NISRGADATTA’S TEACHING METHODOLOGY

If you read Maharaj’s last talks as presented by Robert Powell, and do so very resolutely with full attention, you can capture not only what he is saying, and his phenomenology of consciousness, but you can see what he is trying to do to his listener’s mind:  He is using words, concepts, to 1. Drive a wedge between ‘you’ and your identification with your body, and 2. Drive a wedge between your direct experience of the totality of your experience, and your feeling of identification with your experience as individual and personal.  Two wedges: one between you and identification with your body, and one between your sense of personal and individual versus the totality of Manifest consciousness.  He tells you not to narrow down into the confines of a limited and vulnerable body.

After these two wedges are properly inserted and accepted by his listener, they are open to the unicity experience of identifying oneself with the totality of one’s whole experience, the totality of one’s Manifest experience, as I previously described as my Zen experiences at Mt. Baldy.  In this experience the sense of I spreads and permeates the entirety of your consciousness, including of your body and of the world.

This technique uses words and concepts to induce the unity of consciousness experience, or identification with the totality of the Manifest consciousness, which Zen accomplishes through a brute force combination of a rigid meditation style, along with great external stress in the form of a harsh and physically stressful lifestyle of silence, lots of physical work, exposure to extremes of coldness and seasonal heat. This combination both unity consciousness while in meditation, along with a joining back to ordinary consciousness for day to day life is relatively unique to Zen.

One can then say both states of ordinary waking mind and altering unity consciousness are equally real or unreal.  The concept of real becomes meaningless.

Try reading Nisargadatta’s book The Ultimate Medicine from this point of understanding his method.

He explains how consciousness, the life force, energy, and mind only operate naturally in a physical body composed of material and chemical processes.  He says all arise from these processes, so essentially, the life force and consciousness become alive only when supported by a body, making consciousness and the life force secondary to impersonal physical processes, chemistry, etc., which allows him to ask, “Where is there room for an identity, a personal, an individual?”  This is quite brilliant.

He wants you to shift your identity away from your body, to an identity with the totality of Manifest Consciousness, your experience of everything, including your body and the world, rather than just identifying with the body.

After you can do this, the spiritual development is out of your hands, so-to-speak.  The words themselves involve your minds on a very deep level and continue the process of de-individuation, and disidentification first with the body, and then later, with the Manifest Consciousness itself.

Other teachers, like Robert, were content to describe their own experiences and borrow Hindu philosophy for their ontology, but Maharaj does something completely different.  He describes a method of awakening by breaking the mental identification bonds and habitual acceptance of “common sense’ that keeps your mind and consciousness so narrowly focused, and so unaware of the entire spectrum of spiritual experiences, from unity, to energies, to bliss, to surrender, and finally to experience oneself as the witness only, the witness of all these comings and goings of consciousness which is Maharaj’s final stateless state.

In this state you experience yourself as entirely separate and untouched by the flowing and passing states of consciousness that bring you your waking, sleep, dream states as well as the experience of I Am, as that too passes.  This is not a state as states describe happenings in consciousness and are changeavble.  The witness is beyond all this as well as life and death, knowledge and absence of knowledge.

KUNDALINI AND ZEN EXPERIENCES-PART i

When I first began spiritual practice and search in 1968, I practiced stopping my mind by cutting thoughts as they first arose and also mindlessly asking "Who Am I?" and looking for the I-thought.

What happened were all kinds of Kundalini experiences, such as feeling energy arising, the Kundalini, within the right side of my spine, hitting a knot at my heart chakra, piercing it (painfully), then proceeding upwards into my brain to the tip of my skull, then passing forwards and downwards into my face and down into my heart where it disappeared.

Also, I began to experience electrical and magnetic fields including the earth's magnetic field forcing me to orient my bed into a North/South axis, as well as feeling electrical currents through wires in walls and in the springs in my mattress.

In addition, I began to be able to see in the dark, and in places, such as a darkened aquarium, while others kept bumping into each other, I could see as clearly as daylight.  The light of the moon had a very negative effect on me and for a long time, I had to stay away from it.  I never discovered what that was all about.

The world also became intensely alive with colors and immediacy of presence, as well s being able to feel the life force in plants and trees, and the actual tracking of the sun by blades of grass, as they turned in sunlight, and opened and closed depending on the light intensity.

