BECOMING AS GOD

A RADICAL NEW SPIRITUALITY WITHOUT HINDU, BUDDHIST, OR CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM

I am presenting a radically new spirituality.  One without mysticism, without speaking of the divine feminine, Kali, Shakti, Shiva, void, witness, reincarnation, Karma, Vasanas, or of any prophet, guru, or alleged-incarnation of the past.  I am saying you are an incarnation of God. 

Your body is not an incarnation of God, but you are an incarnation of God, you as the life within you that senses your body and senses the world.  The same life is in all beings, and the life in these beings tends to identify solely with the body and its circumstances in the world.  As such it becomes a prisoner of circumstances of each being’s own experience.

What if I were to tell you that you are the life that you are, not the experiences that you feel.  This is your basic identity. You are the source of all experiences.  You are life itself.

Realizing that you are an incarnation of God ironically involves totally owning your body first.  For most people, their body is merely an afterthought while their mind dwells in various other identities such as family, work, reading, worshiping, watching television, and doing a hundred other tasks of every day mundane life.  We really do not know our bodies, and we have to know the body in order to realize that we are separate from the body, the knower of the body, and yet become more and more intimately aware of everything associated with the body, including one’s own energy body lying just below the surface of our bodies’ physical sensations of muscles, breathing, bowels, movement, etc.

This new awareness requires us to immerse ourselves in our emotions, to really feel them, not try to understand them, just feel without understanding. Leave the mind behind.  We need to feel into the area around our heart for that spark of life we call “I-Am.”  Feel for that I am sensation, and when you find it. dwell there.  If you can find the I am and stay in it, abide in that I am feeling, it will grow larger and larger until it fills out the body and it will be seen to contain a myriad of energy movements and energy complexes.  The energies are first felt sort of like a mild electricity at various points within the body, and later about it.  Unlike electricity, the tingling sensations of this energy cause pleasure as opposed to the pain of electricity. 

As you immerse into this energy body, one of many non-physical bodies which together are called the “Subtle Body,” energies throughout the body will grow and individuate into separate bodies, and then begin to come together into balance, causing immense pleasure that feels somewhat like an intense liquid sexuality throughout your physical body, but actually within one’s energy body. 

Gradually this energy body, as well as the associated emotional body, will grow into what you recognize as your own sense of presence, an inner body of emotions, energies, tactile sensations, separate energy centers (a.k.a. Chakras) associated with your heart, sexuality, power, and inner vision, that mark you as an individual incarnation of God.

I have used the term “life” to describe this inner complex of experiences.  But life is really one aspect of God, which I call the Life Force.  This Life Force is the guiding energy which controls all organic movement within the universe, and is experienced inside of you as the various elements of the subtle body is described above: feeling; energies; emotions; and identification with all the complexes of the Subtle Body.

You will lose your identification as the physical body as you get to know it more deeply and recognize its difference from all aspects of the Subtle Body.  Then you will feel yourself primarily as an energy/emotional/sensual being inhabiting your body, and your body is a felt object within your subtle body.  You are far more than just your body, you are far more than that thinking mind that preoccupies almost everyone to the exclusion of feeling God within themselves.

You, as the essence of God’s Life Force, which Robert Adams called “the power that knows the way,” are the center of your universe, you are the feeler, the hearer, the smeller, the taster, and the toucher within.  You are your emotions, the cascading and wonderful energies, bliss, and ecstatic states within.  You are a raging sexuality, as well as the sense of power that resides in your belly.  All of these bodies you reclaim by introspection and feeling.  You become as God by owning the God within you and you see it is entirely beyond any concept you ever had of what you were prior to the process of introspection, loving, and feeling within.

You see, at this point, there is no mysticism at all in this form of spirituality.  There is no Krishna, no Kali, no Shiva, no divine feminine, no divine masculine, no regarding women as an embodiment of the divine feminine, and the same for men as an incarnation of Shiva.  There is no karma, there is no reincarnation, there is no predestination, there is no Krishna consciousness, no Vasanas, one does not even need the concept of Chakras.  There is no need for salvation, there is no God the father, no God the son, no heaven, no hell, there is just you.

Then I say further the most rapid way to own these subtle aspects of yourself, of your Life, and incarnation of God’s Life Force, is by falling desperately in love with another, feeling, perceiving, recognizing the Life, the Life Force, the divine within them, and in so doing, be overcome with total devotion, total surrender, and total worship of them.  In that total worship of them, you surrender your identity that you have had up to that point in life, and just identify with that aspect of God in them which you feel, perceive, worship, and surrender to. 

