Elder Abuse at Banner Boswell ER in Sun City AZ

Last Sunday I visited my 99 year-old mother (Helen Alder) at her home and found her to be very lethargic, not alert, and generally out of it.  Her caretaker said that her feet had become very swollen, and they had not been when I saw her two weeks before.  The caretaker also said she is barely eating, and has stopped walking from her chair to the bathroom and had started to relieve herself in protective panties.  She only walks in the morning from her bed in the bedroom, to chair the front room, and back again at night.

This is absolutely abnormal for my mother who usually can walk fairly rapidly throughout the house.  That she was not eating, not reading the newspaper or doing crossword puzzles which she always did.  I was very concerned and called her doctor, who responded to my call the next day, and came out to see my mother on Tuesday, performed an evaluation, and drew several vials of blood for testing.  Results came back on Friday morning, June 2.  The nurse practitioner, Susan Ward, called me on Friday morning saying she was quite concerned because two of the blood tests came back with highly abnormal readings.  This coupled with her behavioral change and lack of eating, indicated to her, an urgent need to go to an emergency room to be checked for blood clotting and congestive heart failure.

Paramedics took my mom to the Banner Boswell ER on Thunderbird in Sun City Arizona on Friday, June 2, 11 AM.  Before any tests were taken, the doctor (Jones) walked in the room, just after my mother had her vitals taken by a nurse, very chipper and happy with a loud voice saying, “You look fine.”  I explained the situation and her behaviors, and he asked if she was back to normal now.  I said no, my mother did not even understand sometimes that she was in the hospital, which is totally abnormal for her.  The doctor appeared very unconcerned and says well will find out what is wrong and get her back to normal in no time, and then pranced out.

After several vials of blood were taken and 500 mL of fluids given, and urine obtain from a bedpan, we waited. She did get a chest X-ray and a head CT for some reason.

Now my mother has atrial fibrillation, but refuses to see a cardiologist, and she has stage III chronic kidney disease, which is normal for someone 99 years old, and she did make plans to see a nephrologist.  Her heart is weak because she so inactive, due to the pain in her legs which was recently compounded by the  current urinary infection, as well as her sleepiness, but we did not know there was a urinary infection until that same Friday morning.

Dr. Jones came in again, smiling and jovially saying that she appears to be fine, and is she “acting normal” now?  He intimated that they were going to release her.  I strongly objected, stating my mother is not normal.  She was confused as to where she was.  She did not know what time it was.  She kept sleeping the entire time she was in the bed except when attended to by a nurse or a doctor, which is highly abnormal for her, as usually she is quite alert and talkative. And, she appeared quite confused by all the wires and tubes connected to her, asking “What is this?” time after time.

A bit thereafter a nurse came in with orders to see if my mother was mobile enough to go home, as Dr. Jones had earlier stated that in her condition would probably be dangerous for her to go home with only a caretaker for eight hours.

Well, the “mobility test” consisted of walking from her ER bed to the ER room entrance which was about 7 feet, and then walking back again.  It took my mother all of four to five minutes to walk 14 feet with a nurse holding her, and using a walker. Yet they were determined to release her.

I told the nurse how can they possibly release my mother in her condition, she is not normal.  She is confused, she cannot walk more than 14 feet with somebody helping her and with a walker, she could never make it to 50 feet to bed from her living room chair where she spends most of the day.  I emphasized that this was an entirely new condition, that until a week ago she had not had that much of a problem ambulating, eating, concentrating, reading and doing crossword puzzles. This was not her chronic condition, but was an acute disorientation.

The nurse said he would convey this information to the doctor.  The doctor never came in, instead a social worker came in, and was quite rude. Jones was too timid to face a critical and upset relative so he sent a surrogate.

She said, “Your mother should never have been brought to this emergency room.  There is nothing acutely wrong with her to be treated.”  She went on to say, “What you should do is either put her on full hospice care, or get her the medical care she requires.  You have to decide when you will let her just be comfortable (until she dies), or to get full treatment; it is one or the other, not both.”  Yet Dr. Jones refused to treat, except for the urinary infection they found, and released. Why didn’t they hospitalize her until her alertness and ability to walk come back by treating her infection in-house, and getting a cardiologist consult for her heart?  Her sudden deterioration was unexplained, and not even noted by them.  They ignored my pleas to treat, and that she was far from normal.

