Nathan Winograd

On June 12, I wrote an article on the killing of Lilly’s 12 full-term puppies at the Maricopa County AZ pound: http://bit.ly/ivhb7z

 

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Here they go again. Mama dog came into the “shelter” full term. She was spayed and her puppies were individually killed by overdose injection. They were not counted in statistics. They were not report as “healthy” deaths. Rescue groups were not given the ability to save them. And Maddie’s Fund will continue to peddle the fiction that Maricopa County is saving ALL healthy animals despite a 50% rate of killing, no better than the national average. 

On the right is mama dog, no longer pregnant. Her puppies are all dead, in the freezer waiting to be discarded like so much trash. To add the ultimate insult to her injury, the mom is now scheduled to be killed. This is YOUR animal shelter. The one that blames YOU for the killing.

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The Mother of Satsang Says this is the best Satsang yet, from last Saturday. It is pure Advaita.


http://www.mediafire.com/?md5cpk5lomjb9lz

I can't remember if I asked you already about this.
You say you teach self-enquiry in the light of Robert and Ramana.
But I wonder what Robert might say to your comment about doing
"sesshin" at mount baldy - and only taking a week to
attain samadhi? (not sure which samadhi you're refering to)
How does that jive with Robert and Ramana exactly?

Thanks for your time,
Seeker

Where is the inconsistency you appear to see?

I teach self-abidance as opposed to self-inquiry.

Zen and Advaita are different paths with different experiences and understandings.

Zen is more into perception and immediacy, while traditional Advaita has a theory associated with it, sometimes emphasizing Consciousness and oneness, sometimes the primacy of Turyatta, the state prior to all states, or the stateless states.

All paths are not equal, and many experiences and understandings are mutually exclusive if you hold onto either a Zen understanding or an Advaita understanding.

I was a Buddhist monk many years before I met Robert, and was at Mt. Baldy 17 years before I met Robert. Did you want me to forget my Zen experiences before I met Robert in order to make my life's understanding and experiences consistent over a period of 40 years? Is that what you prize, consistent knowledge and experiences?

That is all the time it takes to attain many states during an intense Zen retreat, a few days. There is really nothing like the intensity of a retreat as at Mt. Baldy, with people beating you with sticks in near sub zero temperatures in a Zendo if you nod off to sleep.

Actually, you can't compare the states between various disciplines. They are not identical across the conceptual lines created by the differing methods and epistemology.

Do not be captured by your understanding of spirituality, but let go, otherwise you will always see problems.

Back At Me:

Just seems like you're diverging from what Ramana and Robert taught here.

Firstly, what good is there to speak of various states of samadhi - when they are not the ultimate unchanging Reality?

Both obviously spoke on them, but only to explain them conceptually - and to remind that they are not the Goal.

And certainly not to claim it can be attained (by a select few? anyone?) doing a few days of meditation?
And further to suggest a retreat of that nature?

It just seems odd and out of line with your teacher and his - and the non dual tradition as a whole.

It could be that I am stuck on a conception of advaita in their lineage/style - but ask yourself this;

Would Robert, Ramana, Nisargadatta, or other Masters in this line ever have spoken those words?
I seriously doubt it.



RESPONSE:


You are stuck on your understanding of Robert and Ramana based on books. Robert, in life, was much different from his teachings. I am different from Robert, I do not teach his Satsang teachings because generally they were for beginners interested in theory and basic techniques.


You should concern yourself less with your apprehension of apparent contradictions between how you perceive Robert's teachings versus mine, and be more concerned about your own teachings, which means your own sense of I Am and self. 


You have to understand this. It does not matter what you think Robert or Ramana would or would not have said. That is all thinking on your part. You need to get out of concepts and perceive the sense of presence, the I Am, then you would not be so concerned with words. There is no truth in words.

I knew Joko Beck back in the 70s while she an I both studied with Maezumi Roshi, who did have an alcoholism and womanizing problem, but actually accepted it as a defect.


It is interesting to look at her perspective as it is truly new age, in the moment. Traditional Zen had a teaching, a body of wisdom that became the Zen way of being, which itself depended on the teacher's background and moods.


Personally, I think there is much more to spirituality than just being in the moment.