Your inner energies have become unified, one-pointed, balanced, and have become your primary identity. Your love for God, the divine in them, will lead to your recognizing God within yourself, the divine within yourself, and then you will become God.  You will have transcended your human hood by becoming 100% identified with the essence of humanity, the life within.  And you will know God directly, intimately, every moment of the waking day as you, and will worship him/her in at least one other human being, the one you call your master, your lover, your beloved, your soulmate, for she or he has shown you your way to God into your true nature as the Manifest Self.  Now you are self-realized as the divine. 

This is not the enlightenment of Ramana or Nisargadatta, but it is the enlightenment needed for our troubled times, an enlightenment that is loving and sharing rather than becoming a distant Absolute, Witness, Unborn.

It is all so simple.  This path has much fewer terms and mysticism than found anywhere else.  The path is simplified to one of constant feeling-introspection, feeling your body, feeling the energies within, feeling emotions, feeling your sexuality totally, feeling your love for others, feeling the ecstasies within that arise from focusing attention on those subtle aspects that reside within your body.  Everything is about what you attend to, what things inside of you that you focus on.  If you focus on the energies within you will become as light and as God; if you focus on the external world you will remain trapped in a mundane life no matter how exciting or boring that life may be. You will have missed the God within you.

There are no rituals here.  There is no real reading to be done here, because you are the book that you should be reading.  But you will need help from time to time of a guide or fellow traveler to help you explore that which you cannot yet see or feel. 

There are no repetitive practices such as visualizing Chakras with symbols, no pranayama to be combined with visualization of moving energies around, all of these are artificial, and are only aids to focusing the feeling attention within.  But if you attend to the energies inside of you, the feelings inside of you, the emotions inside of you, there is absolutely no need for pranayama, imaginings symbols within, or imagining the kundalini rising than the spine.  All will be revealed naturally just by self-exploration, and by loving your beloved, your lover, your soulmate, your God, your guru. 

Such love must be filled with yearning to be together, to be as one, to integrate every aspect of your subtle body, emotions, and especially sexuality along with the energies.  Sexuality has such power to add, that its use is essential in integrating your entire Subtle Body, making it one pointed, and thus able to manifest through you consciously.  Sex is the great glue, even though the physical act of intercourse may never take place.  It is necessary to feel sexual yearning for the other in order to bring all of your powers together at one time one pointedly toward your beloved in order to discover the divinity within them, so that you can discover it in yourself.  This is the easiest way that exists to create the intense focus needed tp allow the divine to show itself to you.  You could practice meditation for 20 years and not gain the single-pointed focus needed to finish the task.

This is the revolutionary spirituality I bring to you, one with a minimum of mystical terms, which remain mystical only until you actually feel emotions, sensations, energies, and the Life Force within you.  Then they are not mystical terms at all, you know them as direct experience of yourself.  But all the other crazy mystical terms like the divine feminine, Shiva, Shakti, the Hindu pantheon, Hindu cosmology, reincarnation, predestination, karma, Vasanas are all seen as illusion, a made up artificial reality of concepts and really explain nothing; they do not touch you as God.

What I can do to assist you, is to use words to make you feel those things within yourself while you listen to me.  In a sense, even while I am feeling the life force within me it speaks through me to you.  Life’s messenger to Life’s receivers. As it speaks to you through me you will feel the Life Force within you.  While I powerfully feel the life force that within me, while we are in Satsang, or while you think of me, awareness of that Life Force will begin to take place within you out of resonance with me.  This is how the Life Force communicates itself: words, music, and resonance.

By attending to me, listening to what I say, two things will be happening: the words spoken through me to you will permeate your consciousness and focus your attention to areas within yourself that will reveal the subtle body within you; and, by having a feeling contact with me, the life force will begin to resonate within you as your own experience. 

It will feel like magic, sometimes like I am casting a spell over you that permeates every particle of your being, but it is not this entity Ed that is doing it, but it is life itself doing it through me.  You do not really need me if you can do it by yourself, but if you cannot, I am both an anchor and a beacon to your realization of yourself as divine.

SATSANG SUNDAY FEBRUARY 25, AT 11 AM ARIZONA TIME.

TOPIC: STYLES OF TEACHING, AND THE TWO MOST IM,POFTANT CHAKRAS FOR SELF-REALIZATION.  PLEASE COME EARLY.

