thepeoplesashram

Posts Tagged ‘freedom’

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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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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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Living Liberation

				In Uncategorized on October 9, 2011 at 1:01 pm

				

					
Happy Sunday Morning all.


Freedom is a living blessing.  It may take some time and effort to arrive there, but I am nearly lost for words trying to describe how fabulous it feels.


So, I’m at work yesterday, cooking away.  The chef I work with has some–well, bad habits.  He doesn’t clean as he goes.  He uses a big pot for whatever he’s preparing and when he’s done he doesn’t rinse or prewash, he just sets it aside.  For me, more often than not.


He has other less productive habits.  But I like and care about him and he’s a good chef, creative and knowledgeable.


Here’s what I know.  Yesterday, I was perturbed about certain workplace trends–mainly about how I was having to do a bunch more work than I ought to be doing–mostly due to my partner’s less productive work habits.


He noticed that I was quieter than usual.  Finally he said something.  I joined him outside for a break and we talked.


Therein lies the dilemma.


You can talk till you are blue in the face but you won’t get through.  Allow me to clarify.


My partner’s mind, like most persons, is so cluttered and obfuscated and keeps him so trapped inside his head that he is truly incapable of allowing almost anything in from the “outside” world.  In other words, his experience of personal selfhood is so powerful and overwhelming that he literally cannot see beyond the prison bars of his mental and physical selfhood to actually listen to another human being.  Much less is he prepared to suffer any kind of criticism–no matter how diplomatically presented. He cannot see, hear or speak for being overwhelmed by so much mental and emotional energy.  Thoughts, emotions are moving rapidly.  The body is clenched, in a constant state of tension.  Oxygen is trapped in breathing patterns that are alternately too short and too long and then clenched and held by the stress that has accumulated in his stomach and particularly, the diaphragm.


He is in great pain.  That is the saddest thing of all, is it not?  That is what is so tragic–to see another person’s pain at the mercy of his/her own mind/body.


What is freedom if not the liberty to live in a world where mental and physical tension has so decreased that it becomes impossible NOT to live fully and entirely in the living Present, the Sacred NOW.


When the temple of your body/mind is free from nearly constant states of storm warning activity, when you discover the sensation of peace that can be experienced in the eye of the storm, then you will–like me–praise whatever Grace may be for this extraordinary gift.


You can be free.  It requires discipline, devotion and effective practices.  It won’t take forever, I promise you.  If you donate 10% of your 24 hour day to meditation and yoga, if you practice effective breathing patterns throughout your day, if you chant whenever you are able to help disperse the established habits of mental activity that continue to imprison you, you will find peace.  Not quickly, but not ten years down the road, either.


The single most important practice that you can perform–along with the above disciplines–is to walk in the world and recognize that everything that you see and experience, “inside” or “outside” of your limited self, is your own body.  The trees, leaves, grass–this is your body.  The thoughts in another person’s head?  Your body. All is energy.  Brooks and streams and rivers of energy.  See through the trees of vibrant energy to perceive the forest that is your true self- a self not contained within a head or a body at all.  A self that is coextensive and coinclusive with the living Universe that is our true body, mind and Self.