Charlotte Joko Beck dies at 94; American Zen pioneer By Adam Tebbe June 15, 2011     Charlotte Joko Beck   , Zen teacher, author and founder of the Ordinary Mind Zen School, has died peacefully today, June 15, 2011 at 7:30 a.m., at age 94. Born on March 27, 1917 in New Jersey, Beck studied at Oberlin Conservatory of Music and taught piano for a time. She married and raised four children before separating from her husband and working as a teacher, secretary and assistant in a university department. She came to Zen practice in her forties and studied with the late Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi    roshi. For many years she commuted between San Diego and Los Angeles to practice with the roshi. Of her experiences, Beck said in an interview with Shambhala SunSpace (http://www.shambhalasun.com/   ), “I meet all sorts of people who’ve had all sorts of experiences and they’re still confused and not doing very well in their life. Experiences are not enough. My students learn that if they have so-called experiences, I really don’t care much about hearing about them. I just tell them, “Yeah, that’s O.K. Don’t hold onto it. And how are you getting along with your mother?” Otherwise, they get stuck there. It’s not the important thing in practice.” Asked what is the important thing in practice, she replied, “Learning how to deal with one’s personal, egotistic self. That’s the work. Very, very difficult.” Joko Beck also studied with both Haku’un Yasutani    roshi and Soen Nakagawa    roshi. She became one of Maezumi’s twelve Dharma successors in 1978 and went on to establish the Zen Center of San Diego in 1983 (where she served as head teacher until July, 2006). She is the founder of the Ordinary Mind Zen School, a loose fit organization of her Dharma successors which is non-hierarchical. As a teacher of Zen, Joko Beck was free from the patriarchal trappings of Japanese Zen. Joko’s approach to Zen teaching was greatly informed by Western culture, and she discontinued shaving her head, seldom wore robes and seldom used titles. Joko was the author of two very important books that are frequently recommended by interviewees at Sweeping Zen— Everyday Zen (1989) and Nothing Special (1993). Her first book,  Everyday Zen, is a book in which she described what meditation is and, more importantly, what it is not. Author Ruthann Russo writes, “…she says it is not about producing psychological change, achieving some blissful state, cultivating special powers or personal power, or having nice or happy feelings. She does say that meditation practice is simple, and it’s about ourselves. To practice effectively, we need to remove ourselves from all external stimuli. Then we experience reality, which is challenging for most of us.” Her second book, Nothing Special, is, as Maezumi himself once remarked, very special. In it Joko expresses what is the original essence of Zen—unencumbered by some of the formal practices and activities we’ve come to associate with Zen practice over the years. For Joko, Zen is simply being right here in the moment, with nothing extra. Zen practice will yield us nothing other than this moment. In the book she answers her students questions and helps highlight, again, what Zen practice is really about. She says, “Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment. We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us. This discovery is our teacher.” In 2011 Joko began eating less and was rapidly losing weight. Her family placed her under the care of hospice. She is survived by her four children: Eric, Helen, Greg (Dharma name Tando) and Brenda (Dharma name Chiko). Dharma successor Barry Magid    says, “One of her great virtues as a teacher was that she did not try to clone herself. She let us digest her teaching and grow in our own different directions. Her Dharma seeds are scattered far and wide. They will go on sprouting in ways we cannot predict and cross-fertilize with other lineages. The Ordinary Mind School may grow or wither, but her influence is now everywhere.”   In Memoriam: Charlotte Joko Beck   It is not too much to say that Joko Beck transformed the nature of Zen in America. At a time when a focus on kensho experiences and becoming enlightened after the manner in which we imagined our Japanese masters led to a dismissive attitude to problems that were “merely” psychological, Joko restored a sense of emotional reality to a scene increasingly plagued by scandal and misconduct by our allegedly enlightened role models. She had the courage to say that her own teacher’s training had done little to curb his own alcoholism or deal with his character problems. Furthermore, his wasn’t merely an unfortunate exception but that it pointed to a deeply ingrained tendency to enshrine emotional bypassing into the very heart of traditional Zen training. She put dealing with anger, anxiety, pride and the self centered sexual exploitation of students into the center of what we must deal with in practice. Joko does not leave behind a institutional legacy. There is no central Ordinary Mind training center. There is no hierarchy among her Dharma heirs, no single voice that clearly continues her message. Her legacy is broad and cultural, a sea-change in how our generation thinks about the nature of practice and its relationship to our personal psychological make-up. Even back when her Dharma successors still attempted to get together for an annual Ordinary Mind School meeting, they seemed designed to prove Wittgenstein’s dictum that members of a group could bear a certain family resemblance to one another without necessarily having having any single thing in common. One of her great virtues as a teacher was that she did not try to clone herself. She let us digest her teaching and grow in our own different directions. Her Dharma seeds are scattered far and wide. They will go on sprouting in ways we cannot predict and cross-fertilize with other lineages. The Ordinary Mind School may grow or wither, but her influence is now everywhere. Barry Magid Ordinary Mind New York ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________   I first met Charlotte Joko Beck in 1972. In April the ice plant bloom along the highways in San Diego. I passed many fields of vibrant  purple and violet blossoms on my way to the small sitting group in the home of Ray Jordan, where I came face-to-face with another vibrant flower. Joko’s page boy haircut, her dark cat’s eye glasses and her rather large breasts would be enough to make her stand out. There was also the  fact that she was the only middle aged woman in the sitting group. We became fast friends. Joko drove every Saturday for two hours to the  Zen Center of Los Angeles to have dokusan with Maezumi Roshi and then she drove two hours back to San Diego. Together we would drive every  month to sesshin and laugh all the way home on  the two hour drive. That was her routine until she moved to ZCLA in 1977 when she retired as the  administrator in the chemistry department at  University of California San Diego. Since I also worked at UCSD, Joko and I would regularly meet for a sack lunch and walk around the campus talking about Zen. She would often comment on  how unreal everything seemed. She had recently had an awakening experience at a sesshin with Yasutani Roshi. She would stick her finger out  and say that she felt that she could poke right through everything to another realm. Joko and I arranged to have Maezumi Roshi come to San Diego for a weekend sesshin at a house I was  renting in La Jolla. He brought two young  monks, Joshin and Tesshin. Joko and I arranged  everything from the meals to procuring all the  implements. When it came time for chanting  service, we only had a bell. I still smile when  I think of Joko beating out the rhythms on a  thick phone book using a large wooden spoon as  our make-shift mukugyo. The umpan was a pot lid  which we struck with a large metal spoon. When  the toilet gave out from over use, we all  scurried down to the corner gas station to use the bathroom. Joko was my best Dharma friend. Her dedication as a student of Zen was inspiring. Her devotion as a teacher of Zen is awesome. I feel fortunate to have known her in her formative years and to have witnessed how she matured into one of the most influential Zen teachers of our time. It is  amazing that she started on the Zen path at an age when most people think of retiring and that  she has accomplished so much in the second half  of her life and touched the lives of so many people. Gerry Shishin Wick   Great Mountain Zen Center Colorado ---From http://sweepingzen.com/2011/06/15/charlotte-joko-beck-dies-at-94-american-zen-pioneer/   Photos: http://www.prairiezen.org/Members/comings_and_goings.html