LINK:  Link: https://zoom.us/j/2950292557?pwd&status=success

The New Spirituality Sheds Old Concepts and is Raw

There are many teachers who are essentially salesmen.  They may have some true teachings, but their intent is to build a following.  Therefore, they want to alienate no one and attract everyone.  They are politically correct.  They say no evil.  They are very polite using high-minded terms and speaking of an elevated morality when they know that the true teachings have nothing to do with morality or high-minded terms.  They are all sweetness and light on the surface, but hide their darkness below fine clothes, flowers and rituals.  This is the type of guru that people invite home to dinner with family.  He is acceptable to nearly everyone.

But there is another kind of teacher, like Nisargadatta.  Nisargadatta said that his way is to shake people up, to offend their sensibilities, to shock them so that they look at their concepts and wonder if they are true.  He is a shocker, a revolutionary, an insurgent, and in a sense a murderer of the concepts of who you think you are.  No one will invite this kind of guru to the family dinner because he is not acceptable to polite society and will be very disruptive.  There is a great deal of breaking energy with this type of guru.

Let me just say that very few students invite me to the family dinner.  So many spiritual students want just sweetness and light, and want no disruptive forces or darkness, which they consider as bad or not elevating.

Let me put all of spirituality and make it very simple for you.  There are a billion steps I will leave out before you can arrive at this truth for yourself.  But here it is:

First, through meditation and self-inquiry into the feeling sense of I am, one gets to know emptiness, also known as the Great Void.  And there you need to dwell for some time becoming fully aware of both the void and that which witnesses the void, the subject, the unchanging absolute within, also known as Nothingness.

Then begins the return into the body and becoming aware of the subtle body, the energy body, and most importantly love and sex.

This is where things begin to get messy, because the energy body is very complicated and subtle.  But spirituality at this point is basically about love and sex, because the heart chakra and the root chakra of sexuality are the primary energies pervading everyone’s life and society. 

For the popular guru, sexuality is to be kept under wraps, and spoken of in very roundabout ways such as the man must love the essence of women as embodiments of Ma Kali, while women must worship men as embodiments of Shiva.  But this is just a polite way of saying that the essence of men worships the essence of women and vice versa.  There is a strong pull, a huge attraction between the two sexes and their essences.  But no one wants to speak about the sex because that is hidden behind find words about Shiva, Kali, and worshiping of God.

But the truth is every human is an incarnation of one aspect of God, which I call the Life Force, which Robert called the power that knows the way, which is basically how life manifests itself in the world, forms relations, and creates each person’s destiny and genetics.  This same life force can be directly felt as a separate body within an about your physical body.  Some refer to this as the subtle body, or as one’s sense of presence.  It is a direct awareness of subtle energies associated with your physical body but separate from it, and in this sense, is more you than your physical body or mind.  It is more intimate than either.  It is more powerful than either.  It is where your true life lies, and where the life force manifest through you.

This subtle body has many centers which may be referred to as chakras.  Some systems posit seven chakras some 13.  But there are many more than that.  However, some of the most important energy complexes are associated with one sex organs and sexuality, the hara, or low belly, where once physical power originates from as well as will and sustaining effort, then there is the heart chakra, which when opened completely bursts and explodes in love, devotion, worship and surrender.  The feeling is one has become totally empty of body and mind, and is released into the pure space of devotion and submission to God’s will.

The next most important chakra is the third eye, an inch above the physical eyes in between them, and an inch into your skull.  Opening of this Chuck reveals the light of consciousness, which pervades the subtle body and soaks it in light, as well as pervades the innerspace one experiences as the void.

However, spirituality at this level is all about the relationship between the sexes, between men and women and the way to realize the life force through love, devotion, worship, and sexuality.  These two centers together, the sexual center reinforces and strengthens the bonding of the heart center opening.  Or is one of my close students once said, “It is all about sexuality is not it?”  Well, it was for her at the time she said it, but it is about a combination of openhearted love exploding inside your soul, in combination with the sexual energy which provides the bond between two people in love.  When these are combined perfectly so that they are a unity, you have realized God as the life force and as you.  In a sense, you become God by identifying with the life force instead of with your body, or your mind. 

There is a lot that can be said about the state of unification of these two energies.  The power is overwhelming.  You just fall to your knees and then forward onto your face, arms outstretched in submission, in surrender, and into worship of the life force in another.  The life force in you worships the life force in the other.  You are totally unified within one energy worshiping another’s energy, and thereby receiving the energy in the other, you also perceive it in yourself.  This is how the self is realized by realizing the life force in another person and recognizing you have that same life force within you that same aspect of God.

