I received today a disappointing communication from a long
time swami friend. He said that what I
am teaching should be done secretly as in his tradition of Kashmir shamanism and
swami Muktananda. Otherwise, I would have
to label myself as a teacher of tantra, otherwise my teachings would cause
great confusion and danger to me and my students.
In other words, if I miss-label the category of teacher I
fall into, my teachings will not be grasped, because apparently students follow
teachers depending on their teaching label attached, or offer criticisms or
salutations based on the consistency whatever I am offering with teachings compared
to some wisdom teachers such as Nisargadatta, or some tantra teachers such as
swami Etceternanda.
But the teachings I am offering now are purely my own, based
on my own experience, based on 50 years of various spiritual practices, and
also 30 years of having functioned in the capacity as a psychotherapist under
other psychologists’ licenses. A great
deal of my teachings are based on understanding emotions, emotional bondings
and relationships.
In 1995 under my teacher Robert Adams, I realized the nature
of the totality of consciousness and that I resided outside totality
consciousness, and thus could be called the Absolute, the Witness, or the
Unborn. For 15 years after that I just watched
what was going on around me and within me, impassively, fascinated by the void
which was the container of all experience.
Then in 2009 I met a woman who loved me deeply and I loved
her. She brought me out of the Void, and
allowed me to reincarnate, to re--own my incarnation as a human being, with the
body, with an energy body, with the subtle body, with a sense of presence, with
emotions, and where everything was always changing within and without. There is no solidity anymore. Words really were only caricatures for
processes that the meanings did not capture at all. All teachings were false because there was a
truth more subtle than the mind can grasp, and the meaning of words could
convey.
What I learned in relationship with this woman, who I loved
with an intensity that could be called desperation, who I surrendered my life
to, and worshiped, and allowed me to love her and be loved by her with an
intensity neither of us had known before.
That love was so great, it could no longer be called human love, can
only be called divine. In loving in that
divine fashion, it became so complete that I identified with love itself. Weeks after I identified with love itself,
within my sense of me, as an aspect of God which I call after Nisargadatta, the
Love Force, revealed itself to me in an explosion of light, energy, and infinite
power, that made me fall to my knees in utter humility of the power of God,
feeling his greatness, his power, and his life.
Later I was to reidentify that and recognize that life force within me
as the true me, I was the Life Force, I was life itself which inhabited and
played through my physical body.
Now my relationship with this woman was extremely intense,
as she was an extremely intense person.
We lived thousands of miles apart and we met maybe three or four times
physically, and we never had sex. But we
both felt extreme sexual desire, between both of us, for an extended period,
and the power of this intense sexual feeling energized every other aspect of
felt awareness of being alive. But even
more importantly we really owned the rest of our incarnation including our
bodies with all of its health and physical issues, the tactile sensations
within the body, the energy body that lives within the body and around the body
which I call my sense of Presence.
The world within is entirely different from the external
world. The world within consists of the
Void, or an empty container that is experience as space, which contains all
experiences from thoughts, to emotions, to sexual feelings, to physical pain,
as well as energies throughout the body and various complexes which some people
call Chakras. I do not use that term as
it is too narrow and conveys a certain yogic philosophy with the meanings
associated that way. I can only describe
them so as not to mix characterize them as” energy complexes” of a kind in of
felt experience of inner flowing and static energies, that sometimes flow, some
signs are static, and sometimes be so intense that they feel like your body is
going to explode. These energies are
known by various terms like prana, Chi, kundalini, Shakti, and probably 100
different terms depending upon the ancient tradition you are referring to.
But when these energies awaken inside of you, spontaneously,
due to your extraordinary love of another person, including vast amounts of
sexual energy, as well as feelings of total surrender to your Beloved, so much
so that you feel like you are in the presence of God, there is no need for
labels like Shakti, kundalini or prana.
Losing those labels allows you to feel the energies and a totally free
way without preconception as to how they are to be felt or experienced. For example, this woman had an enormous
number of continuous orgasms that were not only felt in her genitals, but far
more often were felt in other areas or energy complexes in her body, such as associated
with pure love and heart openings. Most
of the orgasms were heart-oriented, or total systemic, even though sexual
images may have happened during the orgasms.
