ALL PATHS ARE FILLED WITH DELUSION

There is no one true “path.” There is no final, or ultimate realization.  Neither Ramana’s or Ramakrishna’s realizations are ultimate.  All spiritual realizations are determined or conditioned by one’s deeply held beliefs, also known as one’s convictions.

Ramana had a so-called “death” experience where he imagined he was dying, imagined his body was dead, yet still experienced the life force within—his consciousness—and decided then and there that consciousness was immortal.  After that, his attention was always pulled inwards to the life force, and his sense of I into a continuous I-I attention.  From the conviction that consciousness was immortal, he built n idealism that held that the outer world and his own body were merely appearances in his immortal consciousness.

This gradually was expanded into a philosophy that all that was, was consciousness, and all apparently material objects, like the world and one’s own body, were nothing but appearances in consciousness with no existence other than appearance.  This was expanded until all living things and the consciousness they experienced were one over-consciousness. Even the death of one’s body was only an appearance as are the deaths of every body the same. Only consciousness was real and the material world was not.

Since then tens or hundreds of thousands of followers have been led down Ramana’s path, trying to emulate his experiences and trying to realize their bodies were not real.

Nisargadatta’s spiritual life began with a different conviction.  His teacher, Siddharameshwar told him, “You are not your body; find out who you are.” With this conviction along with Siddharameshwar’s teachings of the four levels of consciousness, ended with a different realization from Ramana’s, which was consciousess had its origin within the chemical processes of the body, and that consciousness created an imaginary world of appearances, including the appearance of one’s own body.  For Nisargadatta, neither one’s own body, the external world, nor consciousness were real.  Only the Absolute was real, Parabrahman, the Witness, which can never be perceived, one can only be the witness.  This witness, you mightsay, was one’s deepest experience of self as the listener, seer, hearer, etc., which when grasped as truth, and actually experienced, was definitely experienced as “me.”  The experience of being the witness is unshakable, and is a different end-point than Ramana’s, and has led tens of thousand’s of modern followers down Nisargadatta’s different path.

There are other paths also, that of Muktananda, of Kundalni teachers such as Jan Esmann and David Spero, where the world and one’s self is experienced as an aspect of Shakti.

Krishnamurti eschewed all such philosophies or phenomenologies of being, and said don’t be captured by the ideas of gurus.

Now comes the direct school of teachings by the neo-advaitins, who invite you to look within, and then they interpret for you what your experiences amy or may not reveal to you.

The most obvious case is that of Bentinho Massaro, who builds a magnificent phenomenology of being by building a model of transcendence concerning your inner experience, and step by step, building a case for the truth of his transcendent idealism, much of which is based on the understandings of modern science, from the multidimension scientists, to the quantum scientists, and positing that their discoveries concerning reality at the sub-microscopic level, or on an interstellar level, are applicable to the human level.

Time after time, Massaro insists that you must gain a conviction of the “truths” that he is offering, because once you accept wholeheartedly his interpretations of your world-experience, you will begin to have experiences consistent with that belief system.

You see, each of us forges a “spiritual” discovery path that could be our own, but which is inevitably affected by the beliefs and convictions one picks up from external teachers.

If you follow your own path, you will likely never have any of the experiences that Ramana, Jan Esmann, or Robert Adams talk about.

When asked the ultimate meaning of Nisargadatta’s teachings gave Ramesh Balsekar, Ramesh responded: peace of mind. Like Christianity, Buddhism, or Taoism, Nisargadatta’s teachings gave Ramesh peace of mind, as he was not the doer, not responsible for his or anyone else’s actions. No weight fell on his shoulders.  No pretense here of ultimate truth or enlightenment.

NO SATSANG SUNDAY FEBRUARY 19 AND 26.

Spending days on retreat and to have more time to visit my mom. Next Satsang March 5, Sunday at noon Arizona time.

FROM STEVE ECKERT

Dear Edji,

Been listening repeatedly to your Emptiness Satsang.....all night at times.

Yesterday about 3 am......that Emptiness became  me.

Not sure what terms to use here.         I  was the Emptiness and all the outside and body was the  ME/ consciousness part.

I could examine things external within my 'bucket of emptiness'.  Everything was external and I  the observer was at peace.

Consciousness could be brought into the bucket, bliss could be brought to the bucket, anger could be placed there, anything could be placed in the bucket .

This lasted most of the day .   While laying on the couch a brass pull chain and blue cut crystal was placed in the bucket and you know.......I could become that antique pull chain and Know all about it.

Quite and experience and will listen at nights to your satsang to reinforce that passage into Emptiness.

