The Guru

I speak here about the special relationship between the Guru and the student, and that one is basically lost in the spiritual endeavor without one.  I base this talk on my own experiences as well as those of Swami Shankarananda, whose recent book I repeatedly mention.

I also speak about the radical difference between an energy guru, such as a Kundalini master, versus the teachings and methods of a classical Advaita master such as Ramana Maharshi, Robert Adams, or Nisargadatta.

Yet, really one needs to travel both paths: The first to the opening to the Life Force within, the explosion of divinity and Shakti that gives you the energy and faith to first deepen your relationship to Shakti, to one's own relationship with the divine within; the second is to disidentify first with the body, then with consciousness itself to pass entirely beyond existence, becoming total peace as the last experience.

LINK: https://youtu.be/FvF4E3-dMLY

COMMENT TO ME SENT BY A READER, VIOLET CRYSTAL:

Hello Edward and all. I have a question based on this excerpt from something Robert Adams said in one of his talks:

"We're talking about the ineffable. Something beyond words and thoughts. Something beyond, something beyond. Yet it's so beautiful that there is nothing to say. There is something there when you go beyond consciousness, beyond beingness, beyond pure awareness but yet it's not something at all. For when you think of something you're thinking of a thing. A thing that you can think about. 

"Something that you can feel perhaps.Something that you can identify with. It is beyond all that. There can be absolutely nothing that can be said about it. You can't even experience it. For to experience it there must not be a you. The you has to be transcended, transmuted. 

"Therefore you can never experience this ineffable. And when the you is gone and no longer is there, there is no longer an experience. For again there has to be a you to experience something. When the you is gone who is to experience anything? The experiencer as been totally transcended and the experience has been totally transcended. You are that!"

Is all this pointing to the state of deep sleep and/or death (which I understand to be the same thing)? Everything Robert is talking about can be said of the state of deep sleep which is something every one of us goes through every night.

ED’S REPLY:

Violet Crystal WHERE DID YOU FIND THIS ROBERT QUOTE? IT IS A PERFECT DESCRIPTION OF THE HIGHEST TEACHINGS!

It is not a state of deep sleep or death, but beyond both, and also beyond the conscious, awake mind.

To know it, you have to catch yourself just awakening out of sleep, or just going into sleep.

At that point you can become aware that you are separate from the awake state and the sleep state, and the dream state.

You only are aware that you have nothing to do with consciousness. This is an understanding reached by the mind which only operates in the awake and dream states, which, of course, disappears both in deep sleep and death.  But combining the experience with the understanding of That which lies beyond consciousness is your truest or deepest identity, is your opening to final enlightenment.

THEN, SOMETIMES YOU'LL GET BROUGHT TO THIS AWARENESS SPONTANEOUSLY.

IT CAN BE LIKE THIS: You will feel very relaxed and in peace. Then is feels like you are falling backwards into yourself, which “feels like” a dark, quiet, and juicy presence within. Slowly you will sink into that nothingness, with awareness of the world, and even awareness of awareness diminishing. Yet each "inch" of falling backwards into that Nothingness is accompanied by ever-increasing peace. Eventually you "return: to complete Nothingness, and nothing is experienced except the complete peace of being complete and self-contained, needing nothing, wanting nothing.

There are other ways to experience this "Absolute Witness" without anything being witnessed, except a sense of complete rest and needing nothing. This is deeper than the causal body state, or even Turiya.

This is the entirely beyond to the other shore, beyond life and death of the Buddhist Heart Sutra. Gute, Gute, Paragute, Parasumgute, Bodhi Svaha!

Going into this state of being beyond, complete, and in divine peace frequently, and understanding this as your deepest self completely, solidly, and stably, is the final enlightenment.  From this place you find complete peace even while living immersed in the world, loving and worshipping the life force as Shakti.

Ramana on the Real

In the post immediately below, I offered an experiential/philosophical definition of the term “not real,” or, “does not exist,” from the point of view of Nisargadatta.

However, there is another explanation of these two terms that is used by the neoAdvaitins, and which comes from Ramana Maharishi.  The best explication of Ramana’s thinking along the lines consciousness, the body, existence and nonexistence comes from reading The Path of Shri Ramana, Part 1, by Shri Sadhu Om, chapter 4, page 58.

