CONCENTRATE ON THE SENSATION OF STRESS–AND RELEASE ALL THE TENSION IN YOUR BODY.  Your hands, your neck, throat, thighs, chest, back.  Use the energy of stress to stimulate relaxation.

If you practice this exercise daily, you will begin to realize that all stress is simply energy.  The time will come when stress will no longer cause you pain.  You will experience the sensations of your body–no matter how they are influenced by any particular circumstance–as a single, all encompassing sensation of warm contentedness.  In time, this sensation of tranquility will become the abiding character of your conscious life.

 

PREGNANT PAUSE

 

You want to

know yourself?

Consider this:

breath never

departs but that

it is returning.

You are the honeymoon

of this marriage of

flow and ebb.

Seeking wisdom,

find the erotic

sensation where at

once the breath

comes and goes–

discover that

Sacred Between

and there surrender

heart, mind and will.

Heed this promise,

you who love

truth–

a flower will grow

free from time’s

hunger,

never thirsting yet

ever in bloom–

for this, O cherished One,

is the fertile

Heart of tantra.

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Trika yoga & the Goddess Kundalini

In Uncategorized on November 1, 2011 at 12:54 am

Shakti is the mother of the universe.  She is responsible for everything that we experience, from light and color to sound and smell.  She is also responsible for there being an “us” in the first place.

Mother Shakti, according to Trika yoga, is the author of all creation.  She created the temples of our body/minds to make us the perfect beings for our world.  There is nothing in our universe but what is, in one way or another, available for our experience–directly or sometimes indirectly.  We belong to our world and our world belongs to us.

The first verse of the Shiva Sutras states,

“Universal consciousness is one’s own nature.”

The second verse continues,

“Knowing the individual consciousness as one’s own nature and not knowing the Universal Consciousness as one’s own nature, is bondage. (Or in other words, the origin and cause of suffering)

Verse fifteen of the Shiva Sutras goes on to say,

“By establishing one’s mind in the heart-the Universal Consciousness-the whole world of perception appears as one’s own nature.”

(From the Aphorisms of Lord Shiva, trans. by Swami Lakshmanjoo)

The Goddess Shakti, Mother of the immanent universe, commanded her handmaiden, the Goddess Kundalini, to move among human beings searching for the truth of their own eternal nature and to assist them in discovering their true identity.

Mother Shakti said, “teach those who will listen, who have the patience and passion, how to experience the world as their own body.”

Then the Goddess Shakti created a seat for Kundalini in the base of the spine of human beings.  Shakti commanded her handmaiden, Kundalini, to teach humans to recognize the living sensation of their own universal personhood.

“Teach any with ears to hear and eyes to see,” the Universal Mother said, “to recognize that at the Heart of all things, no matter their size or variety, is the luminous, abiding bliss that is Shiva, the God whose Light animates all existence.”

The word, “kundalini” has come into popular use both in the Western world as well as in the East.

Allow me to suggest that wherever spiritual energy assists individuals in discovering truth, peace and compassion, the Goddess Kundalini, handmaiden of Mother Shakti, is at work.  The power of spiritual energies to effect personal change and enlightenment exists beyond the artificial barriers that humans erect between this or that religion or tradition.

For Trika Yoga, however, the mission of Kundalini is very specific.  She is the goddess who exists to take the aspirant by the hand and lead him or her to the Heart of one’s Universal Self.

In practical terms, this means that the mission of Kundalini is to teach the seeker how to recognize that everything she perceives, everything the senses apprehend, is his OWN NATURE.

She begins by asking us to believe, to have faith, that everything that we experience with our senses is real and divine, but if we learn to see beyond the surface, if we learn to surrender our conviction that what we see is all that can be perceived, then we can begin to journey into the Heart of all that is real and experience the One Energy that is the author of the universe of energy.

The Goddess Kundalini asks us to listen with our eyes, to see with our ears and to feel from the inside of our skin.

Mother Kundalini knows that when stress and tension is released, when the maelstrom of the mind is calmed, the seeker can begin to see, hear and feel anew.  The aspirant is able to perceive more subtle qualities of his/her energetic existence.  She can begin to feel the existence of the chakras that begin at the base of her spine and continue on up and beyond the crown of her head.  He can begin to sense the subtle friction caused by the movement of the serpent Goddess Kundalini throughout his body, directing his attention here or there, helping him to know where he must concentrate and intensify the energy to unseat pockets of pain and knots of stress.

Steadily and certainly, the aspirant evolves.  With the ascension of Kundalini, comes an ever greater capacity to perceive and experience the world on subtler levels.  An existence ruled by the tyranny of an ego protecting itself by any and all means necessary ceases.  As one embraces a life not ruled by emotions, or in fact, any kinds of thoughts at all, one experiences finer qualities of quiet joy and peace that owe their origin and existence to nothing more than the marvelous fact of being alive now, in this moment.

