thepeoplesashram

Posts Tagged ‘tantra’

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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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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.