24 January 2012

Things gurus don’t tell you

Robert used to embrace uselessness. He used to embrace leaving your job and dropping out.  He would say don’t worry about bills, payments, medical insurance, obligations, etc., just leave the world behind. Don’t worry about the pragmatics of day to day life.

The John Wheelers and Parsons of the world really don’t talk about life during the awakening process or afterwards as all of your cherished beliefs and concepts are blown away.  One day you are ignorant of yourself, the next day you are awakened, self-aware and all problems have disappeared and are resolved.

This is bull.  The process of awakening, losing beliefs, attachments, concepts, and even the belief you are the body causes tremendous changes in your day to day life.  This is a sign you are really changing and awakening.

Relationships fall apart, you no longer love your husband or wife, the idea of being pinned to a 30 year mortgage creates nausea.  The struggle to maintain payments on your BMW, $700,000 house, and student loans becomes too much. The belief in the benevolence of friends and the government go out the window.  You know the wealthy are trying to take more and more from you.  The health care system is rigged to extract the most money from you.

Fox News and MSMBC are both mouthpieces for a partial perspective.  No one speaks to you honestly, they lie a little each word they say so as not to drive you away.  Sometimes they smile and you can feel their hatred.

Strange energies awakening in you and you can’t sleep or you sleep too long.  You don’t talk to the kids anymore because you are immersed in indecision about everything.  You just want to be alone, or you just want to be with someone else or be somewhere else.

All your self-told lies disappear and you are exposed to your own truth more and more, and that which is not part of your truth falls away.

Things no longer unfold as they did before, but unfold in a new and frightening way as your entire past is seen as a lie and yet you still do not see your own truth clearly.

In other words, your daily life goes from a boring certainty, to an insecure emptiness, yet an incredible and frightening aliveness,

Intense practice, or intense involvement with a free teacher creates situations with a lot of out of control emotions, matched at times with an inner deadness, followed by periods of intense self-doubt and self-inquiry.

Do these gurus tell you of this?  Do they warn you of this?

You see, Robert did and incorporated this inevitable collapse of your belief systems and lifestyle, and made it a part of leaving the world behind.  When your whole lifestyle and thought structures are deconstructed due to self-inquiry, self-abidance, or watching one’s thoughts in emptiness, radical changes to one’s outside life are inevitable, as well as to one’s emotional composition and self-boundaries.

In other words, the walls come tumbling down, and chaos reigns for a long, long time. If there is not a bit of chaos, then there is no real change happening on a deeper level. This must be obvious is it not?  One cannot continue in the old lifestyle with the beliefs you had before when everything is being radically questioned and whole new worlds of perception and cognition are opened.

I warn my students of this.  Robert incorporated this falling apart into his teachings and made it a goal, the goal of becoming good for nothing, meaning really not good for anyone or anything in your previous lifestyle.  And, you will be good for nothing until you live your own truth, rather than society’s, your spouse’s, your children’s, or your employer’s “truths.”

Intense practice or intense involvement in the movement towards freedom has to produce such external chaos. Is it not obvious?  Freedom means freedom from your past conditioning and the known.

What Krishnamurti missed however, are all those states and understandings beyond mere recognition that there is no separate ‘I’ or separate doer.  He did not talk of the ecstasies, the awesome Void, the feeling of the sacred, the feeling of surrender to the divine, to one’s own Beloved.  Nor did he speak of rivers of love that move through one’s body and one’s sense of presence.  Nor did he talk of a love so deep that you disappear into the other, or of a void so vast that you fall to your knees in awe and sometimes fear.  He did not talk of the awesome power you feel sometimes when you feel aligned with your own destiny and feel its inevitability.  There is so much that teachers do not tell you, both of the richness and the sadness and desolation you will encounter.

It is like the Matrix Trilogy.  When you take the Red pill, everything changes, enlivens, collapses, becomes chaos, reorders, and you become alive.  But sometimes you crave the Blue pill, to let you return to your old life and its security.  Once you really take the Red pill, you have a tiger by the tail and you cannot let go because he will eat you.

13 comments:

  1. Thank you Edji,
    I fear and love your truthfulness.

    Adriano.

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  2. "Blessed is he who has a soul, blessed is he who has none, but woe and grief to him who has it in embryo."-G.I. Gurdjieff

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  3. This is too funny. Just today I was posting on another forum about the red and blue pill. This is what I posted:
    ___________________________________
    Most of us remember the Matrix. I woke up this morning with a question.

    Lets say that if you took the Red pill you would have instant and full awakening. The only condition is you have only 24 hrs and then you need to drop the body(individuality) and back to the absolute.
    Would you then take the Red pill.
    Now the blue pill will allow you to have a long good life but the condition is you will stay in the dream until you die.

    So those are the conditions nothing to be added which pill would you take?

    Thanks
    NBisH

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  4. On the contrary, again written from a misunderstanding.
    When one has become no mind what is there to concern oneself about the world?
    You're finished with it.
    And Robert tried to make his students understand
    what happens from his experience which really cannot be finitely understood.
    Robert was a jnani. Nothing in the world mattered anymore he had transcended.
    However the body would still be performing the actions needed for it to perform
    yet without a doer being involved.
    If bills and payments and medical insurance and obligations needed
    to happen they would be met without anyone being the doer.
    So how can anyone be reacting to these situations?

    A great example is Robert. Never phased by anything with a constant
    response of "All is well." He jokingly commented on chewing whatever was
    sent to him and spitting it out. With Robert there was noone there to
    suffer these human traits he was pure silence.
    The body appeared but he was not the body he was pure awareness itself.
    Even the body having a so-called illness did not phase him he was beyond
    it and remained there, even though others saw him suffering, for him noone
    was suffering.