Beloved Edji,

Reintegrating back into the world after a meditation sabbatical was very challenging, everyday was a battle for me. A little like the silly cartoon character that is trying to stop the leaking of a damn using his various body parts and chewing gum all in vain because the cracks in the damn continue to grow bigger and bigger.

The past few months, the hyper-masculine work and self-discipline have faded. On some level the tremendous effort to maintain purity of abidance, constantly and consciously, got the best of me.
On some other level, however, this shift felt natural and organic as an expansion into my humanness. Almost as if there is a healing between the two seeming opposites of relative and absolute.

Meditation is still a very important part of my day as is resting in being and will continue to be so...

Identification with that impersonal, absolute, oblivious aspect of our nature has faded as a result.  The result of this surrender was however increased joy and feeling more alive. Feeling more connected to all. Prior to that, there was a feeling of deadness. The "I AM" zombie.

There seem to be a growing number of individuals who seem to be making the shift not through negation but through radical embracing of all arising phenomena. This seems to be much more conducive of living in the west. I'm speculating that Deeya's transition may have been of this nature.

Noticed that your satsangs, your teachings, and your presence are also shifting.

Perhaps, these are merely projections of the shifting of my perspective...

Suppose i write you because there still is some uncertainty on part. Whether to continue with where this is pulling me are whether to lace up the boot straps and get my ass back in gear...

One of the other reasons for the softening of my sadhana was that i work as a counselor. Clients would come to me with stories of woe and i would sit and stare, totally impersonal, totally oblivious to the dimension of suffering. There seemed to be little choice but to meet the client where they were.

