thepeoplesashram

Posts Tagged ‘consciousness’

, , , , , , , , , ,

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.

, , , , , , , ,

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.