If we are willing, Kundalini will lead us to the recognition that our perceived, “individuality” is in fact, only possible because the Goddess Shakti, who indeed we all are, is the goddess of will, of knowledge and of action.  We are creative beings because we are that Goddess whose existence is the creation, maintenance and eventual destruction of all things.  We will recognize that we are in truth, not delimited by our bodies at all.  Our body is but a loving expression of our Universal Self.  The privilege to perceive, to recognize, to see, hear and feel–to exist at all–is possible because our eyes and ears and hearts beat with the Light that is the Source and Substance of One Being.  We all are the universal nature that animates us each as the individuals for whom Life is that singular Stage upon which we all perform.

We look at the trees and see our own limbs.  The crickets chirping are our own thoughts.  Behind the eyes of another person exists the Light that we recognize as the one and only Light that animates all the infinite expressions of our Universal Personality.

All of this and more is possible by allowing the Goddess Kundalini to take us by the hand and lead us along  the path of purification and wisdom.

And it all begins with the sensation of our own bodies.

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Meditation by Immersion

In Uncategorized on October 26, 2011 at 7:13 pm

Meditation is the most powerful means that exists for human transformation.  There are many recipes for effective meditation.  Some come with religious doctrines.  Others do not.  What almost all meditative prescriptions share is the commitment to train, exercise or otherwise effect attention.  More often than not, this begins with learning to sit still.  It begins with learning how to be alone with yourself–your thoughts, sensations, concerns, tensions.  And, eventually, the absence of all of these.

For meditation practice to be fully effective, it should be accomplished twice a day-morning and evening.  It can begin with 15 minute sessions, but be allowed to evolve into longer periods over time.  If you meditate for 15 minutes a day, you’ll get 15 minutes worth of benefit–not nothing–but only a scant introduction to the power and scope of meditative transformation.

When you find yourself desiring longer sessions–an hour, two hours and more–you will confront and overcome deeply imbedded fears and concerns about who you are, about the life you have lived and will live, and about time itself.  You will only overcome the fear of time, mortality and the non-existence of a ‘personal self’ when you look them in the face and recognize them for what they truly are.

These are not simply ‘existential’ concerns.  Our fears, failures, beliefs and expectations are integrated into our muscles, our joints, and into the patterns of thought and behavior that animate the courses of our daily lives.  Only through concerted meditative confrontation, recognition and release can we truly begin to experience lives without stress and suffering.  Lives that begin to abound with effortless joy and relaxation.

If you long for an extraordinary life, if you desire the quality of spiritual, physical and emotional freedom that is the rarest of all experiences, immerse yourself into the healing waters of meditation.

How do you accomplish this?  Integrate three vital, powerful activities into the conduct of your daily life: chant, breathe and meditate.  Commit yourself absolutely to these three activities.  If you do, you will, I promise you, experience profound transformation in just a few years.

Yes, years.  You can’t expect to run a marathon without committed and disciplined training.  You cannot hope to achieve anything great and rare without dedication.

Faith will help you.  For me, my friends, there is a God.  This Goddess is who we each and every one of us already is.  The God/Goddess that we all already are will assist us in our efforts.  We need only practice effectively and faithfully and pray.  Not necessarily on our knees.  (Though there’s nothing wrong with this.)  But in our meditations, during our work days, in the middle of the night when we awaken from sleep.

Our purpose is straightforward.  Disrupt accustomed patterns of thought, of physical stress and tension.

To accomplish the first, we begin to make of our lives an on-going chant.  Here is one that I recommend that you use to begin:

limb–leem–lame–lamb–lawm–luhm–lohm–loom.

This is a chant to awaken and vitalize the root chakra.  It is derived from the muladhara seed syllable, lawng  or lawm.

Begin to chant always and everywhere, without exception.  It’ll take time and effort.  It won’t happen–won’t begin to become easier–for several months.  But trust me, it will get easier, and it will effect a powerful transformation on the ingrained patterns of thought and behavior that you assume are the substance of who you are.

Second, you must begin to breathe deeply.  Whenever and wherever you are, be aware of your breath, take hold of your breath and breathe in slowly and deeply, breathe out slowly and deeply.  Learn to be aware of your breath at all times.

Chant and breathe together.  At the grocery store line, in the bathroom at work.  Before you go to sleep at night and in the minutes before you arise to prepare for the day.

Meditate twice a day.  Set your clock.  Get into a comfortable seated position.  Preferably, on a meditation cushion and pad.  But in a chair, if need be.  Commit yourself not to rise before the alarm sounds.  Make this an indelible habit

Breathe and chant.  Begin with this activity.  Breathe long and deep, use your chant to measure the time.  When your mind wanders, take note, let go of any concern about it, and resume your chant.

