On the other hand, listening to stories told by others also can create a momentary configuration or context of emotions and energies that can be pleasant or not, and which can affect your behaviors, and also your understanding and processing of future events. Teachers love to tell stories for the effect they have on you, and not at all necessarily telling you any truth about anything at all, such as the nature of God, Consciousness, enlightenment, Brahman, etc. They are spiritual story tellers that make up stories and situations for effect, much as a comedian tells stories to make you laugh, or Garrison Keeler to make you cry. Never believe that they are conveying any truth of their world.
Robert variously stated that you do not exist, your body does not exist, that you do not exist and that the world is illusory like an optical illusion. Then he would say the true you lives in a different dimension, is Brahman, is the Self, is Consciousness, and is immortal, timeless. Then he would also say you are emptiness, space, and/or light. Then again he’s say that you do not exist, your problems are pains are part of a dream, and to wake from that dram.
People would listen, they would become calm and peaceful, the words soothed them and they felt peace. He would then say the deepest teachings are silence and that your mind was your enemy, and to try to end thinking. He would tell you this even when filling your mind with stories about who and what you really were as something transcendent, while also telling you what you “really” are not.
This is pure brain washing. He told you a story that made you feel peace, he told you your problems were dreamlike, and that even death was a dream. He said don’t be concerned with the world because it is illusory. He said pay no attention to your body, or to emotions, positive or negative. Sure enough over time you lose interest in the world and relations, and turn your attention inwards towards the subject, towards emptiness, towards peace and silence. “Silence” would become a desired destination for you.
What he has done is replace your old story with his new story that has a different reality, with the world, your body, your supposed needs and problems becoming unimportant, but with emptiness and the “source” (whatever that was) and silence becoming all-important. Your conceptual understanding of yourself and of the external world has been replaced by an oneness-consciousness, emptiness, God, and an Unborn Self or silence. (Silence for him though was not just a stopped mind, but the emptiness of no mind at all. The feeling that the mind sensation has gone.)
He even admits this in some Satsangs, telling a story about a Hindu spiritual concept such as their being no free will, to further make you passive. At the end of the story and talk about the concept, he would say he made it all up, and he told the story because people loved to hear stories. Everyone laughed but they did not get the deeper meaning which was to believe nothing and to escape stories and concepts altogether.
Though the story was complete fabrication, its intent, Robert’s intent, was to take your emotional and physical pain away by means of endless repetitions of phrases stating that you don’t exist and the world is like a dream. Robert told his stories to relieve those who suffered, and to get them to turn within and feel the peace of emptiness and the witness. Robert’s teachings were basically to rescue people from suffering, just like Buddha’s teachings were a rescue. Yet he told his stories as if they were true, that the concepts he spoke of were the real reality. He had to make you believe his stories to elicit an understanding, emotion, or change in you, effecting a rescue from your specific misery.
Buddha told his story of escaping from suffering by understanding the Fourfold Noble Truth about its nature and origin, and then of following the Noble Eightfold Path of meditation and also seeing everything in the right perspective thereby ending desire, thereby entering Nirvana, the same peace that Robert spoke of.
Nisargadatta spoke in a more complicated way using spiritual ideas and qualitatively superior logic than used by Robert or Ramana, to mold your minds in the same way, urging the seeker to take the position of the Absolute, the Witness, the Unborn. As Ramesh Balsekar admitted, the end of such teachings is to find personal peace through detachment, not by finding truth, but which he considered as functionally equivalent to enlightenment. This is the Arhat concept of Buddhists, seeking to end your own suffering by becoming entirely absent, in Nirvana. In fact, Robert called his way that of an Arhat using the Buddhist term
For both Robert and Nisargadatta there really was no truth; all concepts were relative and you really could not find anything that words or concepts referred to except in the most elementary ways in everyday life, which Seung Sahn would refer to as having a cup of tea. They told stories with an intention of setting you free from your conceptual prison, first by denying your present truth, then substituting their truth or story, until you eventually transcend the need for even that story to keep the happiness you acquired as a result of losing you old way of living and thinking.
The truth you have to grasp is there really is no truth, just stories. Masters know this and tell stories and give practices to destroy your old story and create a better, even if untrue story of transcendence. And since most of us harbor some doubt about community conventional truths anyway, many seekers rush to embrace the new, better story.
Personally, my experience is that this is only half of a complete spiritual trajectory of moving from your old everyday world of drama or dryness, to a transcendent world through multiple ecstatic spiritual experiences, then once again coming back to the everyday world but having been totally transformed by escaping the illusions of words and stories. There is a type of subtle bliss that comes in when you embrace nothingness. Even Freud spoke of this as the ingrained human drive to experience Thanatos, nothingness, death. There is also a kind of bliss that arises when you come close to experiencing your own beingness without the clutter of thoughts, emotions, and daily experiences that are us in our identities most of the time. Pure beingness feels like full expansion and openness without clutter or distraction.