Her regular visiting nurse practitioner from PopHealth, is the one who stated that she should be taken to the emergency room based on her observation of my mother and the results of two very abnormal blood tests that indicated possible blood clots and congestive heart failure.  It was not a decision my mother made, nor that I made.  That social worker repeated that my options were to make her comfortable until she died, or give her the care she needs, but she cannot have both.  And she is being discharged now.  She asked whether I could stay with my mom, to which I responded that I was having hip replacement surgery in three days and was getting prepared to go. 

She responded with a very stern voice, “Well, the doctor said she is going to be discharged even if it is to her home with a caretaker there eight hours a day. I think this is medical malpractice on Dr. Jones’ part as well as Banner Boswell. I assume this is their normal protocol with very elderly patients.

They absolutely refused to admit my mother and treat her for any of the conditions that she was suffering from.  My mother has a nurse practitioner that comes to her home every three months and more often if needed, such as when she came out to draw my mother’s blood and ascertained that my mother really needed more extensive evaluation. She also has another nurse coming two times per week to check vitals and prepare medications.

I talked to another ER nurse about my mother’s condition stating my mother should not be released.  She told me that things have changed since Boswell Hospital was taken over by Banner.  She said that since Obamacare came in full effect and Banner came in, they hardly admitted people anymore from the ER, and that the new attitude was get them in quick and get them out quick.  She said in the old days they wanted to admit everyone, but now under Obamacare and at Banner the elderly get the short end of the stick as a result of sucking 800 billion dollars out of Medicare to pay for it. Can you imagine the state of healthcare if another $880 billion is sucked out of Medicaid?


Kerima, my significant other, has worked in retirement homes for 15 years here and in L.A., and the same is happening there.  Even nonprofit homes have completely changed to a bottom-line, for-profit mentality.  The old CEOs are fired, and new “cut out everything” CEO’s take their place with massive firings of older employees making a good salary, to be replaced by little or poorly trained, much younger employees making half as much, skimping on food quality, reducing activities, and failing state audit after audit. Her previous employer, Glencroft, slipped from 5 stars to barely more than 3 after a new CEO initiated massive firings of older and experienced employees.

I did a quick Google search for reviews of Banner Boswell, and found many negative reviews of that hospital’s ER.

https://www.yelp.com/biz/banner-boswell-medical-center-sun-city

https://www.yelp.com/biz/banner-boswell-memorial-hospital-sun-city

The nine or 10 user comments that yelp does not use to determine rankings, as they are mostly negative, and yelp tends to hide those.  There is a link to these comments at the end of the reviews that they do count.

This is not going to end well for Boswell, as after I return from surgery and recover a little, I am going to get to the bottom of this elder abuse at Boswell Banner. I am assuming this is a systemic problem not isolated to that ER.

Edward Muzika, Ph.D.
Medical Editor

Home: 623 444 5211

Cell: 818 421-3780

Blog: http://itisnotreal.blogspot.com

People who are able to fall in love easily should follow a Bhaktic path with a Guru, or better a Tantric path of utilizing emotions and desires to find their higher or divine self. Those who don’t want or can’t do close relationships are automatically relegated to the dryer yogas like Advaita, or Zen in order to explore emptiness and nothingness. If you are able to choose, choose the Bhaktic or Tantric path first because it will destroy the ego and make the second half of one’s spiritual path, the disappearance of the divine, much easier. With desires fulfilled and then dropped away, one becomes one-pointed during the rest of his or her sadhana.

I am very honest with you; more honest than most teachers who have adopted a holiness role, rather than being genuine with you.  If I talk about sex and desire, it is not because I am a pervert, but because both can be used to realize the divine within one’s self, as did Ramakrishna and many others.  I also do it because there is such a strong current of body and sense denial in all of spirituality, from ancient to present times.  If I talk about emptiness or nothingness, it is to prepare you and to aid you in knowing which path you want to take and where you are on it.

So many teachers are so secretive about everything, either out of fear of being exposed, or because they are mostly empty with nothing to say.  In comparison, I am a blabbermouth because I feel there is value in straight talk, warning and cajoling, even if students run from this because I don’t hide spirituality in intellectualism, or guru modeling, but by relating my own experiences and the specific understandings they generated in me.