But because of societies burying sexuality under taboos of speaking or doing, very few teachers can express this truth directly and openly, and instead bury this truth under flowery Hindu or New Age concepts that hide the rawness of the power of the erupted heart combined with erupted sexuality.  Or else they hide their relationships with students regarding their teachings and practice of sexuality.  Thus arise all the scandals about gurus having sex with their male and female students. The rawness and the power is unbelievable, and therefore it is kept under wraps because of the destruction it can possibly cause unless guided carefully.

Osho failed in this manner because when he unleashed sexuality within his Sangha it became no more than masturbation with another, rather than being combined with a totally open heart.  He did not know how to teach unification of these two energies.  And when sexuality was unleashed without unification with the heart, it became destructive and destroyed his Sangha in drugs, and criminality.  This is why society represses open sexuality.  It can destroy without the heart connection.

Let me also say, that it is not necessary to actually engage in physical sex with another, but it is necessary to feel these energies and combine them with one's heart energy.  But it is all about relationship, not being lost only in yourself.

Becoming as a god

I was speaking to one of my students yesterday about the great progress he had been making, about his ability to sense nuances within his energy field, locating the various chakras, and the subtle differences in the ever changing fields within, as well as his ability to be able to read emotions in himself as well as in others.  The latter ability is often lacking in spiritual teachers that focus solely on energies, as there is a difference between the energies and emotions, even though essentially they are one.  In someone who is studied emotions for a long while, the onset of awareness of energies makes them appear entirely different, yet learning the subtleties of the various energy fields is much easier because of a prior openness to nuances and emotions.

To which he resisted, stating, My feeling the energies are all due to you, you are constantly flaming me, filling me with your energies.  If not for that, I would not be feeling these energies.”

I told him the energies you feel are entirely yours.  You are empathically feeling in yourself my energy and emotional state, I am not projecting any energies into you.  Your awareness of what is in me creates a simultaneous awareness of similar states and you.  Your first aware of energies and emotions in me, which you discover in yourself, and then they become entirely yours.  After that, there is a dance between our separate energy and emotional fields, there is not simply empathy anymore, but a recognition of our separateness, and are separate energy, emotional, and physical fields, and the dance between them.

Also I said, without you I would have no energies to give.  Without you I would not have someone to love, and no energies would arise.  In a vacuum, I would have nothing.  So you make the situation for energies to arise, and subsequently they are kindled in your own heart.  The flame in my heart kindles your heart and vice versa.  We are both equally responsible for the processes occurring in the two of us, as well as in the Satsang as a whole.

I told him, most teachers are satisfied to bring their disciples into enlightenment.  Nisargadatta said he does not just enlighten is students, but he wants to make gurus.  I take this one step further, I take my students into being as gods, because I make them feel the God within themselves, and when they feel the Life Force as themselves, they gain unlimited access to energies and forces they need to learn how to control and make useful in the world.  So, all that I want for you is to know yourself as God, as an incarnation of the Life Force.  When you understand this, when you know it with your entire being this, you become fearless, and you own the earth and all around you.  This is how it feels: this whole universe is yours.  All you have to learn to do is to use it.

Have you ever experienced a moment in your life where you feel you have been touched by God?  Have you ever felt like falling to your knees before the awesome presence of the divine, perhaps in seeing the Grand Canyon, or being in a temple, or listening to a Bach mass?  Is it not that moment that you keep searching for, to have it again forever.

It is that moment that I am trying to take you to, trying to tell you that you can obtain this divinity, this rest in your own divine self, this discovery of yourself through total, surrendered, worship of another, whether it be a  Buddha, Jesus guru, or a lover.

When you bow before that other, when we love more deeply than life itself, when you bow your head to the floor and worship her or him, and feel such grace at being given the opportunity to worship another, you are beginning to know yourself as the divine, because when you worship God in this way in another, you know yourself as God also, as the Life Force that lives in all things, moves all mortal beings unerringly towards the ecstasy of realizing itself in another and thereby experiencing that same Life force that is yourself, as yourself.

In total surrender to the other, in total worship of the other, and becoming totally nothing except love of the other, you are in a place to finally realize God as the other.  You fall down to your knees, then flat on your face, holding the feet of your beloved, the divine rushes into you, the bliss and grace descend into you, and you are completely fulfilled, nothing left to do except lie flat on your face touching God’s foot.  You finally arrived at what you always wanted.  You have come face-to-face with God, and thereby have been transformed yourself into the divine.