In other words, there are many kinds of orgasms, and the
ones associated with physical sex are one class only. But there are classes of orgasms that have
nothing to do with physical touch or physical sensation, that originate purely
out of love and surrender towards the other, and these orgasms are different,
not grounded in the body, but originating within the subtle body and
deeper. But even using terms like subtle
body, is to describe it in terms of an ancient catechism, and ancient way of
viewing human experience under some sort of religious or yogic system, which confines
and restrains experience to conceptual system.
I have found that these orgasms, often mistakenly associated sexual images
and physicality, can be so powerful that they will open up other energy centers
throughout the whole subtle body, and associated with other parts of the
physical body, like the heart, with a heart opening, and in the middle before
head, the third eye, which initiates inner vision of light and colors associated
with the energy body within.
However, any time orgasms and sexuality are mentioned,
immediately they are branded as falling within one’s own understanding of sex, judged based on their past experience, and
increasingly with social norms about sex, as opposed to what the yogi means by
orgasms as energies or love that pervades the entire body. When one begins to feel the energies, they
begin to transform, becoming both more subtle and powerful at the same time,
into a constant feeling of bliss as the whole body is in ecstasy from the
dancing energies within. But these
energies, the energy body interacts with the feeling body, with emotions, and
in a sense, emotions are just another form of energy, and one can watch the
interplay between emotions, such as sadness, anger, fear, grief, and
loneliness, with bliss, energies coursing throughout the whole body and between
organs, as well as ones felt experience of the other, your Beloved.
In other words, if one feels grief or sadness strongly, and
allows that feeling to just be there, and you actually accept it and allow it
into your heart of hearts, the most vulnerable and sensitive part of your
subtle body, you will find that those emotions transform into a river of bliss,
a river of very subtle energies that feel like a gentle breeze or sometimes
like pure running water, which bring great happiness and make you feel more
powerful because the energy of these emotions have been transformed into the
field of energies. After a while you
begin to identify yourself with the energies which comprise your sense of
presence which is always within you and around you, and you no longer identify
with your physical body.
But your physical body is your only vehicle really, is the
host for all the other bodies within you all the other experiences within you
from sexuality, heart openings, to all the centers in the subtle body, your
mind, to your emotions, to your inner feelings of physical organs within, and
your actual sense of being alive, also called the I Am.
But to realize yourself as life itself, ironically, it means
you have to first realize yourself as a body, as a physical body, as a human,
with all the feelings, energies, and emotions, and relational needs that being
a human being entails. Without knowing
yourself as a body, the desires of the body, the physical needs of the body,
the relational needs of the human, then you will never know yourself as life as
opposed to the insensate body.
That is, you have to completely own yourself as a mortal
first. You have to explore your inner
world completely, including all the energies within, all the desires within,
one’s own sexuality within, and you have to give up your mind and just be
broadly and acutely aware of the sensations of being alive, because if you hang
onto your mind, you will be living within a myth superimposed on all your
experiences as being an incarnated being.
You will be living in the conventionality imposed by civilization,
culture, and whatever spiritual/religious system you adhere to, and all experiences
will be judged, and convicted according to that system. You will have no freedom to experience it as
it really is, but you will experience it according to the systems you have
incorporated in yourself or been given by her teacher or by your culture. You will have no freedom at all except to
live within that system and hide the parts that do not fit in that system.
Thus conventions and cultures destroy people and robs them
of their freedom, and the only way you can get to that freedom is by fully
feeling and living your life, and for me, I have found in my own experience,
that the only escape to being a real, free human being is to give up all
concepts, all systems, all cultural constraints, and to love some one person
with all your heart, all your mind, all your spirit and surrender to that
person, worship that person, and serve that person.
Is this not the way of Christianity? Is it the way to God through loving Jesus because
he is an incarnation of God?
But if you take my point of view,
that life itself is an aspect of God, and that insofar as we are life within a
body, we are incarnated, we are incarnate, we are living within an insensate
body as an incarnation of the divine as was Jesus. Thus each man becomes a
Jesus and each woman, a Mary. This is the correct understanding. It is not necessary to have sexual relations,
but sexuality must be completely awakened, and this requires mind, emotions,
love, surrender, and worship as one would with Jesus.
