SELF-INQUIRY IS NOT 100 YARD DASH. It is a long, long Ironman race. To get out of the stream of thought, the center of your consciousness has to be deeper inside of yourself than thought.

You have to move your center of attention into the empty awareness inside of your body to the heart chakra or below.

Spend time there. Look within. Somewhere near your heart resides for most people the sense of self, first found as a spark of energy. Attend to it. Over period of days, weeks and months, this sensation will grow into a complete sense of presence totally within, through and extending outside of your body, like a total capacitance or electrical field of some sort.

By attending to the totality of that sense of presence, one feels the empty space within, and can move your center of consciousness downwards from the brain and head area closer to the heart or in the region of the gut.

This takes one into a deeper emptiness, and at this center of consciousness, the flow of thoughts don't touch you anymore. It appears to be above you and in space like a constant chattering radio station which does not interest you at all because you are no longer immersed in the field of thought.

You never try to stop the thought, because that is the will, which is located at the level of mine still, in the head, in the brain and will just face an impossible fight with itself. Instead, just ignore the thoughts and concentrate on the IM sensation somewhere inside of your chest or lower, and fixate on it. Fixation and attending to it, and attempting to merge with it, gives it energy and makes it grow into one sense of presence. When that sense of presence is complete, you have a whole new concept of who and what you are, because you recognize you are not the body, nor the mind, but that sense of presence, that ecstatic state of flowing energies within, consciousness itself. This is your first step. Your first major step.

ONLINE SATSANG TO BEGIN AGAIN SOMETIME DURING OCTOBER 2016. STAY TUNED. PROBABLY ONE IN THE MORNING FOR EUROPE AND ONE IN THE EVENING FOR USA, CANADA, AUSTRALIA AND S. AMERICA.

Focus will be on the Self, self-inquiry, the nature of consciousness, and beyond consciousness, and the teachings of Robert and Nisargadatta.

There will be assigned reading--homework--for those who want to go deeper.

LOVE YOURSELF! WORSHIP YOUR SELF!

But first you have to find your Self. That Self is not your body. The body is only the mortal shell.

What you are is the Life Force, Prana, awareness and that of which you are aware including your body. The body does not know itself but serves as the vessel for consciousness, which does perceive and feel the body, its motion, its organs, its pains and pleasures.

This awareness of your body also paints a humanizing picture of the external world from one point of view  (scientific/Nisargadatta), or creates an illusory world of the unreal, from another point of view (Robert/Ramana), which is purely speculation and makes no living difference.

Get to know consciousness by looking within long enough to become aware of the Empty Void within, and the light of consciousness, a phrase that denotes 'self-illumined'.

Once you begin to know yourself, love your self. Feel it. Honor it. Worship it and one day you will realize it is God, the divine, and yet it is also you.

Then one day after the madness and joy of self-realization passes, and you can even go beyond it to the source.

LAND OF THE ANCIENTS

Ever since I was a little kid I have read stories of places where people live an extraordinarily long time.  Usually it is a small and isolated culture somewhere in North Asia, or in some ex-Soviet Etceterastan village where everyone lives to be over 100, with the eldest claimed to have been born before Napoleon.

Well, I found another such village culture.

When I moved to Sun City two years ago, I did a google on internists in my area and found Dr. Raghav Mohindra and went to him to be my doctor.

Today I went to see him to get the results of some tests, for a B1 shot, testosterone shot, flu shot.  He also doe house calls for elderly and incapacitated patients.

Today he told me something incredible, amazing, astounding.  He has over 500 patients aged 100 and older!!!!

He backed that up by saying that recently there was an all-day event in the Sun City area just for centarians, people aged 100 or better.  180 centarians attended!

He also told me something else amazing.  He said when he was a little kid, he was terribly frightened of death and the associated suffering and pain.  But he said nowadays, there was no pain, no suffering, no suffocation involved in death except when it comes as an act of violence, such as an automobile accident.

He said with today’s pain medications, morphine, and the expertise of hospice, death comes peacefully for all, even for those dying from cancer or respiratory failure. Morphine eases the hunger for breath. Death comes gently.

So, the real Shangra La is right here in the Phoenix area, Sun City and Surprise on the West side, and Scottsdale on the East side, as well as Glendale, Youngtown, Peoria, and Phoenix.