I have got to tell you that in ways the thinking of Ramana Maharishi seems to me entirely juvenile not very powerful. 

He defines that which is real as that which is always existence, and always aware for is always in awareness.  By that definition alone, the external world and the body are not real, because they are not always in existence or in awareness.  He says further that which is in existence and awareness only temporarily, is not really real, and it is really illusion or unreal.  For him, only the Self was real.

Thus purely by definition, that which comes and goes in consciousness is not real, but Ramana asserts that consciousness is always aware of itself, and is aware of itself in our sleep because when we wake up in the morning, we know we slept.  That is, when we sleep, we are not aware of the external world, we are not aware of mind, we are not aware of our bodies, and I can say most of us are not aware of ourselves while we sleep.  But Ramana says when we wake up we know we have slept, therefore we have existed even during sleep.

To me this is a very crappy argument and makes no sense.  We can just as easily say we knew that the world existed slept for our body existed when we slept.

This is purely a a definition of real, is that which is always aware are always in awareness, and only such exists.  If it does not meet these two criteria, whatever falls outside, considered as unreal.

The neoAdvaitins just eat up this argument, and they buy his argument that the self is always self-aware, it is just that we, by wrong thinking and wrong understanding, such as believing that the world is existent when we are asleep, or the body exists when we are asleep, have deluded ourselves into false truths.  For Ramana, no body and no world exists at all when we sleep, purely by definition, and the only “real” is the Self.  That is, the neoAdvaitins just hold this understanding as enlightenment, and believe that they are enlightened and they can say that the world is not real the body is not real in the self is real without any experience this truth, or any corroboration of these concepts.

This is so very, very different, from Nisargadatta, who holds that the I am, consciousness does not exist in sleep, and both consciousness and the body, as well as the external world are not real as defined in my earlier post of a 17, based primarily on experiences gained over years through meditation on the nature of the self, from seeing the emptiness within, seeing a pulsating, scintillating nature, and changeable nature of consciousness itself, seeing emptiness penetrating through all objects in consciousness which robs objects within consciousness of its individuality, and understanding that our bodies are objects in consciousness also just like the objects we see in the world, and as such we are the creator of both, both having the reality of mentation, imagination, dream.

So when you run into neoAdvaitins on Facebook and the rantings about trying for the real and everything else is unreal, you know they have been convinced by following the bad logic of Ramana, had not had some sort of real self-realization experience.

However, I am fairly sure Ramana and Nisargadatta shared the same state, it is just that they gave two radically different sets of arguments and explanations of unreal, illusion, etc.

They shared the same method, namely abiding in the one’s self, just quietly being oneself, although Ramana also taught to look for the I-thought and where it arose. Following that method, one always finds emptiness or the Void as the source of the I-thought and of all thoughts.

m

SATSANG SUNDAY MAY 21, 11AM CALIFORNIA TIME.

GI TO:  http://satsangwithedji.weebly.com

Password:    edji

THERE ARE INCREASING TECHNICAL PROBLEMS WITH WEEBLY. YOU MAY NOT BE ABLE TSANGTO FULLY ENTER THE CHAT ROOM WITH A USERNAME, AND MAY JUST BE RELEGATED TO BEING A PASSIVE OBSERVER.  IF I HAVE THE SAME PROBLEM GETTING IN, NATURALLY THERE WILL BE NO SATSANG, SO JUST SIT IN SILENCE IN YOURSELF.




















x

From Dust to Ashes

What is meant when Ramana or Robert Adams says “the world is not real.  You are not real.  You do not exist.  The world is in appearance, an illusion”?

Several things are meant, and all of them are based on experience rather than a philosophical viewpoint.  That is, yogic experience, not every-day, “common sense” notions of concepts.

  

1.  The first “reason” appears at first to be philosophical, but actually rests on experience.  This reason is that nothing lasts, everything is constantly changing, from the mind, one’s body, the seasons, weather, climate, and even the rising of mountains and their subsequent erosion away.  No object lasts.  No object endures.  Nothing is self-sustaining in the objective world of objects.  Seeing under the aspect of eternity, nothing lasts, nothing persists, not even the world for the universe.  As such it is not real in the sense of being self-sustaining, self caused, and eternal.