I can hardly tolerate teachers who are not authentic, hide their pasts, or hide their true understanding.  Openness, to me, is the true key to spirituality, not concentration, not meditation, not Mantra, not reading Ramana’s talks, or Nisargadatta.  But openness is so hard to find both in teachers and students, the willingness to tell the truth about one’s own self in relation to other teachers and with students.  It is not always possible to be honest with students because so many run away when openness actually occurs. The student always subjects what a teacher says through an analytic filter, trying to find unseen motivations or manipulations, unless they are already open to openness. Real openness is off-putting to many, because it is personal, and many in spirituality are looking to the impersonal or transcendental to escape death.

Yes, self-inquiry is necessary as is meditation, but these practices can close you down as much as open you up when they are done too tightly, and many teachers talk about the need for openness or authenticity, without actually being open or authentic.

Sw. Shankarananda was a scholar and intellectual, but was led almost unerringly to a Tantric guru who stretched him and opened him to love.  I too was an intellectual, but I was led to Zen and Advaita on an entirely different path to enter the depths of the Void.  Then I met Robert who was so distant and withdrawn, that only a Bhakti could love him, and those who did made good progress.

But for me it took a woman to awaken the divine within in an explosion of light, power, and love/bliss, which means Shaktipat can come from any source at any time. A lot of critics cannot accept such a possibly problematic initiation into Shakti.  They are blind to the power of ordinary human love, which when extreme and leads to complete surrender, also can lead to self-realization of the phenomenal self, because in their utter surrender, they see God in the other, that allows them to feel it within their own selves. They can’t get out of their own conceptual boxes of traditional thinking.

So, when a student comes, I ask them what is it they are looking for.  What is it they think they want?  To understand the great problem of life and death?  Are they looking for someone to surrender to for self-realization?  Are they confused, or have they had experiences they want explained?  There are hundreds of reasons for a person to get into spirituality, and I mean a deeper seeking than just reading books or taking workshops, and that reason must be explored within oneself or in an authentic relationship.

The Guru

I speak here about the special relationship between the Guru and the student, and that one is basically lost in the spiritual endeavor without one.  I base this talk on my own experiences as well as those of Swami Shankarananda, whose recent book I repeatedly mention.

I also speak about the radical difference between an energy guru, such as a Kundalini master, versus the teachings and methods of a classical Advaita master such as Ramana Maharshi, Robert Adams, or Nisargadatta.

Yet, really one needs to travel both paths: The first to the opening to the Life Force within, the explosion of divinity and Shakti that gives you the energy and faith to first deepen your relationship to Shakti, to one's own relationship with the divine within; the second is to disidentify first with the body, then with consciousness itself to pass entirely beyond existence, becoming total peace as the last experience.

LINK: https://youtu.be/FvF4E3-dMLY

COMMENT TO ME SENT BY A READER, VIOLET CRYSTAL:

Hello Edward and all. I have a question based on this excerpt from something Robert Adams said in one of his talks:

"We're talking about the ineffable. Something beyond words and thoughts. Something beyond, something beyond. Yet it's so beautiful that there is nothing to say. There is something there when you go beyond consciousness, beyond beingness, beyond pure awareness but yet it's not something at all. For when you think of something you're thinking of a thing. A thing that you can think about. 

"Something that you can feel perhaps.Something that you can identify with. It is beyond all that. There can be absolutely nothing that can be said about it. You can't even experience it. For to experience it there must not be a you. The you has to be transcended, transmuted. 

"Therefore you can never experience this ineffable. And when the you is gone and no longer is there, there is no longer an experience. For again there has to be a you to experience something. When the you is gone who is to experience anything? The experiencer as been totally transcended and the experience has been totally transcended. You are that!"

Is all this pointing to the state of deep sleep and/or death (which I understand to be the same thing)? Everything Robert is talking about can be said of the state of deep sleep which is something every one of us goes through every night.

ED’S REPLY:

Violet Crystal WHERE DID YOU FIND THIS ROBERT QUOTE? IT IS A PERFECT DESCRIPTION OF THE HIGHEST TEACHINGS!

It is not a state of deep sleep or death, but beyond both, and also beyond the conscious, awake mind.

To know it, you have to catch yourself just awakening out of sleep, or just going into sleep.

At that point you can become aware that you are separate from the awake state and the sleep state, and the dream state.

You only are aware that you have nothing to do with consciousness. This is an understanding reached by the mind which only operates in the awake and dream states, which, of course, disappears both in deep sleep and death.  But combining the experience with the understanding of That which lies beyond consciousness is your truest or deepest identity, is your opening to final enlightenment.