He told me recently an 80 year old man was complaining to him about his life and wishing he was dead.  Mohindra told him, “Sorry old man, you have another 20 years.”

My own tests revealed I had a near zero chance of having heart problems or a stroke during the next five years, and only a 10% chance during the next ten years.  He takes very good care of me.

Dr. Mohindra: http://moremd.net/

Ultimate Truth

MY RECENT EXPERIENCE OF MY BELOVED KATIE’S DEATH MADE CRYSTAL CLEAR THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE BODY: I CERTAINLY AM NOT THE BODY, BUT I AS CONSCIOUSNESS AM CLEARLY AWARE OF ALL ASPECTS OF MY OWN AWARENESS, BOTH OF BODY AND AWARENESS OF THE WORLD.

It is essential to closely observe the death of someone you love in order to correctly understand your own nature and your own life. Correctly observed, the experience allows you to grasp all at once the totality of your field of awareness, including awareness of everything within the body, including one’s sense of presence, internal energies, internal organs, your breathing, and at the same time, you can be aware of the totality of the manifest world arising simultaneously in the waking state. That is, the totality can be experienced as a totality, including the arising awareness that you are aware of consciousness as a single, continuous totality (Manifest Consciousness), but also aware that consciousness has not captured YOU. YOU, as witness, stand apart, a witness of oneness, the totality, yet apart from it.

Those spiritual paths that raise the body to a divine level, who worship it as a fount of truth and divinity, totally mis the point of the temporality of the body, and the temporality of consciousness too, which usually is snuffed out even before the body dies. From nothingness we come and to nothingness we go. To live life fully, grabbing all it has to offer in terms of pleasures, pains, excesses, bliss, and energies, misses entirely the lesson taught but not grasped: We come from nothingness and return to emptiness without a trace left.

We have to opportunity to discover one’s self as the root of awareness which sprouts into a seed of consciousness which begets the tree of consciousness.

It is not to ignore our bodies, but to be entirely aware of both awareness itself, and the totality of consciousness. Just being aware of our bodies and the divinity arising therein, blinds us to its limited nature, and how we need to grasp the totality of our lives in one fell swoop to obtain the highest understanding, the ultimate understanding.

THE ULTIMATE TRUTH

MY RECENT EXPERIENCE OF MY BELOVED KATIE’S DEATH MADE CRYSTAL CLEAR THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE BODY: I CERTAINLY AM NOT THE BODY, BUT I AS CONSCIOUSNESS AM CLEARLY AWARE OF ALL ASPECTS OF MY OWN AWARENESS, BOTH OF BODY AND AWARENESS OF THE WORLD.

It is essential to closely observe the death of someone you love in order to correctly understand your own nature and your own life.  Correctly observed, the experience allows you to grasp all at once the totality of your field of awareness, including awareness of everything within the body, including one’s sense of presence, internal energies, internal organs, your breathing, and at the same time, you can be aware of the totality of the manifest world arising simultaneously in the waking state. That is, the totality can be experienced as a totality, including the arising awareness that you are aware of consciousness as a single, continuous totality (Manifest Consciousness), but also aware that consciousness has not captured YOU. YOU, as witness, stand apart, a witness of oneness, the totality, yet apart from it.

Those spiritual paths that raise the body to a divine level, who worship it as a fount of truth and divinity, totally mis the point of the temporality of the body, and the temporality of consciousness too, which usually is snuffed out even before the body dies.  From nothingness we come and to nothingness we go.  To live life fully, grabbing all it has to offer in terms of pleasures, pains, excesses, bliss, and energies, misses entirely the lesson taught but not grasped: We come from nothingness and return to emptiness without a trace left.

We have to opportunity to discover one’s self as the root of awareness which sprouts into a seed of consciousness which begets the tree of consciousness.

It is not to ignore our bodies, but to be entirely aware of both awareness itself, and the totality of consciousness.  Just being aware of our bodies and the divinity arising therein, blinds us to its limited nature, and how we need tp grasp the totality of our lives in one fell swoop to obtain the highest understanding, the ultimate understanding.

Katie--my beautiful Katie

OUR DEAR, DEAR KATIE DIED YESTERDAY AFTER A SIX WEEK ILLNESS. I AM HEARTBROKEN.  I WATCHED HER SPIRIT LEAVE HER BODY YESTERDAY AT 3 PM AT HER VET’S OFFICE.