 2.  In the moment of first awakening, when one first realizes the Manifest or divine Self, the life force, Shakti, acting in conjunction with consciousness, and one loses primary identification of the body, and re-identifies as consciousness, the way consciousness is perceived changes radically.  Consciousness becomes one’s primary identification, and everything is realized as being just an appearance within consciousness, an object within the field of consciousness, and as such, is not independent of your consciousness.  Nothing is independent of you as consciousness.  It does not have an independent existence.  It is just an appearance in consciousness, including the appearance of your own body.  Everything is just in appearance in consciousness.  The operative word is “appearance.”

3. The other thing you have to realize, is that this point your experience of consciousness itself changes as opposed to before when you felt you were dealing with objects that had the same reality as you, as a physical body.  One experiences the world differently.  It is a safe place now as it is no different than you are as body/mind.  Both are appearances within the one consciousness.   Also, consciousness seems far more intimate than a supposedly separate and objective world of coequal objects. They become “your” objects.  And reality no longer seems as solid.  It flows.  Nothing appears solid anymore because everything is permeated against a background of emptiness, and things flow out of emptiness and back into emptiness. It is not just a concept, you actually witness the coequality of form and emptiness and their indivisible interplay.

4.  But after a while of dwelling in and identifying with consciousness instead of with the body, one realizes that consciousness itself is temporary, ever-changing, and is not self-sustaining.  So, just like when a dream ends, the dream world disappears into the unconscious, into nothingness, so when the body dies, the sense field and the sentience associated with that physical body just disappears, and is absorbed into the nothingness which proceeded its birth.  Consciousness comes out of nothingness, and at the end of one’s life span, is recalled into nothingness.  It is a temporary show.  Thus, while everything is consciousness, is known through and by consciousness, and is an appearance in consciousness, consciousness itself is just an appearance within nothingness.

Thus, understand Robert and Nisargadatta when they say world is not real, it is an optical illusion, it is Maya, means that the entire “play” of consciousness has the same reality as a dream, same origin, and the same end.  It suddenly appears from out of nothingness, just as a body is born and sometimes later consciousness begins.  When the body dies, the associated consciousness is absorbed back into nothingness, which some call the absolute.

  

It cannot be understood from the Western point of view where all objects are considered to be independent of consciousness and consciousness merely illumines the existence of relatively stable external objects that exist independently consciousness, and you are but one object among many, some of which are sentient, and others, like rocks appear to not be conscious.  As long as you identify your body as you, and consciousness as the instrument for perceiving a real external world, you can never understand the point of view that no object is real, including your body, or your mind, or your emotions.  All these are constantly flowing, mixing, combining and recombining, flowing out of emptiness and then disappearing back into emptiness or nothingness. 

  

Therefore, Buddhists say form is emptiness and emptiness is form.  Forms have the essential quality of being empty, nothing, and in that sense they do not exist.  They appear out of emptiness, or nothingness, in the same way as the entire universe is supposed to have been born, out of nothingness, in a big bang 13 billion years ago, and they returned to emptiness or nothingness at the end of the universe when all the particles in the universe become dispersed into nothingness.

Practicing Self-Inquiry

Recently two people wrote to me regarding what they considered a problem: the distraction caused by random thoughts.  They wanted to know how to overcome the distraction of their constantly thinking mind.  They wanted to be able to focus their attention laser-like, onto some specific object, like the I-thought, in order to perfoem what they thought was proper self-inquiry.

However, this is entirely the wrong approach.  This forceful control of the mind will beget only tension. which someday may result in a very focused mind, but that focused mind, that laser -like attention, will never discover the self, because the self appears when the mind is entirely gone and is utterly relaxed, because you are utterly relaxed.  A laser-like attention focuses downwards to a point, while relaxed openness, is aware of everything, and is happiness, freedom, and lack of constraint.

Focusing clamps down while relaxation opens up, is not tight, and is not a limiting of awareness.

Instead of trying to use the mind control the mind, you have to do the exact opposite, which is to use the mind to lose the mind, to intentionally relax.  You learn how to relax and drop your attention out of your head and into your heart, and even lower, into the gut.  You need to sit or lie relaxed, and continually relax even more. In such a relaxed state, you can perform complete body scans of feeling each part of your body, starting at you toes and ending in your head. You “feel” your body from toes to head.  Feel into your chest.  Feel your diaphragm move.  Feel the air expanding your lungs.  Feel into your gut.  Relocate your center of gravity of attention from head into your body while in a relaxed state.