THEN, SOMETIMES YOU'LL GET BROUGHT TO THIS AWARENESS SPONTANEOUSLY.

IT CAN BE LIKE THIS: You will feel very relaxed and in peace. Then is feels like you are falling backwards into yourself, which “feels like” a dark, quiet, and juicy presence within. Slowly you will sink into that nothingness, with awareness of the world, and even awareness of awareness diminishing. Yet each "inch" of falling backwards into that Nothingness is accompanied by ever-increasing peace. Eventually you "return: to complete Nothingness, and nothing is experienced except the complete peace of being complete and self-contained, needing nothing, wanting nothing.

There are other ways to experience this "Absolute Witness" without anything being witnessed, except a sense of complete rest and needing nothing. This is deeper than the causal body state, or even Turiya.

This is the entirely beyond to the other shore, beyond life and death of the Buddhist Heart Sutra. Gute, Gute, Paragute, Parasumgute, Bodhi Svaha!

Going into this state of being beyond, complete, and in divine peace frequently, and understanding this as your deepest self completely, solidly, and stably, is the final enlightenment.  From this place you find complete peace even while living immersed in the world, loving and worshipping the life force as Shakti.

Ramana on the Real

In the post immediately below, I offered an experiential/philosophical definition of the term “not real,” or, “does not exist,” from the point of view of Nisargadatta.

However, there is another explanation of these two terms that is used by the neoAdvaitins, and which comes from Ramana Maharishi.  The best explication of Ramana’s thinking along the lines consciousness, the body, existence and nonexistence comes from reading The Path of Shri Ramana, Part 1, by Shri Sadhu Om, chapter 4, page 58.

I have got to tell you that in ways the thinking of Ramana Maharishi seems to me entirely juvenile not very powerful. 

He defines that which is real as that which is always existence, and always aware for is always in awareness.  By that definition alone, the external world and the body are not real, because they are not always in existence or in awareness.  He says further that which is in existence and awareness only temporarily, is not really real, and it is really illusion or unreal.  For him, only the Self was real.

Thus purely by definition, that which comes and goes in consciousness is not real, but Ramana asserts that consciousness is always aware of itself, and is aware of itself in our sleep because when we wake up in the morning, we know we slept.  That is, when we sleep, we are not aware of the external world, we are not aware of mind, we are not aware of our bodies, and I can say most of us are not aware of ourselves while we sleep.  But Ramana says when we wake up we know we have slept, therefore we have existed even during sleep.

To me this is a very crappy argument and makes no sense.  We can just as easily say we knew that the world existed slept for our body existed when we slept.

This is purely a a definition of real, is that which is always aware are always in awareness, and only such exists.  If it does not meet these two criteria, whatever falls outside, considered as unreal.

The neoAdvaitins just eat up this argument, and they buy his argument that the self is always self-aware, it is just that we, by wrong thinking and wrong understanding, such as believing that the world is existent when we are asleep, or the body exists when we are asleep, have deluded ourselves into false truths.  For Ramana, no body and no world exists at all when we sleep, purely by definition, and the only “real” is the Self.  That is, the neoAdvaitins just hold this understanding as enlightenment, and believe that they are enlightened and they can say that the world is not real the body is not real in the self is real without any experience this truth, or any corroboration of these concepts.

This is so very, very different, from Nisargadatta, who holds that the I am, consciousness does not exist in sleep, and both consciousness and the body, as well as the external world are not real as defined in my earlier post of a 17, based primarily on experiences gained over years through meditation on the nature of the self, from seeing the emptiness within, seeing a pulsating, scintillating nature, and changeable nature of consciousness itself, seeing emptiness penetrating through all objects in consciousness which robs objects within consciousness of its individuality, and understanding that our bodies are objects in consciousness also just like the objects we see in the world, and as such we are the creator of both, both having the reality of mentation, imagination, dream.

So when you run into neoAdvaitins on Facebook and the rantings about trying for the real and everything else is unreal, you know they have been convinced by following the bad logic of Ramana, had not had some sort of real self-realization experience.

However, I am fairly sure Ramana and Nisargadatta shared the same state, it is just that they gave two radically different sets of arguments and explanations of unreal, illusion, etc.

