08 April 2016

Talk, talk, talk, talk. God, spirit, insentient body, I, I-Am, me, you, non-dual, dualistic, peace, love, Satchitananda, Subtle Body, Causal Body, Shakti, bliss, Kundalini, Chakras, Advaita versus Kashmir Shaivism, Buddhism, emptiness, the Void, the Absolute, Ramana, Robert Adams, Papaji, teachings, meditation, samadhi, sahaj samadhi, Gunas, praktriti, purusha, self-realization, enlightened one, jnani, ajnani, Krishnamurti, karma, ego, mind, no mind--a bewildering array of mostly empty concepts entertaining the mind of the seeker. Can you not see that it would take a dozen years just to understand what all these concepts mean, let alone know if any were "true?"

Drop the talk, look and feel inside, and just be who you are without any understanding.

Seeking "correct" understanding is not spirituality. It is "spiritual" entertainment.

Some of that entertainment can be awesome, but most is just perplexing, arguing about which guru was right, forcing Ramana down someone's throat, referring to quotes of Nisargadatta to settle everything.

All are caught in the network of thought, or thinking about spiritual attaining.

Shut the fuck up, turn your attention towards yourself, and then become yourself.

No need to borrow all these silly ass concepts from dead gurus from ancient and dead cultures.

Be the expert on your own self, not an excellent reciter of Ramana's thousand concepts and quotes. You are lost, caught in the thought nets of a thousand dead guides.

Do yourself a favor and leave it all alone.

Turn your attention to your own self, and with vigor just be that which you find, not a Nisargadatta parrot.

Also, no matter how beautiful, soft, or welcoming Robert's words are, they are his truth, or as he put it, his confession. Make your own truth from you, not by bringing Robert;s concepts into you. What is your own confession?

What I have found for myself, is that I keep moving, expanding, contracting, knowing, not knowing, never the same from moment to moment. Even this statement is wrong.


05 April 2016

MARIE SCHUCKLES AND 150 HOMELESS CATS NEED YOUR HELP!


Marie, 2013 at old Safeway site
When I left Northridge (L.A. Suburb) and moved to Phoenix, I left care of my four feral cat colonies with 22 cats to my long-time friend and fellow colony manager, Marie Schuckles.  I have worked with Marie since 2003 helping tend to the thousands of homeless street cats in the San Fernando Valley.  Marie takes care of nearly 30 feral cat colonies in the Northridge area numbering around 150 cats.  I have made monthly contributions to Marie to provide for the cats I left behind as well as for her own, just as I did when living in Los Angeles.  Most the cats I have at home are from the streets of Northridge or Santa Monica.

Marie at old Safeway
 location 2013
But Marie, aged 69 and mostly retired, has informed me that she is ill.  Doctors discovered a large mass in her uterus, and she needs to undergo a total hysterectomy, which will put her out of operation for two to three months.  She is soliciting other caretakers to cover her (and mine) cat colonies while she is off work and recovering.  But colony managers tend to be poor, and these caretakers need money for food and medications while Marie heals to care for her 150 cats.





A dozen cats a few blocks South of Plummer,
 Northridge

I find it amazing that the poorest people, those who have the least materially, are the one’s wealthiest in compassion and hands-on caretaking.  They most clearly feel the lives and problems of others, both human, but especially animals.

These two are located at the first colony I managed.
These are second generation males and now in good shape.



I am asking you to help Marie and her interim caretakers by sending some funds for the next three months to:







Marie Schuckles

8860 Corbin  Ave, #276

Northridge, CA   91324  

Two cats at doughnut shop on Reseda


Parking lot $1 store, Reseda Blvd near CSUN
These were Jimmy's cats when he lived on the railroad tracks in Northridge.  Police and security harassed him, jailed him, and destroyed his camp.  Marie and I had to sneak in very late, as police were stationed there to prevent us feeding them. Eventually all were trapped and relocated to an indoor setting.
A large Furr Ball that showed up by a group of 3 feeding by wall of an apartment house building. The owner eventually discovered, harassed me, and threw the cat food away. Had to move feeding station elsewhere, but not all cats accounted for.























02 April 2016

My Clearest Statement of Robert's Teachings


If you really want to understand Robert, and to be in the state that Robert was all the time, and from which he spoke the truth about being a Jnani, you have to travel a very difficult path of becoming nothing.  You have to become Nada, nothing, not knowing anything, being entirely stupid, uneducated, not understanding, and thus not living through the filter and activities of mind.