Knowing that you have had some experience in the counseling profession, i wondered how your interaction with the clients was?

Any recommendations on how one can utilize this relationship to further unfold and grow into reality? Intuitively it feels there must be a great opportunity for client and counselor alike.

My apologies for the rather superficial and autobiographical nature of this email. Looking for perspective, looking for guidance.

With heart splitting gratitude for your teaching,

love you edji,

RESPONSE:

XXXX, you speak in such abstractions such that I don't know what you're talking about. I don't understand the metaphor about the cracks in the dam being related to coming back into the world after retreat. I don't know what you mean by hyper masculine work and self-discipline, if you are talking about your retreat or something else. And I don't know what you mean by the effort to maintain the purity of abidance in the self or the I am. The part about something was felt organic, I don't know what you're talking about.

I am not in your skin, and yet you you address me as if I know what you're talking about without being specific.

Personally, I know my true nature is beyond this world, beyond phenomena, beyond life and death, and beyond love and loving. I know the current trend, the New Age, is to be in the moment and to change with the moment, and I see no contradiction with being in the moment if one has attained the former. The emptiness of the void easily contain everything that the world has to offer wrapped in the silence of the infinite. I see no contradiction in being in either or both places. Many people run towards the absolute or to silence when the world gets too much for them; but after one knows the absolute, knows silence, knows the void, they really should have no problem going back into the world.

If you're having a problem of personal versus impersonal, this is not a real problem, because ultimately, if you own everything, everything is personal. If the infinite love of God flows through your heart, then it's personal. If you feel the void everywhere, and it interpenetrates your being, that void is personal. It is only when you don't feel something close to your heart or to your center, that it feels impersonal. In a sense, you need to own everything and make it part of you, take it into yourself and make it yours. In a sense even the world becomes your family, your responsibility, everyone your brothers and sisters.

Does not the Bible say that even a small bird does not fall to the ground without being known by God? For him, all is personal, as it is for me.

Love, 

Ed

Try feeling nothing after reading this. This is happening all over America every day to the tune of 11,000 cats and dogs and kittens a day. If you have an open heart, this will break it.

Nathan Winograd

This is a tiny kitten allowed to suffer and die within the New York City pound system, which the ASPCA, Mayor's Alliance, and Maddie's Fund defend as a "national model." This was under the "care" of a medical director who helped write the "five freedoms" of shelter animals through the Association of Shelter Veterinarians.

The five fre...See More

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Transcript: June 11 Satsang:

I want you to join me in taking a look inside of yourself. Can you close your eyes and follow me?

When I look inside of myself the first thing I see is emptiness. By this I mean I see pure visual space that contains everything in the body including the organs, muscles, bones, but few which I feel. I feel sensations and circulating energies inside. This space opens up and contains everything around me, the entire contents of the room and its sounds. The space is self-illumined, meaning although it is dark, the space itself is lighted and expands everywhere.

Besides that, where I imagine my legs to be, I feel energies rising from my toes into my calves and then up into my thighs. I feel energies originating in the abdomen rising into the muscles in my back and shoulders, into my face and head, and into my arms and hands out to the fingers, then radiating into space.

From that same space in my abdomen, into my heart I feel a flowing of love, filling the heart area then radiating out into the world. My face is flushed with these energies and my body feels like a powder keg.

Throughout that empty space, both inside the body and out, is my sense of presence, my sense of being alive, of being sentient, of being aware. This is the so-called I am. This is what we need to meditate on, the I am in all its aspects and colors and permutations. The I am contains the totality of our existence.

However, there is something else to, there the witness of all of this, of the sensations, of the void. Sometimes the witness feels like a me, sometimes just impersonal watching.

There are two positions I can take with respect to this witness, that Nisargadatta calls the absolute. The first is to look at it and witness it as an object, in which case it just becomes another part of the I am. The other position is to fall back into the witness, and become it. When we do this, suddenly the world appears extremely vividly without an awareness of the witness, because the witness has become the world, its identity is the world.

Lastly, we can go deep into meditation, falling deeply, until our head gets hard as a rock, thinking stops, then it feels as if we are going to sleep. Then everything disappears including self-awareness. We are entirely unaware of our own existence or of the world. The next moment again we become the witness, and the world appears, or sometimes our body opens up and we become the entirety of the world, just oneness.