They shared the same method, namely abiding in the one’s self, just quietly being oneself, although Ramana also taught to look for the I-thought and where it arose. Following that method, one always finds emptiness or the Void as the source of the I-thought and of all thoughts.

m

SATSANG SUNDAY MAY 21, 11AM CALIFORNIA TIME.

GI TO:  http://satsangwithedji.weebly.com

Password:    edji

THERE ARE INCREASING TECHNICAL PROBLEMS WITH WEEBLY. YOU MAY NOT BE ABLE TSANGTO FULLY ENTER THE CHAT ROOM WITH A USERNAME, AND MAY JUST BE RELEGATED TO BEING A PASSIVE OBSERVER.  IF I HAVE THE SAME PROBLEM GETTING IN, NATURALLY THERE WILL BE NO SATSANG, SO JUST SIT IN SILENCE IN YOURSELF.




















x

From Dust to Ashes

What is meant when Ramana or Robert Adams says “the world is not real.  You are not real.  You do not exist.  The world is in appearance, an illusion”?

Several things are meant, and all of them are based on experience rather than a philosophical viewpoint.  That is, yogic experience, not every-day, “common sense” notions of concepts.

  

1.  The first “reason” appears at first to be philosophical, but actually rests on experience.  This reason is that nothing lasts, everything is constantly changing, from the mind, one’s body, the seasons, weather, climate, and even the rising of mountains and their subsequent erosion away.  No object lasts.  No object endures.  Nothing is self-sustaining in the objective world of objects.  Seeing under the aspect of eternity, nothing lasts, nothing persists, not even the world for the universe.  As such it is not real in the sense of being self-sustaining, self caused, and eternal.

 2.  In the moment of first awakening, when one first realizes the Manifest or divine Self, the life force, Shakti, acting in conjunction with consciousness, and one loses primary identification of the body, and re-identifies as consciousness, the way consciousness is perceived changes radically.  Consciousness becomes one’s primary identification, and everything is realized as being just an appearance within consciousness, an object within the field of consciousness, and as such, is not independent of your consciousness.  Nothing is independent of you as consciousness.  It does not have an independent existence.  It is just an appearance in consciousness, including the appearance of your own body.  Everything is just in appearance in consciousness.  The operative word is “appearance.”

3. The other thing you have to realize, is that this point your experience of consciousness itself changes as opposed to before when you felt you were dealing with objects that had the same reality as you, as a physical body.  One experiences the world differently.  It is a safe place now as it is no different than you are as body/mind.  Both are appearances within the one consciousness.   Also, consciousness seems far more intimate than a supposedly separate and objective world of coequal objects. They become “your” objects.  And reality no longer seems as solid.  It flows.  Nothing appears solid anymore because everything is permeated against a background of emptiness, and things flow out of emptiness and back into emptiness. It is not just a concept, you actually witness the coequality of form and emptiness and their indivisible interplay.

4.  But after a while of dwelling in and identifying with consciousness instead of with the body, one realizes that consciousness itself is temporary, ever-changing, and is not self-sustaining.  So, just like when a dream ends, the dream world disappears into the unconscious, into nothingness, so when the body dies, the sense field and the sentience associated with that physical body just disappears, and is absorbed into the nothingness which proceeded its birth.  Consciousness comes out of nothingness, and at the end of one’s life span, is recalled into nothingness.  It is a temporary show.  Thus, while everything is consciousness, is known through and by consciousness, and is an appearance in consciousness, consciousness itself is just an appearance within nothingness.

Thus, understand Robert and Nisargadatta when they say world is not real, it is an optical illusion, it is Maya, means that the entire “play” of consciousness has the same reality as a dream, same origin, and the same end.  It suddenly appears from out of nothingness, just as a body is born and sometimes later consciousness begins.  When the body dies, the associated consciousness is absorbed back into nothingness, which some call the absolute.

  

It cannot be understood from the Western point of view where all objects are considered to be independent of consciousness and consciousness merely illumines the existence of relatively stable external objects that exist independently consciousness, and you are but one object among many, some of which are sentient, and others, like rocks appear to not be conscious.  As long as you identify your body as you, and consciousness as the instrument for perceiving a real external world, you can never understand the point of view that no object is real, including your body, or your mind, or your emotions.  All these are constantly flowing, mixing, combining and recombining, flowing out of emptiness and then disappearing back into emptiness or nothingness. 

