GAINING STABILITY AND ROOTS

Living a spiritual life is difficult for many because they become more and more sensitive to themselves, others, and the world. They feel blown around by currents and sensations and when they try to follow their heart, they feel only masses of ever changing sensations.

This is what I learned in Zen: sit still and be very attentive.  Sitting in silent, erect yet relaxed meditation will teach you everything.  You become sensitive to your breath, the pain in your knees, the pain in your back, thoughts about how hungry you are, how itchy your nose is, and how your guts feel bloated after eatINg fruit and vegetables together.

Your mind races around in your physical discomfort, thinking about Zen, Yogananda, Aurobindo, or Ramana, and what they went through.  You feel hopelessly lost and unstable.

This is the crisis.  Every fiber in your body and every thought in your brain screams at you to move.  Instead, you sit without moving and feel the pain, feel the disturbed mind, feel the hunger or the painful bloating.  Feel it all fully including the screams to move.

And then, DON’T MOVE! Don’t move until the bell rings signaling the end of the sitting.  You will be amazed that if you do this, at some point, maybe after 10 or 15 minutes your entire body will relax, as well as your mind and you will feel wonderful.  Wonderful that you had tamed your body and mind, and wonderful because your body and mind are so rested and relax.

You probably have to repeat this lesson a hundred or a thousand times before you believe it: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO REACT!  And if you don’t react you will find an end to suffering and peace.  This will carry to the end of your life.  You gain stability.

In addition, continued practice will lead to the experience of real emptiness, an experience of the Great Void where you disappear as a body mind and become all things.

Once emptiness becomes routine, you can begin the search for divine love from a deeply stable place of knowing how not to react to discomfort or at the direction of hunger or sexual impulses.

After you know how to stabilize in emptiness, sexuality can spread throughout your body along with great love, both turning into the most sublime bliss and ecstasy, and you are on your way to knowing God within.

But if you don’t know the stability of not reacting, and have increased sensitivities, you will be blown around by your ideas and sensations, desires and needs all your life, like a puppet.