This was my realization while sitting side-by-side with my Beloved next to a golf course in Sun City Arizona.  I as a person became God by worshiping her.  I was filled with enormous power and at the same time was a complete slave to this goddess whose presence gave me a new life.

Magic and Identity

From my viewpoint, spirituality is all about FEELING. If your method of trying to understand yourself is not based on feeling, then you are either using your mind, or witnessing the visual mode of perception, whether of inner worlds, or of the external world. Using vision, one can only understand nothingness or emptiness a.k.a. the Void. Knowing the void leads to Nirvana or escape from the world, escape from sense data, emotions, and inner energies, all of which are found through feeling.

The teachings of Robert Adams, Nisargadatta, and Ramana are more or less all based on seeing, nothingness, consciousness, and emptiness. Even this seeing method is far more powerful than what can be accomplished by the mind.

But my way after 40 years of Advaita in Zen, is the way of Bhakti, of feeling, of loving, devotion, and feeling emotions, feeling, feeling, feeling. Feel everything! Lie outside under the stars in your back looking upward into space feeling the cold ground under you, and the starry sky above. Listen to the sounds around you, of crickets and things moving on the ground. Feel the wind on your face. Then turn within and feel within for your heart. By turning within and finding your heart, you begin to develop one’s own sense of presence, becoming aware of your own energy field within you and about you.

Then you begin feeling bliss and love, you become sensitive to electromagnetic currents associated with the earth’s magnetic field as well as electricity flowing through wires. You can see in the darkest of night because somehow your vision is enhanced. You can feel energies in your fingers that go out into the world. You touch the world with your skin and your skin reacts. You can feel the flowing energies arising from your sexuality upwards into your gut, upwards further into the heart where they spin and turn, and course even further upwards into the head and brain. Then you truly understand the power of sexuality and of love, because it has totally opened your being to feeling in the world, emoting in the world, and being able to articulate your feeling-understanding. In a sense you become a witch or a warlock, sensing things that no others can see, sensing external energies and changes in the environment intuitively.

Image is from Warner Brothers King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Brilliant depiction of magic.

You will be able to look at another person’s face and know completely who and what they are, and what the slightest movement of their mouth may indicate about changes in their inner state. Become a magician. Learn to feel! It is all about feeling everything, and understanding everything directly without the mediation of the mind.

Satsang, Sunday, February 18, 11 AM, Arizona time.

https://zoom.us/j/2950292557?pwd&amp%3Bstatus=success

THE WHITE HOUSE: A RATS NEST OF CRIMINALS AND SPIES.

THE WHITE HOUSE: A RAT'S NEST OF CRIMINALS AND SPIES?

Last week we heard for the first time that between 20 and 30 employees in the West Wing of the White House had not been cleared for permanent security clearance.  Today we hear something even more frightening: 130 employees in the White House staff have not obtained permanent security status.

We know that this president has a penchant to select cronies that have a criminal past to comport with his own sleazy tendencies.  He selects people as dangerous as he is to the security of our country.  We know that many of these 130 will never be able to obtain top-secret security clearance because of criminal pasts, financial problems, or association with Russians who are attempting to influence our government.  How many of these 130 are Putin-selected?  How many Russian assets are included in this group of 130 that have not been able to obtain final clearance by the FBI?  How many are wife beaters?  How many have been convicted of major crimes in the past, such as money laundering, blackmail, or other white-collar crime?  How many are out right spies for Russia?

These people have been granted continuous access to top-secret information and processes by one man alone: Donald Trump, our criminal president.  That is, they did not pass the FBI protocol for one reason or another, but the president keeps them on because he alone clears them for their White House duties.

It was announced today that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner will never obtain permanent security clearance because of their associations with Russians and smelly business practices.

Why does this Republican-controlled Congress not do anything even as our country is being taken over by the Russians and by a criminal element?  How can they stand themselves when they look in the mirror or even avoid looking into a mirror for fear of what they will see?

On Becoming a Person

Satsang, Sunday, February 11, 11 AM, Arizona time.

https://zoom.us/j/2950292557?pwd&status=success

Other than Robert, the most powerful male being I ever met was Carl Rogers.  Rogers wrote the book On Becoming a Person in 1961. 

This is also what I teach, but not become a person from immaturity, but II teach those who have gone beyond the human into realms of emptiness, the void, the sense of presence and energies, to come back and be a human again.  I teach people how to love each other again as separate human beings, with separate sets of emotions, energies, and needs, yet with all of us having God live through us as Shakti, the power that knows the way which you can feel in your everyday life as the Life Force in you.