  

Therefore, Buddhists say form is emptiness and emptiness is form.  Forms have the essential quality of being empty, nothing, and in that sense they do not exist.  They appear out of emptiness, or nothingness, in the same way as the entire universe is supposed to have been born, out of nothingness, in a big bang 13 billion years ago, and they returned to emptiness or nothingness at the end of the universe when all the particles in the universe become dispersed into nothingness.

Practicing Self-Inquiry

Recently two people wrote to me regarding what they considered a problem: the distraction caused by random thoughts.  They wanted to know how to overcome the distraction of their constantly thinking mind.  They wanted to be able to focus their attention laser-like, onto some specific object, like the I-thought, in order to perfoem what they thought was proper self-inquiry.

However, this is entirely the wrong approach.  This forceful control of the mind will beget only tension. which someday may result in a very focused mind, but that focused mind, that laser -like attention, will never discover the self, because the self appears when the mind is entirely gone and is utterly relaxed, because you are utterly relaxed.  A laser-like attention focuses downwards to a point, while relaxed openness, is aware of everything, and is happiness, freedom, and lack of constraint.

Focusing clamps down while relaxation opens up, is not tight, and is not a limiting of awareness.

Instead of trying to use the mind control the mind, you have to do the exact opposite, which is to use the mind to lose the mind, to intentionally relax.  You learn how to relax and drop your attention out of your head and into your heart, and even lower, into the gut.  You need to sit or lie relaxed, and continually relax even more. In such a relaxed state, you can perform complete body scans of feeling each part of your body, starting at you toes and ending in your head. You “feel” your body from toes to head.  Feel into your chest.  Feel your diaphragm move.  Feel the air expanding your lungs.  Feel into your gut.  Relocate your center of gravity of attention from head into your body while in a relaxed state.

Then you relax and open your awareness again to the totality of your consciousness, from inside the body, to the surrounding room and environmental sounds.

And when you sit in formal sitting meditation, let your attention drop into your gut.  Not trying to see anything or feel anything just rest your attention into your gut or heart.

After a bit of practice, you will notice that your brain starts freezing up, and it feels like a rock, heavy, and unable to move or think.  You feel utterly stupid with no thoughts.  After practicing this for a while and getting used to that feeling of being a rock head and utterly stupid, and accepting it as a normal state, one day, suddenly, the center of your attention will drop into your body and out of your head.

The problem of "you" feeling the disturbance of random thoughts, is that your center of attention is in your head most of the time, which is right next to the central transmitter of constant thoughts, namely your brain.  When you both occupy such a small area, the broadcasting thoughts seem like a big deal.  But when your attention falls into your body in a relaxed state, you will enter an entirely new world.  It will feel as if you have dropped into a huge, dark, canyon, an expensive emptiness that will feel entirely open and comfortable.  This is your entry into emptiness, into the Void.  From this new location in that expansive emptiness, the mind will seem so very far away from "you."  What is “you” will now feel like you are in a new location in a vast emptiness, and the mind can continue to prattle and talk to itself but it does not disturb you because the transmitter is no longer located right next to you in your head space.  Thoughts are then experienced like listening to a radio from two rooms away.

Then thoughts do not disturb you.  You can ignore them like all the people in a crowded room while you are attending to one particular conversation, or like ignoring the crowds and sounds while at the beach, lying in the shade.

This is not really enlightenment, but it is an opening into the expansiveness of your heart, and within this expansiveness you can feel your own sense of presence, your own sense of I, of being alive, of being sentient.  Just resting there in your own presence is proper self-inquiry, which is really an abiding or resting in one's own self.  Abiding in the self this way, feeling the quiet emptiness, feeling your sense of presence, feeling the I-energy, will lead to an experience of an identification with the totality of the manifest consciousness, what I call the Manifest Self.

This is the first stage of enlightenment: recognition of yourself as no longer an individual, but identified with the totality of your consciousness, that your consciousness is you, and not that body object which is experienced within your consciousness.  You are much larger than your body experience.  You are the totality of all of your experience including the external world, all your thinking, the emptiness, the peacefulness of that emptiness, and all the energy states that comprise your sense of presence or existence as a sentient being.Recently several people have written to me for advice on how to focus their attention on the I

Cat's eye-Kali

SATSANG EVERY SUNDAY, 11AM, CALIFORNIA/ARIZONA TIME.

Go to http://satsangwithedji.weebly.com 

password is edji

Only time to look for notice here is if satsang is cancelled.