However we are aware that during that moment when we and the world were not conscious, we still were, we still existed as something. But that something was not in this universe but was beyond that. It's not a direct cognition because it's not part of consciousness; it is before consciousness, and we know we are that, untouched by the world, emotions or anything.

When I was at mount Baldy, and we sat silently, body and mind would disappear and we would become totality of the world around us as oneness. Sometimes when a bird or an airplane flew overhead, we felt ourselves flying over the landscape identified with the bird or airplane. Sometimes after deep meditation when we were walking in the courtyard, when we saw a tree, boundaries would disappear and would become that tree.

As I have said many times it is all a matter of identification, and what you identify with, even if you don't choose the identities, and the identities choose you. In other words, you can become anything and everything.

Sometimes you are a person with personal problems, sometimes you are the samadhi state, sometimes you are an action figure driving a car, sometimes you become a cloud. All the time, with the slightest provocation, you can become empty space, and if you want, you can identify with love itself and find a resting place there, as love.

Sometimes, and this was Robert's definition of awakening, you could be in a place we can call ‘you’, and you witness the coming and going of the various states of consciousness.

You pass from sleep into dreams without "you" being affected; the sense of you does not change at all. You watch the dream state arise as witnessed by you, and then you see the waking state moving into replacing the dream, and neither state has touched you who are beyond both.

Sometimes you can pass from waking into the sleep state, and again it does not affect you, you are beyond everything. Untouched. Ultimate freedom.

Then comes the knowledge that you are that which is entirely beyond consciousness of the world, and that you witness the coming and going of the world and of the various states from beyond the world. You are the knowledge that you are beyond everything, the absolute, the witness, beyond even the I am.

So what does all this mean? There are so many things you can be, so many places you can go, so many emotions to experience, so many voids to experience, so many sensations, so much love, so many personal identities. What do these experiences and knowledge do for you?

First and foremost they free you from the places where you are stuck as a person, in a place or situation. You can accept many identities, many situations, many experiences without hardly leaving your house. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.

If you go into the void or into the witness, you can gain freedom from emotions and pressures and stress. If you go into emotions, you gain intensity and freedom from boredom. If you identify with love, you can be a lover, or become love itself. Freedom.

But I wanted to address an important problem that affects many of you out there who are in relationship with another.

If you both pursue the same path, that is wonderful, and your resonating energies can make your path so much easier.

But some of you have differing and apparently conflicting paths. But they are only conflicting if you rigidly hold onto one method or one dogma, such as Advaita, or the bhakti approaches.

Let me read from this letter addressed to me and my response to her.

LETTER:

Dear Edji,

I have been doing marvelously.  Everyday another layer of the onion peels away, so to speak.  It is really amazing.  Thank you so much for your sage council to find my sense of self and don’t budge and to trust my own experience.  After so many years of seeking verification through books and myriad other “outer” sources, it has been refreshing and revelatory to finally trust the guidance that continuously wells up from the Guru within my own Heart.

I do, however, continue to find myself faced with an issue that has been plaguing me for quite some time now.  I am a bit sheepish about asking for your advice concerning this issue not only in light of the comments I just made, but also because I know the Guru is not a marriage counselor and I do not wish to put you in such a precarious position.

Nevertheless, because I do not know anyone else I can turn to for advice on this matter, anyone else who would understand the context of sadhana that frames it, and because my wife has repeatedly implored me to see if you, as my Guru, can shed any light on the situation, I have decided to place the issue before you.

As I’ve mentioned to you before, sadhana is the number one priority in my life.  Over the past year, I have been engaging in more and more formal sitting meditation.  I do 2-3 hours each morning, another 2 hours in the afternoon, and if possible when my wife is out of town another 1-2 hours in the evening.  The depths to which I’ve been able to plumb my “inner” being during such extended sessions have been really remarkable.  

I must say, however, that I feel a little remiss in calling the length of these meditation sessions “extended” as Himalayan yogis would probably scoff at such minute scraps of time.  Moreover, Michael Langford, in his book, “The Most Rapid and Direct Means to Eternal Bliss,” refers to the many days he spent meditating for 12 hours or more and suggests that if one is serious about reaching the “goal” that one has to quit fooling around and devote all his time to the endeavor.  I so often feel like I somehow should be doing more, but for now this is about as much time as I can find for meditation given that I am married and have a job as a high school teacher.