This is the most difficult path imaginable for highly educated people that have always depended on their minds for their careers, for making day-to-day decisions about what to buy or wear, to planning once future regarding directions and finances, or to satiate for many, and insatiable desire to know things, and to do things.

Many of us are driven to do things.  Our minds are always fixated on hotly utilize resources present for any potential end or goal.  Others, like me when I was young, have an undying thirst for knowledge, whether about science, economics, or self understanding, either of the garden-variety found in psychology, or the much deeper Self found in Advaita Vedanta, or Kashmir Shaivism.  But that is searching itself is done by and through the mind, through directed attention, through analysis of phenomena or states of mind, and as such does not take us deeper into our more fundamental sense of Self that is deeper than mind.

Robert always talked about the mind as being your enemy.  At other times he said, “your mind is not your friend.”  Yet people always listen to this through the mind, and made this an understanding, rather than taking it as a direct invitation to stop thinking.

Robert over and over, repeated his advice to stop thinking.  He proposed methods of meditation, mantra, self inquiry, chanting, the I am meditation, etc., all with the aim of getting the mind to stop.

Why?

Because when the mind stops, when thinking is no longer present directing attention, compartmentalizing our perceived world, dividing it into objects, subjects, seeing versus seeing, the witness versus the witnessed, something truly wonderful happens.  All divisions disappear.  The I am ceases to exist separate from everything else.  Even the space that appears to separate us from the world disappears.  There are no separate phenomena which we can call the world.  There is no longer a separate self which exist within the world.  And from this point of view, we see that what we formally considered the world is an illusion created by an active and projecting mind.

Our fundamental beingness, the so-called ‘gap’ between thoughts, or which exists the first thing in the morning before the sense of I ascends into the brain, is a state prior to I, prior to I am, prior to I am experiencing the world.  There are no thoughts here, and there is no knowingness here.  There is simply awareness, and not an awareness of what, because here there is neither an I, nor a world.  Neither have come into existence, and will not come into existence, until the mind, the sense of I am, arises into the brain, and then, at that moment, the world appears, and I appear.  Prior to this arising of the mind, which suddenly imposes a map of the world, a way of knowing, there is no thinking, no I know world.

One can call the state the original ignorance, the original not-knowing, or the original state prior to a consciousness of the world and self.  This is the state prior to consciousness.  This is the state of awareness prior to consciousness.  About this state nothing can be said because it is prior to mind.  Anything that the mind creates exists at an entirely different level from this pure awareness state.

All of Robert’s instructions, all of his methods, are directed to be able to rest in the snow mind state, prior to the world-consciousness, prior to the I am.

Both Robert and Nisargadatta, and Ramada, all agree that the gateway to this pure consciousness lies through focusing on and abiding in the I am consciousness, the sense that I exist, that I am alive.  By so abiding, one enters into Christ consciousness, or Krishna consciousness, which is the deepest level of the Manifest Self of energy, bliss, knowingness, and existence.  This is what Robert calls Satchitananda.  This is the state of pure knowingness.  However, even prior to that, is the pure state of not knowing, of simply being, and not being separate, not being a witness, not being the witnessed.  Simply being aware, and not aware of anything or of anyone.

Ultimately the states are “seen” and also understood to be one and the same.  The unknowing beingness, and the I am of Turiya, are ultimately recognized to be one.

But to reach this state of completion, we have to pass through the waking state, the dream state, both of which contain the I am sensation, and enter the causal state of not knowing anything, of being unaware of anything, and finally into the Turiya state of existence/knowledge/bliss, before piercing to the state of pure awareness prior to the mind superimposing a world an individual self onto this pure awareness.

Now, most importantly, Robert states why should you believe him that this indeed is the truth?  He asks, “who am I that you should believe me?”

Thus Robert throws everything back on to you.  He confesses his own direct experience, and says it is his experience.  But he says, for this to be true for you, you have to have your own experience of the truth of his confession.  Before that, if you hold on to what Robert is saying, it is purely a belief system for you, and just another level of ignorance added onto the ignorance that is the world superimposed by your mind onto your basic beingness state.

So when you repeat Robert’s words over and over, without experiencing the truth by your own direct seeing on to all four levels of Self, as well as that which rise prior to Self, which Robert calls True-Self, you are only adding ignorance onto the fundamental ignorance you already have that is the world and your personal self.  To truly enter the gap, to enter the awareness-only state, you have to become dumb as a rock, you have to become unknowing, innocent, comfortable in being stupid, because intelligent, and educated, are your enemies, as they are vaunted attributes of mind.