SATSANG TODAY, SUNDAY MAY 7 11 AM CALIFORNIA TIME

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PASSWORD edji

Hello Edji,

For some time now It's been clear that there is no entity within the body. And in silence, there is no separation and there is a feeling of oneness. But the identified I-thought arises whenever something happens to the body and all the resistance and suffering comes back. I can't seem to let go of the belief in the "I am a body" idea even though I can see it isn't true. It makes no sense to me and leaves me really frustrated. Could you please help me?

Thanks very much,

G.

ED:

There are distinct experiential differences between the I-thought, the identification with the body, and you.  What does the I thought point to?  Emptiness.

The identification with the body is feeling the body from the inside, which is different from any other experience, and as such, we tend to identify with it because it is always there opposed to environment or people around us.  It has a constancy that environmental appearance lack.

But you witness that.  As its witness, you are separate from that body feeling.

So you need to relax more deeply.  Fall backwards more deeply into your sense of self.  Just keep doing it, more and more, longer and longer.  You will begin to see all things related to your body and your mind are really witnessed by you, and you are not affected by them.  This is the beginning of enlightenment, the foothills so to speak.

The more habits and tendencies you have, the more conditioning and education, the longer the deconstruction of mind/body experience will take, and for your freedom.  For now, you feel your imprisonment in habit, identifications, and mind, but you have to see yourself as separate from all that.

SATSANG EVERY SUNDAY, 11AM, CALIFORNIA/ARIZONA TIME.

Go to http://satsangwithedji.weebly.com  password is    edji

Only time to look for notice here is if satsang is cancelled.

There is another point I want to make here.

There are many, many teachers plying their goods, building Satsang’s, writing books, giving retreats, wanting to change the world through the force of their personality and teachings.  They are like many little Satans in sheep’s clothing, speaking sweetly, being warm, cuddling and smiling, while calculating the size of their sangha, and the night’s receipts from Satsang.  They manipulate, cajole, and sweettalk students into giving money and work, and they give them crap and return, just the very basic teachings and a warm and friendly smile.  But they are useless even to themselves.  They have no advanced knowledge of themselves.  They can only teach the useless knowledge that picked up from books or from other third-rate teachers that they learned from.

But even more so, a good or potentially great student is almost impossible to find now.  Most are just interested in accumulating teachings from books and from random Satsang’s or retreats.  They may spend three months or four months at an ashram and leave, because they were not paid what they considered the proper respect to great students like they are.  So much narcissism nowadays, students expect masters to bow to them for paying attention to them.

Therefore I tend to be hard on students.  The pursuit of enlightenment is the most arduous, dangerous, and perilous life.  There is so many pitfalls, so many false paths, so many false leads, so much bullshit in terms of methods, techniques, Shaktipat, true and false, that leads their heads swimming trying to figure everything out so they add their own speculation onto all the false knowledge being given to them.  So if you can see through the false, and to survive and go on to real realization of any depth, they have to develop discriminatory intelligence rather quickly, and see the fool for the fool, and not be a fool following an immature teacher.

The best Zen teacher I studied with this is Sasaki Roshi, because he would not tolerate fools, and his teaching method was very strict.  Fools were not allowed to stay in his centers.  Only those who really wanted to deeply studies in.  There was an extraordinary amount of discipline required of the student, many demands made on them as he deepened in their understanding of Zen.

Robert was an entirely different style teacher.  On the outside he was very silent but friendly, a kindly looking old man that everyone could identify as a father that they wanted, whose long stairs and fumbling speaking drought a kind of fondness is students.  But students never stayed.  They could not understand Robert.  They could not understand it when he said, “you do not exist.  You are not a human.  You are not your body.  The world is an illusion it does not exist.”  And he meant it.

When people met him privately for lunch or otherwise, he listened as a blabber about all their problems, and he tried to give sage advice to their petty concerns.,  But hardly a one grew up under his tutelage.  The novelty of hearing “you do not exist.  You are only consciousness.  Only consciousness exists.  Your body is unreal.”  Goes away after a while because you do not know what the hell he means, see you take it as a kind of joke pointing to something deeper.  But he was being literal.  He spoke from his point of view which is of being beyond consciousness but that all that existed was in consciousness, but he as outside of consciousness did not exist, and neither did you, but you did not know it.  How many people really want to know they do not exist?  How many want to transcend life and death really?