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  5. Dear Edji: Once awakened a billion bits of enlightenment seeping through needs to find place in the displacement. At times, and bit by the bite the tearing down of the plastic illusion. Where does one put themselves in this new awaken self in a world that makes them hugely vulnerable? After and once the dismantling of constructs has gripped them and taken hold of their old sloughed-off skin? Being aware that this will and is going to happen, probably presently in the here and now a sign should read "leave illusionary garbage outside (self)and take nothing personally (good luck).
    If this detachment of psyche has happened to others on the truth to Divine LOVE path, it should would could be written in stone. Let others know! All the up and coming adepts who's stars shine forth from the dancing star, who's light is so brignt as to shine their luminosity across a room, (or further) they should step forward declare the truth of the passion, and the pain it wroughts. Bring forth with their trusted gift of experience first-hand knowledge to help all cope. Maybe there are home remedies to the newby awakened and their current state of maladaptive maladies? Anyway, it would be a great start for any up and coming wanderling who may have too much heaped on their astral plate.

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  6. It all sounds distasteful, but then, what are the options? I think "I don't want to do this to the people in my life," but then automatically the question comes up, "Who are these people? Where did they come from, if not my mind? Who am I?" It's a circle. What is the alternative to seeking the truth? Subscribing to life in a house of cards that will always be unsatisfying and inevitably collapse. So, one must soldier on.
    Thanks for stating these truths and challenging us all the time, Edji.
    Love, Matthew

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  7. @ Anonymous who says “On the contrary…” etc.: For me, the thing about Robert, Ramana and others in the pantheon of great teachers is that they have become iconic symbols of perfect realization. In other words, several steps removed from my apparent experience. What they show us is perhaps useful in giving a picture of the end result, a goal to keep in sight.

    But not so much help in the actual slog toward understanding, because we are never shown their struggle to get to where they got to. How did Ramana actually deal with the dissolution of his ”normal” life? We don’t know, because it’s all been sanitized or hidden or discarded as unreal, unnecessary, unimportant: “Nothing in the world mattered anymore he had transcended.” Well good for him, good for Robert, good for Jesus or whoever you’ve placed up on the throne. Another star in their heavenly crowns! Personally I don’t need yet another god-figure to idolize from afar.

    What Ed writes is not “ again written from a misunderstanding”. On the contrary, it is written from a position of direct experience and compassionate understanding of what is needed by his students. As weird as it may sound, I feel enormous happiness and relief in hearing that my life is falling apart is right on schedule, a to-be-expected result of whatever changes in consciousness I may be experiencing from the little practice I manage to do. I am grateful for that support. Better than feeling frustrated and going crazy because my path doesn’t mirror the idealized unattainable grace and perfection of Robert’s path.

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  8. Maybe this is what Jesus was referring to when he stated, "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away and behold all things have become new."

    It is that process of the 'old' things passing away and having no idea of the 'new' that is the shocker. In the middle of it, there is just falling away, loss, nothing 'new' is experienced as of yet.

    No books I have ever read prepared me for what I am going through.

    The rebellion, the doubt, confusion, intense anxiety, paralyzing fear, terror, despair, relationships falling apart (and all the drama that goes with that), losing interest in almost everything...

    I am realizing that resistance is futile. It's all reaching such an intensity that 'surrender' is appearing to be the only viable option.

    Ed, you and Robert did give warnings, but I'm not sure anyone could have prepared me for this. It's one thing to hear about it, another altogether to experience it.

    I am grateful you are here for me.

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  9. I used to think surrender was an option, an action for me to take or decision to make, like bubbling in an answer on a multiple choice test. It might really be more like acknowledging the inevitable, but with a positive attitude instead of resignation.

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  10. Hi Edji,
    You know I still read your blog for it is entertainment of a real good level! Thank you for that. And you know I do study the teachings of J. Krishnamurti. And to me it seems like he says something entirely different then you suggest. I believe K's teachings are hard to crack and they are endlessly deep. In order to understand his teachings deeply I believe one has to study his meetings, the biography's of Pupul Jayakar and Mary Lutyens, and last but not least all of his diary's. One can go deep into this matter for a lifetime and still see that there is more to explore. The person K. did not matter, he was not a teacher, he was the teaching itself in it's purest manifestation. The most wonderful gift to this world in the 20th century, oeps... But who cares? However I did swallow the red pil already and yes my live is a mess :).
    Love,

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  11. tangled in tiger tail . thank you Ed for sounding some truth. grace, gratitude . . _/\___

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  12. Dennis, I feel they're both teaching the same truth from different perspectives.

    J.Krishnamurti wants us to explore our minds, hearts and actions, to simply examine our lives, but leaves us high and dry without providing a method. As much as he talks about action he provides very little actionable information! He's purely conceptual.

    But Edji really takes it all to the deep end and provide's us with a precise method to follow that's free of concepts! He gives us a method to lose our concepts!

    I feel J.K. appeals to a lot of people because he provides what everyone craves - conceptual understanding.

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  13. Hi anonymous,
    Thanks for responding. I can only speak for myself, my understanding and my expirence. To me the teachings of J.K. helps me to leave behind all concepts and to look closely to meself whitout any projection. Most other teachings give me comfort but that is not what I am looking for. On the other hand J.K. is dead and gone already. And a sincere teacher or sentience being that is alive and kicking like Edji is a precious gift in this 'hungry' world. But in any other way I don't want to compare these teachings. However if you don't mind and allow me to correct, J.K. does not provide intellectual understanding to me. That's it abouth J.K., I will not mention him here any more. Let's find out the truth for ourselfes.

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