There were other purely illusory phenomena, too embarrassing to discuss.

However, within days to going to Mt. Baldy and being taken off the Koan of "Who Am I?" by Sasaki Roshi, getting my first Koan from him, and sitting very formally and intensely in the Zendo, all energy phenomena disappeared.

Instead, after about 5-10 minutes of each 30 minute meditation period, my mind contracted, my brain felt like it was made of stone, then my awareness of body/mind/world would cease into a state of non-awareness, followed by a sudden dropping away of my center of consciousness from my brain into my heart and gut.

When this happened, I was no longer and individual centered in my body, but "I" became the totality of my consciousness with no center.  That is, my identity was with everything: The blowing wind, the sound of birds, an airplane passing overhead, as well as a total emptiness which embraced all phenomena.  This would last until the end of my meditation period, after which I returned to a "body in the world consciousness."

This happened literally thousands of times, and I often asked myself, which is real, the meditation based identity with the entirety of my manifest consciousness, or my everyday consciousness.  During this period I passed literally hundreds of Sasaki's Koans.

AWAKENING TO YOUR MANIFEST SELF IS THE MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL AWAKENING EXPERIENCES, BUT IS NOT THE FINAL AWAKENING.

Awakening to your Manifest Self, your divine nature as Consciousness and the Life Force, liberates you from your culturally-imposed ignorance of being only a body/mind.  It liberates you from mind because the body center from which you lived, your center of gravity in consciousness, changes from your head to your heart/gut.  You become centered in your thorax, far “below” your mind, the head where your mind dwells, and the mind no longer captures you.  The longer you remain in your heart, the more that mind becomes merely an accessory tool for doing things, and its non-goal directed chattering disappears in relevance.  It becomes like the sounds of the news on a T.V. in the next room.  Sometimes an item may grab your attention for a moment, but only for a moment, an hour or a day.  No more.

I and Robert experienced it as an arising of a brilliant light thrusting upwards from my gut into my head and upwards into space.  The brilliant white light was accompanied by a feeling of immense power and knowing within that light, and buried within that light was a being of light, the Life Force, Shakti, who appeared at once to be the divine ‘other’, but also one’s own divine self.

Nisargadatta had similar experiences which he wrote about in his first book, Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization.

After this awakening, you can experience yourself iin many ways: as an incarnation of the divine, as was Krishna; as a human with a divine consort; as just consciousness awareness, with your body and mind being objects witnessed within your totality of consciousness.  That is you realize you are consciousness and not the body or mind, and consciousness also contains the world, which you are also.

Many, many paths fixate at this level.  The work is to free, explore, and expand the energies, bliss, Kundalini, or Shakti, and the student becomes stuck here as a Kundalini or Chakra Master and guru.

In this place, emptiness is the canvas upon which the life force lives and works through you.  Form and emptiness work together, each defining the other.

However, here lies a deep trap.  The person believes they have transcended the human condition and the body level attachment of the ego, but in fact, they have only broken the key heart source of being human, being vulnerable, open to emotions, open to threads of love and loss, sorrow and joy, calling these, and all other emotions, as signs of non-awakening.  These teachers and students are merely in denial of their humanity which they falsely believe they have transcended.

The last step, the one Robert and Nisargadatta taught in his latter life, is that of transcendence, realizing that consciousness and the life force itself are both not real, in the sense all these manifestations of life force and consciousness are limited in time, endurance, and are impermanent, but that there is something behind all of the manifestations that is aware of both the manifestations and their passing away, or objects, their arising and passing away, of emptiness and the disappearance or emptiness into nothingness.

Awareness can be aware of both existence and the disappearance of existence into nothingness, which is even the absence of emptiness, which is merely the container for objects, and is itself a super object, space and time, characteristics of the manifest world.

You yourself are always aware of this transcendent aspect of yourself when you are quite, without thought, aware of your body, mind, and world.  At that moment, your center is the transcendent, but then you are not aware of the transcendent because you are the transcendent.

Dwelling quietly like this for a long, long time, will result in a true experience of the disappearance of the world and an introduction to true Nothingness as opposed to experiencing emptiness.  The distinction between the manifest and unmanifest is totally known and you are free: free of your humanity, the world, yur body and consciousness; free from all.