This way you have everything.  You have love for another, marriage, whether spiritual or literal, utter devotion to your other, worshiping your other, surrendering to her or him.  But you also feel Emptiness, the Void, the Life Force in you, the divine in you, and that divine is the same in everyone. You see it, you feel it, you hear it, and you can taste it in everyone.  You taste you and everyone, and you worship you and everyone.

Each week I try to sink you deeper into the Life Force and into your emotions.  I try to make you reincarnate as a bringer of love and God down-to-earth.  I teach you how to feel God in you.  I teach you how to feel love for another and for yourself, because the best way to love yourself, is to love someone else first, and recognize that love you have for other is YOUR OWN LOVE.

Satsang February 4, 2017 Seer Versus Feeler Spirituality

For the sake of understanding, spirituality can be divided into visual and tactile, seeing or feeling.

A seeing emphasis is mind and brain oriented, and can lead to deep silence, the Void, nothingness, peace, understanding. This approach is negative, passive, quietistic, and leads to classical enlightenments of Advaita and some forms of Theravadin Buddhism.  This approach is solipsistic, self-involved.

A feeling emphasis leads to owning both our bodies and the energies, pleasures, and pains that are part of life.  This approach is affirmative, positive, active, energetic, and leads to living fully as an incarnation of impersonal forces which our individuals body/minds make personal and meaningful.  This approach can be entirely solipsistic or relational.

LINK:  https://youtu.be/b-9JJQsycIA

   Every mortal will taste death,  

 but few mortals really taste life.

Most live in their minds, their expectations, their conventions, and their beliefs,

Accept the fact that you are alive and live in and through your body and your sense of presence. You are mortal, temporary, then become nothingness.

This is a take off from a Rumi quote.

Satsang Sunday February 4, 11 am Arizona time.

Subject is the usual, self realization of the Manifest Self, Shakti, the Life Force, the active rather than passive aspect of God (Consciousness).

Link: https://zoom.us/j/2950292557?pwd&status=success

Recently I got a lot of blowback by people who think will I was too highly critical of Robert Adams and his teachings.  They did not understand what I was saying.  He was my teacher.  I loved him.  I followed him and I believe him, and I came to his kind of enlightenment in 1995, which he acknowledged.

First of all, there is no such thing as truth.  All religious ideas, all spiritual ideas, and even all spiritual methods flow out of a belief system, that itself, at one point, flowed out of the experiences of a specific spiritual figure, such as Ramana or Robert Adams.  Then they had to explain what their current experience was, what it meant, and how to get there. 

Ramana’s Advaita Vedanta belief system had one specific and, which was to bring peace to the believer, both through the words about what states of consciousness can be attained by practicing certain methods, such as becoming increasingly silent or through self inquiry, but also by providing a belief system that says you should only focus on yourself, that the world is not exist, your body is not real, it is an idea, or it is an illusion.  Robert stated not to pay much attention to the world, or to your situational problems, or to your emotional state, and especially pay no attention to your mind, and absolutely try to quiet the mind, or to find the gap between thoughts, which he called silence, which he called what you really are.

Robert and Ramana’s whole belief system and methodology were to bring peace to suffering people, people who thought they wanted to go beyond the world, thought they were done with the world, who were suffering because of their situation in the world, or because of their own mental states an overly busy mind.

Advaita’s whole approaches to bring peace.  But is it worth totally accepting their belief system, that the world is an illusion, you are an illusion, that the self you think you are, is only an idea, that your real nature is silence or bare consciousness?  This is what this belief system gives you, silence and peace.  But that certainly is not all of spirituality, there are different systems that seekers and practitioners two different kinds of experiences, different kinds of awakenings, such as finding God within oneself, finding the Lifeforce within oneself, or finding Shakti as oneself, energies as oneself.

This is what my teachings are aimed at and I minimize the need for a belief system or an explanation of the nature of reality, believing all of those ideas are really not helpful for understanding what you are, because they all provide very narrow definitions of what you are, in order to get you away from fear of death, and from your own internal suffering.

For example, they may tell you, you are not a body or mind or human being, you are consciousness itself.  Or you are awareness yourself.  But what does this belief give you except an idea that you try to make your own through various spiritual practices or just by, as Nisargadatta said, accepting the truth, believing the truth, which will set you free.