Do these three things, pray and in several months you will begin to recognize tremendous changes taking place.

Like an athlete training for excellence in her event, you will first break down familiar habits and patterns.  This may be painful and stressful at times.  Work through it.  Remind yourself that profound transformation is simply a matter of follow through.  Do the work and you will transform.  The Goddess will hear your prayers and give you strength when you need it most.  When you are meditating for an hour for the first time and your body is restless and your mind simply won’t conform to the chant without constant effort, then pray.  Ask that Grace that loves us all for help to go on.  Then go on.

The time will come when your meditative muscles will have been sufficiently broken down and you will feel new strength and power.  Only, it won’t be so much “strong and powerful,” but more like peaceful and fulfilling.  Meditation and spiritual practice will begin to become its own reward.  Like the runner who has grown into his stride and can run easily five miles, ten miles, twenty.  When you sit for your meditation, peace and relaxation will come more quickly, with less effort.  You will begin to explore the real substance of who and what you are.

You will know when your efforts are taking effect when you begin to awaken in the middle of the night chanting.  When you realize that you were chanting in the dream you were just having.

You’ll know transformation is underway when you awaken in the morning, lying on your back, arms at your sides, and realize that you have just experienced the deepest sleep of your life.  You’ve awakened in a body that has so imbibed the habit of releasing tension, that even your sleep time has become immersed in the activity of meditative transformation.

To find abiding joy and relaxation, you must use your entire day to prepare for meditation.  You must meditate to prepare for your days and nights.

Your purpose is to bring all time–waking, sleeping and dreaming–into a single precious Moment.  Yes, you can experience all of your life as ONE SINGLE moment.  That Moment will be still, it will never change.  It will be quiet, it will exist without being broken by a single wave of thought or physical action.  It will be quietly, profoundly joyful.  AND, it will include everything that is happening all around you all the time.

Your life will become a performance of enlightenment.  Enlightenment is what happens NOW.  When you ARE now, you are an actor liberated to perform on the stage of life.

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One Mind, One Time

In Uncategorized on October 24, 2011 at 7:22 pm 




What truly does it mean to “thin” the mind of its content?  Certainly, it means what the words communicate: less content, less activity.  Does this mean that the simple fact of 50, 60 or even 90% less mental volume is alone responsible for the quality of conscious experience we often refer to as Enlightenment?


 The answer to that question is–well, yes–but there’s more to it than simply volume of content.


  

 What is the nature of the content of our personal consciousness?


 It’s funny that what for us is so intimate and familiar, the activity of our own minds, also succeeds in escaping our understanding.


 Consider time.

  

  

  

 How much of our mental activity concerns itself with time? Think for a moment of all the ways in which we obsess over time.  Its like a disease, a cancer.  We can’t let time go.  Regret over the past and fear for the future are like a cancer that eats away at our present.


  

 We replay, rewrite and reinvent memories ad infinitum.  Over and over.  Out of control.  Events from long ago, what happened at work yesterday, someone’s rude tone of voice just moments ago.  How things should have been, what we ought to have said, how we could or should have done things differently.

  

 We are equally addicted to expending huge amounts of emotional energy anticipating the future, trying to control what cannot be controlled, influence what is beyond the horizon, worrying whether this happens and not that, or that rather than this.


 Think about this and you will agree.  We are addicted to time.  We are enslaved by our investment in time.

  

 So we begin to let it go.  We chant mantras to disrupt customary patterns of thought and emotion.  We perform pranayama while waiting in traffic, waiting in the grocery line, watching television, walking the dog.  We dedicate our lives to breaking every pre-established pattern of thought and breath and physical response to stress and tension.


 We use the day to prepare for meditation.  We use our meditation to prepare for the day.  We awaken early to lie still and perform breathwork and release all tension before meditating.  In the evening, we meditate and retire to bed where we lie still and perform pranayama and release our physical tension.

  

 In time, our meditations, once so busy and full of waves of thought and emotion, slow down.  Moments begin to lengthen.  Intimations of silent stillness plant roots in our awareness.


 We notice that while we meditate, time seems to move in sequences of attention.  For awhile there is only mantra.  Then a review of our work day.  Then a discussion with our son or daughter.  Then mantra.  Then the discomfort in our legs.  Then what time is it?  How long have we been meditating?

  

 But with grace and effort, we are able to still the constant movements of the eyes, we are able to release the tensions in the ears and our knees and our backs no longer ache after fifteen minutes, a half hour, two hours.


 The time comes when we recognize that behind and between and above and below every thought and sensation there exists a sameness, a stillness.  We focus our awareness on this sameness.  We bathe in this sameness.  We luxuriate in stillness.