She had received extensive treatment including multiple bood tests, X-rays, fluid therapy, multiple courses of anti-biotics and iron support supplements, as well as being syringe fed for the last five days.  He 3 vets were mystified.  The X-rays appeared to reveal pneumonia treated by three different antibiotics, but she continued to go down hill.  Her blood values were all normal, including kidney, except for an increasingly severe anemia treated by iron supplements.

The vet said her could not help her any more after the last antibiotic failed.  So I got all of her medical records to take to a recommended specialist, who I called the day before yesterday. I talked to a technician there and the doctor over the phone who asked many questions.  After I read her Katies blood values and recent medical history, she was very pessimistic, saying she is gravely ill.  I was to take her the next day (yesterday) to begin treatment, but when I awoke yesterday, Katie was much worse and was gasping for breath.  I knew it was too late.  She was too weak and now appeared frightened by her inability to breath.  

Katie with her children

So yesterday at 3 pm. We took her to Grand Paws and put her to sleep.  They had a room prepared, with a thick blanket for Katie, and tissues for Kerima. As  per usual, the staff was wonderful, sympathetic, compassionate, and the euthanasia passed without incident, and both Kerima and I cried.

Watching her spirit leave her body, it was painfully aware that Katie  was her spirit and not her body, and that under anesthetic, consciousness left first, and with it her suffering, and then after the Euthenal was administered, her life force left and her body stilled.  Katie was entirely gone.  A brief flash of life and vitality that brought others and us joy for 16 years. This made me appreciate even more my temporality and present consciousness, and to actually worship it in myself and in others.

Some of these attached photos show Katie playing with her eight children—cloth dolls.  She often stood above one or more of them, and strongly lectured them about some misdeed of their’s.  She was a tough-love mother, always likely being surrounded by her children, and playing with them loudly in some other room than the one we were in.

God bless and keep you Katie!  I love you!

Jnana is for the spiritually elderly

Nisargadatta said his last attachment, his last identification to his body, ended the moment he heard that he had cancer.  Bernadette Roberts said that the spiritual process she went through after full experience of unitary Christ Consciousness, was a gradual loss of everything, a gradual hollowing out of her identity as naturally happens with aging.

Robert Adams had his awakening experience to Christ Consciousness at age 14, but 34 years later he was still wandering India visiting teachers, including spending six months with Nisargadatta Maharaj in the late 1970s.  He still had an interest in spiritual knowledge.

When I knew Robert, he was already done with life.  He had no interest in the world, and just lived from day to day doing almost nothing.  He said if it were not for his wife and daughters, he’d be living alone somewhere doing nothing.  He said his dog Dimitri was his only attachment.

For all three of these teachers, Consciousness itself had lost its allure.

The intensity, the brilliant light and flash of the self-realization of the manifest consciousness, Christ Consciousness, gave way to the gradual or instant realization that they had nothing to do with consciousness. They themselves were nothing at all observing consciousness.  The states of consciousness came to them, one after the other, and they passively observed it, no longer engaged of very interested in its play.

All three were done with life, with their bodies, with consciousness.  The excitement was gone.  The bliss of the flame of consciousness was gone.

For these three giants, spiritual seeking, spitual seeking, spiritual knowledge, spiritual powers or siddhis, were all just entertainment within the field of consciousness, and when one’s interest in consciousness itself wanes, all seeking wanes.  Then one finds a different kind of happiness, one of being in peace, rest, with nowhere to go and nothing to seek.

However, old habits die hard, and Maharaj visited prostitutes after his wife died, and Robert became a notorious womanizer, both, I think, trying to overcome periods of emptiness or boredom.

Indeed, Bernadette called her loss of Christ Consciousness (Which she also called unity consciousness) a terrible catastrophe, and both Robert and Nisargadatta talked endlessly about nothingness.

So I ask all aspiring jnanis out there, “Are you ready to become nothing?”  If not, spend your time doing social work or practicing an energy yoga, or Kundalini yoga as long as you can, or continue to chase human love to keep you interested in life, because once your interest in consciousness itself leaves, you will have nothing, and can you tolerate nothing?  Are you ready for it?