Love you,  steve

OH!   forgot.  I was watching the plaster ceiling in the living room and it turned into waves and light........I know that the ceiling is not real ,  only the mind makes it real.

A TREATISE ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT TEACHINGS OF

BENTINHO MASSARO

BY

EDWARD MUZIKA

A critical but balanced commentary on the Enlightenment I teachings of Massoro, the good and the bad.  Excellent choice to experientially understand some aspects of Ramana Maharshi's and Nisargadatta's Advaita, but not other aspects.

A great deal of his text's value rests on his convincing you of the properties of presence-energy, which is always and ever available.  You have to find this in yourself, or create this experience in yourself to be able to use his methodology.

But he gets better when talking about awareness, always and ever available and aware--even when it is not.  He gives an experiential feel for the Advaita terms, and is rather convincing that you have to believe his story that connects all the threads.

http://www.wearesentience.com/uploads/7/2/9/pdf3/7293936/a_treatise_on_the_teachings_of_bentinho_massaro-3.

SATSANG FEB 5, 2017

NOTHINGNESS SWALLOWS CONSCIOUSNESS, WHILE I WATCH AMUSED.

GUIDED MEDITATION 

New Link:

https://youtu.be/7A0DgpAuEXU

YOU ARE NOT WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE

 

Robert used to open Satsangs saying, “You don’t exist.  You are not real.  You  have been hypnotized into believing you are a fixed human being with a body and mind, living in a larger container world context.  You are not that at all. This is only a mirage, an appearance.  What you are is entirely beyond that.”

Ponder this: All that you know or experience has come to you through your consciousness. You have been taught you are a body/mind within a context of a larger physical world.  You go to college and learn that the appearances within this consciousness-appearance world has underlying laws such as Newton’s Laws of Motion, Einstein’s relativity theories, quantum mechanics, inorganic and organic chemistry.  Studying these things make the world more solid and real to you because you reinforce the “truth” of entities that are self-exosting and independent from you.

HOWEVER, the more you study these sciences, the more often you find the current and most advanced teachings are saying:  nothing exists; emptiness permeates everything; the universe collapses into blackhole, dimensionless singularities.  The more science pushes the boundaries of knowledge, the less substantive its “solidity” appears.

Robert’s firsthand experience confirms what science is currently finding, and that is ultimately nothing exists, everything is an appearance within the field of consciousness, which ‘I’ observe (see, feel, hear, taste, touch, intuit).  All objects, happenings, and processes are merely appearance and not real.

THIS INCLUDES YOUR EXPERIENCE AS BEING AN INDIVIDUATED BODY, SEPARATE FROM OTHERS AND FROM THE WORLD.  Nothing you experience is real.  It is just an appearance in consciousness.

If you are still, very quiet, letting your body relax entirely, so much that your mind stops with its endless thoughts about how you as a body/mind, are required to do next, such as eat, pay taxes, find a job, do a Google search, or buy a laptop.  The endless self-talk about the external world and your place in it, is precisely that which prevents you from looking within more deeply to find the underlying beingness of your “truer” existence as the totality of consciousness.

Quieting the mind by sitting in silence, going within begins the path of self-inquiry where eventually you find out that you have notning to do with this world.  You are merely and observer, one who is self-aware that it is observing the flow of appearances in consciousness, and itself is untouched by this “play.”

When I wa a Mt. Baldy sitting in meditation in the Zendo, after a few minutes of sitting, the human I would disappear and I would become the totality of consciousness.  No me, just I am one with everything (all appearances in consciousness), yet, from time to time I would note to myself, that although I felt one with the entirety of everything that I perceived, from time to time a different kind of silent thought would arise, that pointed out to me, the observer, that I was in a state wherein I identified with the totality of my experience of consciousness, you I, as observer, was still separate in the sense I was aware that I was THE witness of the whole show.

Then, when the meditation period ended, I returned to being a human, dressed in black robes, walking down a snow-filled path towards the chanting hall, or upwards towards Roshi’s cabin, for our face-to-face meeting to check my mind.

I used to wonder which state was real—the unity with consciousness state found in meditation, or the black-robed human body state.

The answer is: what is true depends on YOU in the moment.  You can take yourself to be a human when you allow it, or you can be in unity with consciousness, and also its observer, if and when you prefer this hugely expanded and hugely more peaceful “reality.”  But, when you decide to fully reenter the human state, you are also aware or your different level of existence as everything, and also as nothing within that everything, and that you are even beyond that everything as its self-aware witness that itself cannot actually be witnessed, because it has no form, or characteristic, no feeling, by which it can be seen itself or experienced itself. 

That witness is entirely beyond consciousness and IS not of this world.