Total surrender, to God or a human, is God realization.  It is pure emptiness, pure silence, pure openness, and pure, subtle bliss.  You will never be happier in life--ever!

https://youtu.be/mW-yVuosv0k

I have frequently been accused by my students of being histrionic, calling me a drama queen. But I have noticed that without fail, they too become drama queens after dealing with me for a time. This is my Siddhi.

OVERCOMING THE TORTURE OF MUNDANE LIFE

With self-realization or God-realization as I have defined it, as recognizing I am not the body or mind, but life itself, one enters a new dimension of being and no longer is a captive to the world.

It is THE way out of the suffering afforded by everyday life, a 9-5 job, children, parents, bills, education, career, etc. Primarily you live in a different dimension of the life force, of liquidy-light and energy absent the density of the body, although you still have a body, and the monkey distractions of the mind.

Mundane life is a terrible burden and impediment to spiritual life. It robs us of energy, of perseverance, or silence and privacy during which to practice self-abidance and self-submergence.

Perseverance though will win in the end through self-abidance and self-love, or the separate devotional track of a deep love and total surrender to another, whether a lover, guru, or a cat. But it must be a love like never before, or total surrender.

https://youtu.be/qbJ2KZMTEV0

FULLY HUMAN; FULLY DIVINE.

I teach about incarnational spirituality in the sense that the realized being’s primary identity is being a spirit, but also a spirit embodied in a human physical form.

Before self-realization most people consider themselves only as people, as body-minds embedded in society and in multiple tribal and familial contexts. However, the self or God realization experiences are an internal opening of both spiritual vision and spiritual feeling where you recognize that you are really the inner subjectivity of spirit and only secondarily an embodied spirit.

People who have this God realization experience of their spiritual nature and the identity of God also with that same spirit, no longer think of themselves as being only human. They know deep down that they are spirit, the inner life force that brings sentient to insensate flesh. Later they may realize the same life force is also God, whether incarnate as a human, or as the universal principle of sentience.

One who has realized self and God both, as the spiritual element that is their subjectivity, they can never really fully return to the world of ordinary human existence. Not that they do not suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but they always feel the presence of God in their own lives, in their own self.

The voice of God, or the life force, is what I call Shakti, the experience of various forms of inner energy within the body and one’s own sense of presence. Each of us, with meditation, devotion, and love, can begin to feel these inner energies that flow, expand and contract, in multiple ways. Sometimes they are experienced as circulating paths of colored energies. Sometimes they are experienced as sheer bliss or ecstasies.

Sometimes they are experienced as rising energies with an associated heat, or descending energies that may actually feel cold. However, after shorter or longer periods of time these energies become identified as a new body within and around oneself that extends a few inches or a few feet from your body as well as inter-penetrates the body within. I call this my sense of presence. It is like a ghost form of energy that inhabits and surrounds my physical body, and is in constant communication with the external world of energies. This sense of presence gradually becomes one’s real body, and the physical body quickly becomes secondary. One’s attention is constantly drawn to one’s sense of presence, and inwardly to the life force within.

One of the most graphic descriptions of this process of self-realization is described by Ramana Maharishi as finding himself within as spirit as a result of his death experience.

https://www.sriramanamaharshi.org/ramana-maharshi/death-experience/

I describe my own self-realization experience, which occurred not as a result of the death experience, but as an experience of being fully alive in my book, Self-Realization and Other Awakenings.

http://www.wearesentience.com/uploads/7/2/9/3/7293936/selfrealization_format_02012014_final_14_-_feb1-14.pdf

Kindle My Heart's Flame With Thine

Feeling the divine rapture by listening to Ed's words about surrender and devotion.  Ed describes the rapture to be found in God-realization or in devotional surrender to your own Beloved. In many it will evokes that experience.

https://youtu.be/tZXm_YVsunI 

Live Satsang online, Sunday 11 AM, Arizona time

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

Believe Nothing!  Just become aware of what an empty mind feels like: open, empty, infinite, and inviting.  This is your natural state.  No need to try to make it last.  Just feel inwardly and this will happen to you.

From this state, feel love.  Remember what it was like when you loved deeply.  Let love gradually return.  Then the energies can come, and then you unfold spontaneously.

eMail to me today.