One must love your Beloved with all
your power, all your strength, in complete submission and worship. When you can do this, when you can become
completely committed, completely focused with all your energies bought into
balance and oneness with your Beloved, then you will realize yourself as the Life
Force, an incarnation of the divine.
To do this you have to feel totally every aspect of your
individuality in relationship to your Beloved, including intense sexuality,
intense devotion, intense love, intense humility, and surrender. The sexuality has such power that it awakens
the other energy centers within your sense of presence, hastening your
awakening to yourself as an aspect of God, as the divine, and recognition of
yourself as an incarnation.
Which means you have to have an intense sexual relationship
with your Beloved even though it may never be consummated physically. Awakening the sexual center gives all the
other complexes within your sense of presence and expanding energy, it breaks
up all contractions within, and you become fully alive, fully consumed by love,
and by sexual desire that powers it.
But when I talk about the need to awaken the sexuality, to
allow yourself to have continuous multiple orgasms in various areas of your
body which is really a sense of presence within your body, and not necessarily
associated with the vagina or penis, I am in danger of being condemned unless I
identify myself as a Tantric teacher.
I am not. I have no
tradition. I speak from my experience
using words not captured by any system such as tantra, Kashmir Shaivism,
Advaita Vedanta, kundalini sutras. I am
myself alone, speaking of my own experience in ways I would use as would a
psychologist, and in entirely new ways that were burst forth from me out of my
relationship with my own Beloved. Ecstatic
sex, especially where actual physical relations are not involved, but sex
within the subtle bodies of the two people involved, is far more intense than
anything your physical body will give you.
There may be a lot of imagination of physical contact which sets off
orgasms parts of the body other than the genitals, so the mind is engaged in a
visioning process which stimulates activities within the energy body. The mind, the internal energies, emotions,
and tactile sensations all interplay with each other in an internal dance of
transformation of one kind of experience into another on a continuously
changing basis.
In addition, there is a dance between the two Beloveds, the
energy fields between the two, constantly dance and touch each other over a
great distance, and emotions are triggered, and emotions also trigger changes
in the energy fields, including sexual sensations.
There is no such thing as higher consciousness or lower
consciousness. There are just
experiences and interpretations of those experiences, or experiences felt
totally without interpretations of what they mean or what category they fall
into such as sex or heart, or mind, or energy.
I ask you to give up all understanding and go with the words I am giving
you, I want to share my energy with you whatever that is. I want to share my sense of being, the life
force in me as it speaks to you. It
affects the tone of my voice. It affects
its cadence. It affects and chooses the
words I use in order to effect some reaction in you, whether it be to love me,
to listen to me, or to ignore me, or to condemn me. It is all a dance between the incarnations of
the divine I call the Life Force after that same term is used by Nisargadatta
Maharaj.
So you are not going to grasp my teachings by calling me a
tantra teacher or wisdom schoolteacher, or Christian, or yogi, kundalini
teacher, I am speaking of my own experience, my own learning, my own journey
and how I have passed that so lovingly with several people with our energies
constantly into playing each other and all kinds of arrangements, sensations,
that can be so easily judged from without by people who still live within
conventions, and hold on tightly to their culture, or the religious upbringing
weather is Hindu, Christian, or whatever. But they will never know what the
experience is really like from our view as incarnations.
And as swami Chetanananda once said to me, “They are angry
and judgmental because they do not understand. (meaning they have not had your
experience, and they can only understand from their limitations and lack of
having known God as you have.)” I find
that even other swamis have no idea what I am talking about because they have
not had my experiences. Their experiences have been predetermined by the
spiritual tradition they have adopted, and the experiences they have had within
that tradition. Only one who has been
through many traditions and actually cast them all off because he sees their
limitations, can directly experience their own multiple subjective bodies. I see the limitations of Japanese and Korean
Zen. I see the limitations of Advaita
Vedanta as taught by my own teacher Robert Adams, by Ramana Maharshi, and
Nisargadatta, who I consider the greatest of all. I see the limitations of kundalini teachers
and of Kashmir Shaivism because they systematize and categorize everything and
leave no room for freedom of experience or expression.
Thus, I see them all as something to be eventually destroyed. The various molds the various cultures and
religious traditions have to be destroyed so the true seeker can find their
freedom rather than traveling between one confinement and another, and true
divinity through loving another.