Then you relax and open your awareness again to the totality of your consciousness, from inside the body, to the surrounding room and environmental sounds.

And when you sit in formal sitting meditation, let your attention drop into your gut.  Not trying to see anything or feel anything just rest your attention into your gut or heart.

After a bit of practice, you will notice that your brain starts freezing up, and it feels like a rock, heavy, and unable to move or think.  You feel utterly stupid with no thoughts.  After practicing this for a while and getting used to that feeling of being a rock head and utterly stupid, and accepting it as a normal state, one day, suddenly, the center of your attention will drop into your body and out of your head.

The problem of "you" feeling the disturbance of random thoughts, is that your center of attention is in your head most of the time, which is right next to the central transmitter of constant thoughts, namely your brain.  When you both occupy such a small area, the broadcasting thoughts seem like a big deal.  But when your attention falls into your body in a relaxed state, you will enter an entirely new world.  It will feel as if you have dropped into a huge, dark, canyon, an expensive emptiness that will feel entirely open and comfortable.  This is your entry into emptiness, into the Void.  From this new location in that expansive emptiness, the mind will seem so very far away from "you."  What is “you” will now feel like you are in a new location in a vast emptiness, and the mind can continue to prattle and talk to itself but it does not disturb you because the transmitter is no longer located right next to you in your head space.  Thoughts are then experienced like listening to a radio from two rooms away.

Then thoughts do not disturb you.  You can ignore them like all the people in a crowded room while you are attending to one particular conversation, or like ignoring the crowds and sounds while at the beach, lying in the shade.

This is not really enlightenment, but it is an opening into the expansiveness of your heart, and within this expansiveness you can feel your own sense of presence, your own sense of I, of being alive, of being sentient.  Just resting there in your own presence is proper self-inquiry, which is really an abiding or resting in one's own self.  Abiding in the self this way, feeling the quiet emptiness, feeling your sense of presence, feeling the I-energy, will lead to an experience of an identification with the totality of the manifest consciousness, what I call the Manifest Self.

This is the first stage of enlightenment: recognition of yourself as no longer an individual, but identified with the totality of your consciousness, that your consciousness is you, and not that body object which is experienced within your consciousness.  You are much larger than your body experience.  You are the totality of all of your experience including the external world, all your thinking, the emptiness, the peacefulness of that emptiness, and all the energy states that comprise your sense of presence or existence as a sentient being.Recently several people have written to me for advice on how to focus their attention on the I

Cat's eye-Kali

SATSANG EVERY SUNDAY, 11AM, CALIFORNIA/ARIZONA TIME.

Go to http://satsangwithedji.weebly.com 

password is edji

Only time to look for notice here is if satsang is cancelled.

SATSANG TODAY, SUNDAY MAY 7 11 AM CALIFORNIA TIME

GO TO satsangwithedji.weebly.com

PASSWORD edji

Hello Edji,

For some time now It's been clear that there is no entity within the body. And in silence, there is no separation and there is a feeling of oneness. But the identified I-thought arises whenever something happens to the body and all the resistance and suffering comes back. I can't seem to let go of the belief in the "I am a body" idea even though I can see it isn't true. It makes no sense to me and leaves me really frustrated. Could you please help me?

Thanks very much,

G.

ED:

There are distinct experiential differences between the I-thought, the identification with the body, and you.  What does the I thought point to?  Emptiness.

The identification with the body is feeling the body from the inside, which is different from any other experience, and as such, we tend to identify with it because it is always there opposed to environment or people around us.  It has a constancy that environmental appearance lack.

But you witness that.  As its witness, you are separate from that body feeling.

So you need to relax more deeply.  Fall backwards more deeply into your sense of self.  Just keep doing it, more and more, longer and longer.  You will begin to see all things related to your body and your mind are really witnessed by you, and you are not affected by them.  This is the beginning of enlightenment, the foothills so to speak.

The more habits and tendencies you have, the more conditioning and education, the longer the deconstruction of mind/body experience will take, and for your freedom.  For now, you feel your imprisonment in habit, identifications, and mind, but you have to see yourself as separate from all that.