Nisargadatta said the sense of being alive, of being a mortal, of being I am, is an illusion.  Why is it illusion?  For him it is an illusion because it is temporary, transient, a small happening in infinite time, and not sustained by its own existence, but requires consciousness to have this experience.  This is a denial of the reality or the worth of being a human being, the idea being that this is a very narrow state itself being a human, and requires the mind to believe that.  What Nisargadatta requires you to believe that first year the totality of consciousness, and then you are the nothingness that witnesses consciousness.  This is a different kind of narrowing, because nothingness cannot be perceived you can only be it, therefore you are already enlightened if you accept the idea that you are nothingness which cannot be experienced.

Do not you see, this is another escape to peace?

But like Jesus, I say I have not come to bring you peace, but to bring you a sword!  I come to show you God within yourself, the life force, the power within yourself, the light within yourself, your sense of presence which is an energetic body within and without that is more real than your physical body, and it does not require a belief system, it just requires a simple practice of a special kind of self-inquiry by feeling within yourself for the Lifeforce felt first sometimes as an electric spark somewhere in the area of the chest or in the gut, and sometimes between the eyes as the third eye.  Once you find it, abide there, stay with it, focus on it and bring it into your heart.

Or you can listen to sacred music, Kirtans or Bhajans, or what other music moves you, moves your heart, opens your heart.

Lastly, you can have this self-realization of yourself as the divine by falling in love with somebody or something to this degree that you totally worship that someone or something, surrendered to that something, drop to your knees and worship that someone or something.  Love that someone or something with all your might, all your will, with your entire mind, and your entire heart.  Do this for a period of time and you will discover that you are love itself, that the feelings of worship and surrender, will bring the Lifeforce to you as an experience within yourself, and you will find you are this life force, this energy behind all of existence that runs the world and the universe.

This approach, this belief system is relational, and it does not require you to have any beliefs other than that your body and the other person are real, and not to be ignored.  You do not even have to believe that love will bring you to self-realization, it is the truth, and will happen to you if you love strongly enough.

Cannot you see how this kind of spirituality is better not only for the person, because it allows them to be productive and satisfied in the world, but is better for the world as a whole because it is relational, not solipsistic, or totally self-involved.

The experience of this kind of self realization is unlike any other.  It is an explosion of love, bliss, white light, and a sense of enormous power within that is your constant companion, first experienced as an “other,” and that is realized also to be the self.  After this for a long, long time to move with the constant companion of God within, feeling lists, power, and divine knowledge guiding you.

The Great Spiritual Flim Flam Game

Zen master Seung Sahn said you must become dumb as a rock, meaning see directly, feel directly, act directly, without the intermediary of thoughts or thinking or of ideas.  Depend only on your own self. 

Krishnamurti said do not depend on any external teacher or guru.  You have no idea where they got their teaching.  It could have been from their own experience, or passed on information as part of a book or from their teacher without having any corresponding experiences.  Also, the teachings may be idiosyncratic, applicable only to them, and not to others with different dispositions and experience.

Robert Adams said, “You do not exist, the world is not real, everything comes from mind, everything is a dream, everything is an optical illusion, ignore your problems, your body is not real, ignore the world because it is not real, everything is preordained, you can change nothing.”  “Instead believe you are consciousness itself.”

You see, Robert was selling his own philosophy of reality which he got from Ramana Maharshi.  Their story is this: you are not a human being, do not identify with your body, do not identify with your thoughts your mind, do not identify with waking consciousness or sleep consciousness, do not identify or be bothered by your emotions or your situation in life, because you can do nothing because it is all preordained and you have nothing to do with it anyway because you do not exist.  Your only true existence is as the totality of consciousness.  You are that.

You see, Robert and Ramana say throw away all that you believe yourself to be, body, mind, emotions, family, wife or husband, and instead become aware of awareness and of consciousness, become aware of the emptiness between your various thoughts, or the gap when you first wake up but the mind has not started.  This gap, this space, this silence, is what you are, the substance from which all things come.  Ignore everything else, only the listen to and feel silence, the gap, the emptiness between thoughts and all things.  Drop your present identification as a human, and instead identify with that.  With that new identification will come in peace, total happiness, and immortality.

All these teachings, Seung Sahn, Krishnamurti, Robert Adams, Ramana, Nisargadatta, all teach you to leave the mind alone, stop the mind or ignore your mind, but they really give no methods other than to understand that your mind is the problem that to do various kinds of self- inquiry and meditation.  But if you can begin to silence the mind, much of what people call suffering will stop, but you still will not be enlightened or awakened.  For that, you have to get much deeper into your body through sinking your attention into your heart, and thereby ending the significance of your mind.