As you can imagine, my wife has found my meditation practice to be a bit obsessive. Nevertheless, she has been pretty supportive of it.  In fact, she has even said that she doesn’t mind how much time I spend in meditation as long as when I come out of it I am fully present with her.

As you can imagine, in order to most effectively maintain this state of awareness throughout my daily activities, I tend to “see through the drama” of situations and don’t necessarily say or express anything a whole lot. 

Given this focus on my part, my wife’s main complaint is that even after I have emerged from my meditation room, I am still rarely, if ever, fully present with her. She says that I act as if I don’t want to be on this earth, that I am a hermit, and that I have a responsibility as her husband to come out of my shell and engage in a more active relationship with her.  In essence, she says, she is lonely.

She also says that I am very selfish, and that I place my path above hers and only care about taking care of my spiritual needs.

My wife, I should tell you, is a XXXXX who has been initiated as an elder in an YYYYY shamanic tradition, and she also sees auras.  She has blended these three areas of specialty in her work.

This being my wife’s profession, she often engages me in conversations about spirits and energies and chakras and auras and whatnot and how these are in various states of imbalance and so on and so forth.  From my point of view, all of this is merely illusory mind-stuff that 1) I don’t want to get mixed up in, and 2) I don’t see as having any reality or validity outside of the mind’s habitual tendency to give it such.  

During our many discussions about this issue, I have expressed quite directly my feeling that perhaps she and I are not a compatible partnership any longer.  I have told her that if it is true that my spiritual practice is causing her as much pain as she says it is and that I am as selfish as she says I am, then it would be best for both of us if we split up, divorced, went our separate ways. 

The idea of divorcing, however, is completely unacceptable to my wife.  She says it is my responsibility, having taken the vow of marriage, to stay with her no matter what.  She also maintains that if I left her I would be interfering with her life’s purpose and casting her adrift in the world of relationship because 1) she says it’s unlikely she would ever meet anyone else who would understand and accommodate her work, and 2) it would leave her vulnerable in her role as a spiritual teacher to romantic overtures from students/clients with whom it would be immoral for her to have a such relationships.

Besides, she adds, the bottom line is that she loves me.

I love her too, and I don’t want to hurt her, but…

I admit that my practice is intense and that it is my top priority – even more than marriage if it must come down to a choice.  Ideally, however, I would really like to resolve the issue in a way that enables me to meet my wife’s needs, while at the same time neither dampening nor impinging upon my sadhana and perhaps even strengthening it.

From your perspective and experience, is such a solution possible, Edji?

RESPONSE:

This is an extraordinarily important letter and describes a dilemma so common to couples, where one or both of whom are pursuing spiritual paths. My answer to the writer is as follows:

The short version is that you are a perfectly complementary couple. You need to be able to immerse yourself in the experiences of her world, and vice versa. Together you can build a much larger mansion of openness, intensity and experience, than if you stayed separate and stuck in separate agendas.

      From her spirituality you will gain intensity and the ability to initiate, you will gain flexibility , and practical insight; from yours, she will gain meditation power (samadhi), spiritual insight and stability. It could take each of you longer to achieve the individual ends you each conceive of for yourselves from where you are now---you finding the absolute, and she finding her spiritual heart--but both journeys CAN be enriched and deepened.

In the meantime, those of you who are not couples, or do not have a spiritual counterpart, you have your teacher whoever that is, and within that teacher’s experience, is probably all that you seek, whether it be an experience of the absolute, the void, energies, or being able to witness the coming and going of the states of consciousness from the witness state. All you will find there in the presentation and presence of your teacher. Look into that presence and find what you are looking for. It is there, just look for it, and you will also discover it in yourself.

Dearest Edji,

First of all, thank you, thank you, thank you for everything...for your satsangs and writings...for the love and oneness I feel with you and Robert...for truth. You have already given so many answers, but I was wondering if I may share with you a few experiences and questions that have come up and which I have not spoken of to others. I apologize in advance for having to relate them to you, as I know you have said that such experiences are subjective and different for every individual. Thank you for bearing with me here....