What You offer goes far beyond anything.
It has nothing to do with the mundane world, with mundane life and wishes.
You offer me to worship, to feel, to fall on my knees, to have fantasy, yearning about surrender, about love so deep that nothing is left.
You eMail to me todayoffer to be loved with all my heart.

Satsang online, Sunday 11 AM, Arizona time

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

For me, my spiritual journey has been twofold: an inward path towards self-realization, followed by an outgroup path towards love, devotion, surrender, and God-realization. I really believe that both parents are necessary for completion and for any real degree of enlightenment. I think straight and later is only half story and cashmere Shaivism is only the other half.

In this Satsang, I will talk about the readiness to travel either leg of the journey, and the characteristics needed for self and or God realization.

There is nothing at all normal about adopting a deep spiritual practice.

It is not normal nor easy to change the direction of one’s attention away from the world and those around you, inwards towards feeling for the I-sensation, focusing attention on any of the chakras, doing visualizations, or even doing nothing as a meditation. These are not instinctive actions of a normally adjusted person in our society.

It is also not normal to fall so deeply in love with another person, a lover, a guru, even a celebrity, or with some nonhuman entity or historical figure such as Jesus, that your whole life and every bit of your attention revolves around the other. This is considered an obsession and unhealthy to most people.

Therefore, it is altogether rare to find a person that is engaged for even one year in some sort of deeply spiritual process such as meditation, self-inquiry, or pursuing abject devotion.

Most people who considered themselves to be seekers only read books, attend seminars, and perhaps attend one or two retreats in their lifetime. Such a person never penetrates even 1 inch into the deep body of spirituality, of God or self. Yet often they think of themselves as experts and give advice, or actually considered themselves to be enlightened because they understand Nisargadatta or Ramana.

Only someone who has been in spiritual practice for decades, has had numerous awakening or near awakening experiences, has practiced meditation for thousands of hours, or who has spent years with spiritual teachers, or who has loved another so deeply and completely and thereby emptied the depths of their being in surrender, even begins to know the depths of the treasure that is of one’s own self.

Spirituality is not about knowledge. If anything, it is about escaping from knowledge, even previous knowledge about one’s own self. It means dropping all concepts, even those gleaned from reading hundreds of books about Ramana, or Nisargadatta, or Ramakrishna, or Buddha. You really do have to become dumb as a rock allowing you to see everything inside of you anew without concepts, without trying to glean any new understandings, but instead become simpleminded, innocent, yet aware without trying to learn. You just allow yourself and the world to unfold within and without you without engaging the mind. This begets wisdom. It is not a learned thing. It is an acquired depth of beingness.

Truly it takes decades of steady introspective persistence, either through meditation or deep devotion to gain this wisdom, which has nothing at all to do with knowledge. Instead, one learns to sink into the heart, into the body, into life and feel the pulsations of the universe within you. The mind has to be abandoned totally, leaving you feeling empty and alone, naked but unafraid.

The great teachers of Advaita, such as Ramana, Nisargadatta, or Robert Adams all lived and studied themselves all their lives, at least for 50 years of practice. Only then can we really call them self-realized, because they live through themselves not about themselves. They have escaped the mind and live the truth as only they can express it, as they have become truth, which is often the very different from the truth of their teacher, different from Buddha, different from Christ. Each one sings the song of their time whether it is of devotion or of inwardness. Each generation must find a different song for the world as it is then including its culture, science, level of civilization, ethics and mores. But always the message is of stepping outside of the normal, the usual, the mundane, stepping out of logic, convention, and the expected. These are all seen as being traps, impediments to authentic expression of one’s own self.

Email to me today:

Ed, thank you for your teaching and guidance. My gratitude does not tire. Neither does my Love.

The tone with which you speak is so very moving. You truly breathe life into the hollowness of words. You truly sing. The words can be thrown away, yet still there is melody from the deep. I feel very blessed to hear your song, and connect to your rhythm.

To be in your presence once a week is the treasure of a lifetime. What you have instilled in me I will cherish as the pearl of my heart, so long as I am this.

BIOPSY RESULTS BACK. KALI HAS AN AGGRESSIVE FORM OF CANCER!

Surgeon will refer her for oncology consult in two weeks after her incision heals for a chemo consult. Dr. Maki says prognosis is a few months to a year. Said not to try to keep her alive a long time but provide the best pain free life for her for the time she has left.

Kerima and I are shattered.