This is the Advaita trajectory, and only a very few will ever cover this arc because of remaining attachments to body/world/habits/desires.

So, I advise people not to tread this path if they only desire Nirvana, detachment, the transcendent, because experiencing nothingness without having first experienced the divine within is a cold, dulling, and deadening path possibly leading to suicide or insanity, or deep sorrow of not having lived.

I recommend going through the self-realization of the manifest self first, and only then trying to pass beyond.

In any event, realization of the manifest self is the only step you really have any control over.  After its realization, the “path” to the transcendent is more or less automatic; wisdom matures all by itself, spontaneously.

This first step, realization of the manifest self is attained primarily through self-inquiry defined as locating one’s I Am SENSATION, not the I-thought, or I Am thought.  It is usually felt first as a presence, an energy or spark somewhere in the chest. Fining it and focusing on it, grows it.  It expands and grows, and gradually becomes an awareness of one’s own presence, an energy body that permeates your physical body and extends into the world.  Constant awareness of this presence within and without, one’s energy body, leads to realization of your Manifest Self, which is the only awakening you have any control over.  After that, it is all in the hands of the Life Force and Consciousness, to make you, the Transcendent, aware of the totality of the Manifest world and the Unmanifest, the unborn realm of the Witness, which itself is unborn, with no characteristic such as space, time, extension, or form.

Only dwell on the sense of I Am.  Such will reveal everything from your divine nature to your nature as Nothingness.

Some people when they see light, feel only its burn and curse it. Others see love, feel it not, and curse those who feel it. Some people see God, feel Him within, and dance in his energies. Others look and hear for years and feel/see it not, and grow envious and angry.

Many see a real guru and understand nothing happening around him or her, and condemn them as fakers, con men, or insane.

Then we have those who do feel love, do feel bliss, do see light, do feel God within and want nothing more than to be around their like.

But then the blind gather to stone them and destroy their church, their home, their place on earth, for they experience nothing, understand nothing, and are unable to love. They can only judge from a place where nothing exists.

Be glad you can see the light, feel god's breath, feel his touch and grace, and hope one day that the others will too.

SWAMI SHANKARANANDA

My good friend Swami Shankarananda and I talked last night for some time.

He is doing well and Satsangs once again are happening giving many people access to the direct experience of Shakti.  He shared that his own experiences were very reminiscent of his own experiences of the divine, the sense of surrender, the descent of grace, feeling utter humble in the presence of God.

Check him out in Melbourne Australia.  I was in his Satsangs back in 1978-79 in Los Angeles, and later in the 1980s when he returned to Santa Monica and hosted Sw. Nityananda and others.  His Satsangs were always so sweet and rejuvenating.  I have long recommended his book “Consciousness is Everything,” and felt ecstatic while reading it.

If I did not have 8 cats and a living mother here in Arizona, I certainly would think of moving close to my friend of 38 years.  I think we were born about 4 days and about 500 miles apart, and we used to visit gurus together, such as Bernadette Roberts, Robert Adams, the Vedanta Center, other temples, and Sueng Sahn Soen Sa.

Thank you Swamiji for being my friend.

THE MYSTERY OF I-AM

The phrase I-Am is the cornerstone of Advaita philosophy. I creates the concept of an invisible subject that cannot perceive itself, and ‘Am” creates the concept of the entirety of one’s own perceived world which also includes the external world, one’s inner world of kinesthesia, emotions, thoughts, desires, pain and pleasure. That Am-ness also contains the experience of I. That is, there is a sensation buried in our experiential filed of ‘I’, apparently pointed inwardly to the invisible subject.

Am-ness, or consciousness, depends on the existence of a body. Without a body, there is no perceptions, no experience. One can follow that I-sensation inwards and “descend’ through various levels of Amness, including one’s experience of their bodies, the experience of the energy body, Kundalini, Chakras, etc., the experience of various Samadhis and bliss states, then the expeirnce of nothingness, the absence of experience and the absence of the I-knowing, of the I-experience.

Lastly, there is the experience of bare consciousness, absent an I, absent an Am, absent a sense of identity or self. This is called the hypnogogic state one experiences after awakening, and before one becomes consciousness of oneself as a person embedded in your life.