Robert’s and Ramana’s teachings for people who are in great suffering, as was Buddha after he discovered disease, death, starvation, and war, or more likely for people that are constantly bothered by their minds and thinking, it can give rapid peace.  But it is not enlightenment it is only stopping the mind.  Buddha went off into the desert to the forests, seeking some way to end all kinds of suffering and found it after seven years of intense efforts, starvation, and physical abuse, by finding the middle way, a path to peace through ending all ambition, all attachments, all pleasures, all sufferings.  You see this was deeper than merely stopping the mind, he said you must get rid of all human desire and attachments, what Hindu philosophy calls Vasanas.

In other words, Robert is also for people who seek escape from the world by escaping into a belief system that is totally incomprehensible to most.  Strive to become nothing, strive to have no attachments, strive to be absolutely silent, strive to know yourself by questioning everything, including who you are, and thereby in any idea of who you are.

Now there are other teachings which are not nearly so negative, and these teachings I give now.  In a way, I feel I am cleaning up after my own teachers, Robert Adams, and Nisargadatta Maharaj to have gone a long way towards creating the neoAdvaitin dominant presence in contemporary spirituality. Yes, they gave a lot of peace to suffering people, and they taught people how to get out of their minds, their truths depended on accepting only one part of yourself as the totality of yourself.  They taught you are only consciousness, or you are the void, or you are emptiness, or you are silence, or you are nothingness as did Nisargadatta, and as such, as a generic experience, or generic lack of experience, you are immortal.  This is an escape from suffering by means of accepting a philosophy regarding the nature of human existence, and ignoring all but one small part of that totality, even though it may be a very significant part, such as consciousness or the void.

The truth is you are all of these things.  You are your body.  You are your mind.  You are your emotions.  You are emptiness or the void.  You are your energetic sense of presence.  You are your relationships with others, they also help to define you.  You are your family and tribe as well as your race and nationality.  Accept all of these things as you.  You also are awareness, consciousness, nothingness, the absolute, and most wondrous of all, God.

I teach you how to know God within yourself, to feel your own divinity arising within your sense of presence within you.

I teach several methods.  The first is to listen to sacred using, kirtan, and bhajans.  They will still the mind and will open your heart and allow you to find emptiness inside, possibly also love.

The second method is to practice “correct self-inquiry self- inquiry means to “feel” inside your chest or inside your four head for that spark of life that makes you you.  Feel that inside of you which makes you feel alive.  You may have to feel for quite some time, and your first experience may be like small electric spark somewhere inside your chest.  Or it might appear as a light inside your head or brain.  When you find that spark in your chest, feel it, and stay there, and they can grow.

That spark feeling, the sense of I am, will gradually grow and become a sense of presence, like an energy field throughout the inside of your body and extending outward a few inches or a few feet into the world.  I call this energy body, my sense of presence, and within that sense of presence you will begin to feel all kinds of energies flowing, and a sense of presence will feel more real to you than your physical body.

Eventually that sense of presence will be filled with energies, and feelings of bliss, and with a sense of love and openness, that will be conducive to the experience of the divine within yourself.

In any event, even after briefly practicing this way for a few months, your center of your attention, or as Sasaki Roshi said, your center of gravity, will drop into your heart or even lower into your gut.  When your attention drops into your heart, eventually your heart will open up feel such wondrous space and relief, as if you have escape from the prison to a wide open space.  You will no longer be bothered by the mind because your sense of presence will be not centered around your mind anymore, but your heart, your emotions, your tenderness, your feelings, and you will live from your heart not your mind.

The third method I teach is to find something or someone to love, and to love it, or him, or her, with all your might, all your strength, with a totally open heart, surrendered to that other in divine relationship, and worshiping that other.  If you can do this totally, where nothing matters to you in life except loving that person or object, all of the things I have outlined above in methods one and two, will be given to you spontaneously, as it is coming out of nowhere, but indeed coming from your own inner self, from that God within you, who reveals himself to you, by means of loving another.  You recognize that all that drama, love, devotion, worship and surrender that you have for the other, is really a story and energy process within you, which is God itself which you have not realized in yourself before, and realize now except through loving another.

This method of loving another is far more Western than the other methods.  It is relational, not just so solipsistic, self-involved like listening to Kirtan, or feeling into your chest for the Lifeforce, both of which can be extremely valuable, but neither of which is as quick or as powerful as the experiences that can come to finding God within you through loving another.  This method is also far, far more joyful, and with far more drama and suffering, which allows you to be a stronger presence within the world.