Not one in 10,000 students has the gumption or the drive to really progress and develop spiritual discipline, and spiritual discrimination that allows them to eventually become their own guru.  And of those one and 10,000, literally only one in 10,000 will become enlightened—at most!  Something will always hold them back.  Lack of emotional maturity is one reason?  Clingings or Vasanas will hold you back from even letting go of the body and identifying with consciousness or as consciousness within the universal consciousness.  You hang onto the body because it has a permanence that your mind does not have.  Mind flickers and flickers, and even consciousness disappears at night, so there is the belief in the body as being more real and more permanent than consciousness.  So it is very hard to let go of the body.  Not one in 100,000 will ever let go of their body, maybe not one in a million-really let go of their body.

It is even harder to let go of consciousness, because once you attain identity with consciousness the happiness and bliss is so powerful that it makes you swollen and fall at the feet of the divine in total devotion and surrender.  Who wants to give that up to find that absolute one that stands behind all?  The only one that will do that is the one that sees that consciousness itself is an illusion.  One that sees that consciousness flickers and is not sustained.  When the body dies, the consciousness associated with that body dies also, no matter how joyful or blissful that entity was one minute before death.  Therefore how many are willing to let go of that ecstatic state of union with God?  Not one in 10,000.  Read what Bernadette Robert said about “the catastrophe” of leaving unitary consciousness, Christ consciousness, and proceeding into no self, nothingness.  It was a horrible experience for her, as it was for U.  G. Krishnamurti, who also called it the calamity.  Your entire world falls apart, your entire consciousness becomes a stranger to you is the ultimate witness.  Yet so few understand the complete and utter peace and rest that comes with that state of having lost everything, given everything up, becoming complete, having no pangs, having all loves, having no desires.  How many would give up God realization for this state of completeness?  One in 10,000?

Therefore, I tell you the truth, but really so few are ready to hear the truth.  So few are ready to hear that the path to self-realization, and the further path to nothingness requires great discipline, great dedication, great perseverance, and through that one develops inner strength and also spiritual discrimination.  But most of the people that come now are newbies, they do not have a clue as to who they are or where they are going, and have no idea of the life of spiritual seeking that lies before them and the disappointments, headaches, and sufferings entailed in order to garner even a small bit of discrimination.

You see, in a sense those who succeed are great men and women.  They are spiritual heroes.  They are not the ordinary run of human being.  They been bitten deeply by a need to understand themselves or to know God, and they gained and the ability to introspect into their own subjectivity and from that complex experience of self to ferret out the various states and experiences found by going within, and are able to do that fearlessly, tirelessly, with great determination, and ability to struggle and struggle and struggle, until their own self, their deep self, shows that the nature of consciousness and what lies beyond.

Strangely, sometimes that bite of the snake of self-knowledge does not come until later in life, after a long life of immersion in a normal human world in a normal human existence.  Take for example, Leonard Cohen.  I met him in 1970 at Mount Baldy’s and center but we were both studying under Sasaki Roshi.  He was probably about 40 at the time.  He was fed up with life but eventually became a Zen monk.  I do not think he ever made it.  I do not think he ever found what he was looking for, his self.  I am not sure he even was fully acquainted with emptiness.

But the famous Zen master Joshu, historically did not get the bug to seek himself, to understand himself, to attain great Satori until the age of 60.  According to history he lived to be over 120, and when asked what his experiences were, he stated I had 17 major Satoris, and thousands of little ones.

This is what a teacher looks for, not the newbies to teach kindergarten methods, and kindergarten understanding about the nature consciousness, because most spiritual students are looking for more than a better life, happier life, or sex, or ecstasies, etc. they are not really looking to understand themselves, nor have they any idea how difficult it is to escape from their mind and their concepts.

Are there any of you out there that have that capacity to be a spiritual hero?  It takes someone who has been bitten deeply by the snake of self-knowledge, and easily throws away where they are in life everything that they have, drops at all, and starts the long path to finding the self.

All the others, I just warn them, that the way of seeking is difficult, fraught with perilous mistakes, suffering, emotional pain, feeling misused and abused, when in fact only their desires are being thwarted.  I tell them the odds of successfully becoming enlightened.  I warned him about people who say they are already enlightened and there is nothing to do, or people who say there is no separate self so all is good.  But I really cannot help them.  They are not strong enough, or they lack courage, they lack discrimination, or they are filled with fear can only take baby steps.