For me, until you also experience the life force within by going within, introspecting within, as the ever-moving and powerful energies that are synonymous with being alive, then you have not yet become really alive. These energies, hidden to most people, when focused on and expanded, lead to states of continuous bliss and ecstasy, which allows for the full feeling of the love of life and love of others, devotion to others, and surrender to your Beloved, whether a human or God within or without.
Feeling the Life Force arising from your gut, rising into your heart, Third Eye, and head, and exploding in light, love, and energy, is the realization of the divine within with a kind of form or light and bliss, and realizing this experience is of directly knowing God within. This is a totally new kind of awakening, awakening to the Manifest Self, the life force embodied in your human form. This is not the Enlightenment of Ramana, Robert, or Nisargadatta which is not manifest at all, but is of the nonmanifest, the Unborn.
These are not Advaita or Zen experiences.
With this realization you are firmly in the second half of your enlightenment, which is an incarnational descent into your physical body and your subtle body, your sense of presence. This sense of presence is like a new spiritual body that permeates and extends beyond your physical body, and contains emotions and energies and the magic of heightened awareness, bliss, and the capability of using energies to heal yourself and others.
Your body becomes fully alive. Your feel a literal openness of your manifest self centered in your heart. You feel joy predominantly as opposed to sadness, depression, or fear, or a sense of contraction. You become as God, incarnate. You feel the power of Shakti within you both as your own, but also of God acting within and around you. You are the smaller God incarnate, Atman, while God transcendent is the life force, Shakti, universally in everyone and around everyone, directing the fate of this world.
Then you can begin telling your own stories in order to shape the world the way you think it should be and to give those who listen to you the courage to turn within and to find their own base sense of beingness, one’s own sense of presence, and to feel the full spectrum of both emotions and energies. In a sense, you become a wizard, a witch, a sorcerer, but also the healer and Sat Guru for all who will it.
The real mystery to understand in all this is is that Shakti seems to follow one’s attention in the form of visualizations, Mantras, body scans, and stories, as well as one’s intention in giving others mantras and visualizations, and stories. There is a fantasy aspect of working with Shakti, affecting the actual functional outcomes of telling those stories in terms of intended and unintended consequences, energetic, physical, and emotional. The teacher/wizard needs to know all aspects of this process.
This of it, the life force energies in you, Shakti, as well as the life force energies around you, appear to follow the intent of the stories, Mantra, or rituals you give to others such that it changes the flows of energies within them. It is an amzing thing. You become both a spokesperson for the understanding and power of Shakti, but also a ringmaster and wizard of those energies, but you are never in full control. It is an amazing relationship between you and God.
One of the central issues is using stories, poetry, expressions of caring and love to create love and the experience of Shakti in others, including the ritual of giving Shaktipat, which is another form of story.
But this is when the process can get messy because we are dealing with humans, and thus you are creating a new messy “real” relationship as opposed to the far more confined and bounded Western idea of the professional helping relationships where the therapist has no understanding of Shakti or the use of symbols and symbolic stories to effect change and awakening.
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RESPONSE FROM DAVID SPERO:
I like your exploration of storytelling. It is correct to point out that Self-Inquiry (the Jnana Yoga we get from Ramana, Nisargadatta, Robert, etc.) are also stories. They are also (mere) “techniques.” Still, those who practice Jnana Yoga often believe their teachings are literally true, expressing perfect and unalloyed truth, which is hardly the case. These kinds of practitioners are unconsciously immersed in their own sadhana and thus have not achieved full discrimination. This sort of ignornace is natural in the life of a spiritual seeker….
You are correct: all we have are stories. What exists previous to “stories" is a “Field,’ which not the Absolute or Pure Being discussed in Advaita) that can never be known, but a Fully Enlightened Being can merge into that Field; into a Condition, or Embodied-Bodily-Exemplification, beyond Silence, Ecstasy, and Shakti. But Silence, Ecstasy and Shakti are the closest approximations to this Story-Less Dimension and the only modalities we (as human beings) have available to be transformed spiritually.
The notion of sahaja samadhi enters into the picture here, which is a full return to the flesh of the body, but in a completely transfigured and God-Like Condition of Self-Radiant, Luminous and Inebriated-Love-Bliss.
I believe the one who has entered into this Divine Condition is more precious than any story-communicated teaching; He or She containing all possible viewpoints for storytelling, but clearly and literally beyond each and every spiritual adventure.
Namaste.