  

 We begin to see that this sameness, this somehow stillness, never changes.  Once you recognize it and begin to see that it never ever changes, it changes YOU.  This is because you realize that silent, still, velvety-delicious sameness is in fact responsible for there being a YOU at all!  Every thought, every event, the entire historical chronology of your life–the whole sum of what you thought was what made you You–wasn’t and isn’t.  You recognize that the you that you are and always were is this magical, mystical sameness.  You realize that there’s never been a moment in your life when you haven’t been aware of this sameness, that indeed, you can’t think of who you are without seeing this sameness that you are in front of your eyes.

 



 There is a timeless You that makes the time-full you possible.  

 



 It is rather like a screen, white and unchanging, whereupon your life, your thoughts and emotions and relationships, hopes, dreams and tragedies all play.

 



 But it is more than just a screen or a background.  When, in our meditations, we begin to sit and effortlessly gaze upon this undifferentiated and perfectly motionless screen, our lives are permanently transformed.  We see that time and timelessness are one, we see that self is one with Self.  We understand that we and God–that Selfsame wholeness that is at once our self and our universe–are one.

 



 We rise from meditation, go to work and return home only to perceive that the entire day has transpired in a single, unbroken moment in time.  We move from meditation to a workaday life so saturated by the lush stillness of a motionless present that the day transpires as if a single, unbroken moment. 

 



 The foundation of our awareness, the substance of our personhood, is as a vast lake of crystal pure stillness.  Life cascades around us in so many waterfalls, yet the deep and abiding tranquility of the lake of our consciousness remains still and quietly joyful.

														

			


			

					

				
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One Mind, One Substance

				In Uncategorized on October 23, 2011 at 11:24 am

				

					
The approach of tantric science to the project of enlightenment is unique from some other well known enlightenment strategies.







Tantric philosophy & practice begins and ends with your body.  It starts and finishes with the SENSATION of your body.  Why?  Because a primary tantric principle proposes that your body–everyone’s body–is a microcosm of the universe.  Furthermore, tantric science believes that in fact, all manifest reality is composed of energy, and the nature of that energy is vibration.  This means that everything we experience–all that is possible to experience–is composed of vibration.  A dynamic, creative symphony of vibration.  

   


For tantra, dynamic reality is not an illusion or born from some kind of ignorance of a transcendental reality that is somehow more real that what we all experience each and every day of our lives.  Rather, manifest reality and transcendental reality are one and the same.  As the ocean’s currents are one with the ocean, so are the immanent qualities of our experience of reality one with the perfectly silent and still ground of that reality.







The tantric philosophy and practice that comprises the perspective of The People’s Ashram believes that all the diversity of the universe can in time be traced to, and experienced as, a single Original Vibration.  A sort of cosmic big bang in the form of an original Sound uttered by an originating Voice. Tantra names this original voice, Shakti.







Imagine an orchestra with ten thousand instruments.  A thousand violins, another thousand cellos.  A thousand bassoons and french horns.  Imagine this ten thousand instrument orchestra playing a symphony–something grand like Beethoven’s Fifth.







Then imagine that the conductor brings the entire orchestra to a point where each and every instrument is playing one note–the same note.  One moment, a seemingly infinite diversity of sound–the next moment, a single, tremendously powerful note.







This is like the goddess, Shakti.  Shakti is the Mother of all the universe, of all creation.  Shakti is also named, Kundalini.  







Shakti is so enraptured by her love-making with her husband, Shiva, that she cannot help but to cry out with one long, ecstatic sound.  From this single note uttered from the rapturous joy of Mother Shakti comes all the infinite creative manifestation that is our universe.  Shakti is the primal sound from whence comes everything in space and time, for the note itself is not different from Mother Shakti, herself, who is not different from husband Shiva.  Shakti is the substance of the cosmos, from the dust of exploded stars to the stardust in lover’s eyes. 







Because all of manifest reality comes from a single frequency of vibration, tantric science has developed strategies whereby an individual can begin to recognize that the sensations of his or her own body are in fact, non different from that original Sound uttered by Mother Shakti.







Tantric disciplines, such as yoga asanas, pranayama and especially, meditation, use the sensation of one’s own body as the starting point for developing a fuller and deeper awareness of the nonduality that is our own consciousness.  Thus, the tantric path to Enlightenment suggests that one begin by attending to the ‘grossest’ or the most superficial of physical sensations and move toward the subtlest, finest sensations.   We may then, by the Grace of the God and Goddess of us all, reach that point where the most exquisite sensation is recognized as the divine substance of silent stillness.  This is the event that has of old been described as the ascent of Kundalini through the subtlest channel, the madhya nadi, of the central channel, Sushumna, to pierce the thousand petaled Sahasrara, the blissful throne of Shiva.