A few years ago, there was a sudden revelation or realization, where there was nobody, absolutely nobody home--no I--only amness. There was definitely the sense of beingness present, yet it was like emptiness, no-thingness, space. It was clear that what I am in reality is formless; and the realization came that if I was aware of this beingness, then this, too, I could not be. What I am must be beyond or prior to this.

Since then, there have been instances of being all-pervading, of no one doing the action performed. Intense happiness is felt at these times, but this is not a perpetual feeling or state. There is often the sense at the end of the day that nothing has happened; and once, I awoke in the middle of the night, and I looked out in front of me with the realization that there was nobody there looking out. I was nowhere but everywhere! With meditation, too, it has more and more clear that the world is not real but created by the mind.

It took a long time to reconcile the understanding of the Self as emptiness and pure awareness when several years ago, before embarking on any spiritual path, there had been the experience of spontaneously witnessing a radiance, which was also formless and felt like complete and total love/joy/peace, like it was home.

So, Edji, would you please provide some insight on this: was this light like a reflection of the Self? Is the sense of pure beingness and the awareness of it one? Does the realization of what is prior to consciousness (what, I guess, Robert would refer to as Silence) come during meditation and become stablized as a permanent reality? Or is it more like we just know that we are that (a realization that has never left "me")?

Thank you eternally for your guidance. Infinite blessings to you, beloved Edji.


RESPONSE:

Don't try to explain or understand where you are.

Where you are is perfect!

You are very advanced. Adding the mind to make sense of it is useless and can get you lost.

Don't worry about what the light is, or what is permanent. In a sense, nothing is permanent, or a source, or a reflection. These are all concepts. Be free of them.

Knowing the absolute is both a certainty, a knowing of truth, and also an "experience" in the sense that occasionally you directly experience you are beyond beingness and consciousness. Conviction begets the experiences, and the experiences beget deeper conviction.

You are doing well. Just stay where you are.

Greatest Love,

Edji

Dear Edji,


Putting this sort of thing in writing is so difficult but I'll try. To begin with, this one expected some sort of cosmic shift to take place and everything would be over. There would be no more problems, no more unwanted moods, no sorrows, no pains, perfect relationships...sounds so ridiculous I can't even explain it any further. What is becoming increasing clear is that life goes on as it always has EXCEPT without the analyzing, interpreting, judging, projecting mind/me managing it. I am seeing that life does not want or need to be managed, that life as it spontaneously unfolds is not at all concerned with whether or not it matches the mind's ideas, conditionings and beliefs about how things ought to be. Life is not concerned with the past or the future....it is Now, expressing in whatever way Mother Consciousness chooses. Raw Life seems tolerable, the one dreaming about how it should be was what was making it intolerable. There is a seeing that I am not something separate from life/the present moment. You've mentioned several times over the past few weeks that the spiritual path is all about identification. The possibilities within the field of identification or course are endless. There is a seeing that there is not a separate 'me' identifying with anything but my own being itself that seems to have the ability through attention to identify with anything arising in the field of Awareness, which may be a 'me' at times.


Being seems to revel in everything, it seems to love to drink and taste of everything. Sometimes it settles into deep silence, sometimes it flits about taking in everything at once, sometimes it feels a deep love, other times it feels aloof, sometimes it feels like a body, other times pure emptiness - nothing in this phenomenal world is stable. I was looking for stableness to come and I am seeing that stableness is already here. It is what I am. This stableness reveals itself as pure noticing, not an entity that notices this and that, but just the noticing itself. I have no idea really where all this is going. The old concepts of how and what it ought to be like are not matching what is unfolding. You have mentioned time and time again to 'trust your own experience, to be the master of your own house.' 


This is starting to really make sense. There is surrender to the inner Guru in my own heart as well as to the outer one named 'Ed'. You said in the last Satsang, 'that which is unconscious knows exactly what it wants and what is lacking.' This is so true. Without your guidance I would have never been prepared for this seeing. There is still so much that escapes deep understanding, but like our Beloved Robert always says, 'do not worry, all is well and everything is unfolding as it should.'


Should you sense anything amiss in the above sharing I am open to listen. I am not interested in being right, but free.


RESPONSE:


Don't even allow yourself to become a prisoner of the concept of freedom, otherwise you risk breaking all that you cherish in the long run in the name of freedom. Sometimes a prisoner, sometimes free, sometimes comfortable, sometimes loved, sometimes loving, but also be aware of those things that are always there within yourself.