This is the pure I without a sense of identity or of even being alive, where the world and and body are observed, but no sense of identity has descended. The is no witness here and no witnessed. Words do not touch this state. This state Nisargadatta calls ‘universal consciousness’ because it is consciousness without personal identity, and is the same in all creatures, whether insect of humans.

Into this not knowing state, the life force begins its movement, starting the mind’s flowing, and the descent of the identity that I, who I know not, exist.

The I, without identity, without form, without substance, without existence, suddenly exists as an identity. This identity disappears when I fall into deep sleep, and also when I die, but it continues to exists in all the countless sentient bodies that sense the world.

But Nisargadatta states that the ‘I’ points to that which is aware of sentience of consciousness, not as an individual, but again, as that which is aware of ‘Amness’ as a principal, but also as nothingness, being entirely without existential characteristics, or qualities, such as form, identity, or extension in time as timelessness, and even beyond the duality of time and timeless, as that which is aware of the difference.

That is, the I, is entirely without the equality of existence, until it becomes aware of existence, of Amness. Thus the I is not born because it is beyond life and death, beyond time and space, neither mortal or immortal. Thus, it is also beyond talking, beyond words, an entire mystery to the mind, but entirely graspable as a spiritual intuition, one’s fundamental essence as the Absolute, the Noumenal, Parabrahman. Ramana refers to this knowledge of experiential/non-experiential, as Consciousness. But, it is a mystery to the mind, to the conventional ways of knowledge, or knowing objects and processes, and this truth is known only after dwelling in that not-knowing hypnogogic state for a long period of time.

I have at times recommended that those who do not have a genuine Advaita teacher in their area, study with a Kundalini or Chakra teacher so at least they get to experience bliss and the energy body processes.

     I can no longer say that. I have had a lot of experience with several of them lately, and indirect experience as related by others who I have referred to such teachers, and I find none of them are really open from the heart. 

   Instead, they are immersed in energies, working with them, manipulating them, which has resulted in them from being human. It substitutes bliss and energies from having an open heart, being vulnerable and deep. All have personality structures that are quite defended, ultimately highly reactive, because they do not allow negative feelings to just ass through them. They cannot let sorrow or sadness into their hearts.
    Many, like Adi Da, are filled with very reactive personalities even as they proclaim they have none, and have transcended the personal.

     Fooling around with energies all the time makes one ego-oriented because of the efforts needed to stay in or increase bliss.

     Oddly, true spirituality of the Carl Rogers or the Robert Adams types, lie on either side of the energy body, and involves either being fully human, open to the frailities and sufferings of being human, indeed, using those pains and suffering to go deeper into the life force, or taking the 1980s Nisargadatta modality of immersing in the I Am sensation in order to disidentify with the body and reidentify with consciousness itself, as a whole, as a way-station to realizing the unborn absolute within.

     I have just looked at You Are That, the 1960s and early 70s talks of Nisargadatta, and there he talks about immersing oneself in the pains and suffering of life as the clearest path to true bliss as opposed to bliss that arises from Kundalini practice. This is what I was saying 2-3 years ago. His later talks were all about disidentifying from the body, reidentifying with the totality of consciousness, and worshipping the life force as a way to transcending everything by being the absolute watching it all.

      In a sense, Nisargadatta traversed a very similar path to my own.

THE NEXT POLITICAL CRISIS IS ALMOST UPON US

After Hillary gets elected, the main street media will begin to report on the crisis in the healthcare system that is tearing it apart.  To fund Obamacare, $700 billion dollars was stolen from Medicare, affecting mostly the Medicare Advantage programs.

Obamacare changed everything regarding the rules by which the elderly are treated.  There are vast limitations allowed for seniors that were routinely provided before Omamacare.  Hospital doctors complain all the time. The amounts they and hospitals receive for almost all procedures have been dramatically decreased as well as far fewer authorizations for anything but routine hospital care.

But so many young people have abandoned the system and just pay the penalty for not joining, that the entire insurance system is also suffering.  One carrier after another is dropping out of Obamacare and the system will collapse unless we go to single payer, or Medicare for All.

But the press would not allow this to become an issue until after the election, because this too would be blamed on Hillary, because she supported it.  Hopefully, this will be one of the first issues she addresses as president.