Robert Adams napisał(a):This is why people like Ramana Maharshi always said that devotion, faith and self-inquiry are the same thing. You can't just have dry self-inquiry. You have to feel love. You have to feel devotion. You have to put God first. Unless you put God first you're going to just have dry words, and the words will give you a sharp intellect. You will be able to recite all sorts of things, memorize books, hear lectures and remember them, yet you will never really awaken. This is why sometimes Advaita Vedanta can be dangerous to some people. Yet if they really read the books on Advaita Vedanta, they'll understand that they have to develop a tremendous faith.
Think of some of the teachers that you know or heard about. Nisargadatta, he always prayed. He realized that he was consciousness. He was self-realized, but at the same time he chanted, he prayed, he had devotion. It sounds like a contradiction. For you may say “If someone is self-realized and he knows himself or herself to be all there is, to whom do they pray?" Try to remember that all spiritual life is a contradiction. It's a contradiction because words cannot explain it. Even when you are the self, you can pray to the self, which is you.
Ramana Maharshi always had chanting at the ashram, prayers, devotional hymns. These things are very important. Many westerners, who profess to be atheists, come to listen to lectures on Advaita Vedanta, and yet nothing ever happens in their lives. As long as you do not have devotion, faith, love, discrimination, dispassion, it will be very difficult to awaken.
Therefore those of you who become bored with practicing self-inquiry may become very devotional. Surrender everything. Give up your body, your thoughts, all the things that bind you, whatever problems you may believe you have. Surrender them to your favorite deity. You are emptying yourself out as you do this. Do a lot of it. Become humble. Have a tremendous humility. If you can just do that you will become a favorite of God and you’ll not have to search any longer.

Nisargadatta napisał(a):One has to work in the world; naturally, carry on your worldly affairs, but understand that that which has come about by itself -- that is, this body, mind and consciousness -- has appeared in spite of the fact that nobody has asked for it. I did not ask for it; it has come upon me in my original state which is timeless, spaceless, and without attributes. So that whatever has happened is doing this business in the world. The life force and the mind are operating, but the mind will tempt you to believe that it is "you." Therefore, understand always that you are the timeless, spaceless witness. And even if the mind tells you that you are the one who is acting, don't believe the mind. Always keep your identity separate from that which is doing the working, thinking and talking.

Cytat:Personal Love

In 2010 I met a woman who came to Satsang in Los Angeles. We only saw each other face to face four times over two years. But there was something about her that clicked in me instantly--the way she looked at me. She was very gentle, loving, and surrendered, instantaneously from the first moment we saw each other.

I had cancelled Satsang during March because my mother was ill, and I was afraid I would have to travel to Phoenix to be with her. Rene had already purchased her ticket to come to LA, so I decided we could still meet for lunch and maybe a brief sight seeing trip.

We traveled from Santa Monica to the South Bay where there is a special deli at Malaga Cove where I often stopped for lunch.

As we entered Palos Verdes, Rene took out her iPad and said she wanted me to hear something. It was a short poem by Rumi, read by a man with a wonderful, powerful voice.

From the beginning of my life I have been looking for your face, but today I have seen it.
Today I have seen the charm, the beauty, the unfathomable grace of the face that I was looking for.
Today I have found you, and those who laughed and scorned me yesterday are sorry that they were not looking as I did.
I am bewildered by the magnifcence of your beauty, and wish to see you with a hundred eyes.
My heart has burned with passion and has searched forever for this wondrous beauty that I now behold.
I am ashamed to call this love human, and afraid of God to call it divine.
Your fragrant breath, like the morning breeze, has come to the stllness of the garden.
You have breathed new life into me.
I have become your sunshine, and also your shadow.
My soul is screaming in ecstasy.
Every fiber of my being is in love with you.
Your efulgence has lift a fire in my heart, and you have made radiant for me the earth and sky.
My arrow of love has arrived at the target.
I am in the house of mercy, and my heart is a place of prayer.


Rene said after the reading was done, “This is how I feel about you.”

I was taken aback, and sort of pushed her away by making a sarcastic joke about the poem, but she let me know with her beingness that she loved me intensely despite my distancing. She told me later that she felt nothing from me, that she could not find a person inside, only emptiness, and kept looking for my core.
We parked overlooking the ocean at a spot where I often photographed sea birds.

Suddenly, without a word spoken, she laid her head on my left shoulder and chest. And for the first time in memory, I felt a fire alight in my heart. The words came to me at the moment from the chant Jyota Se Jyota Jagavo, “Kindle my heart’s flame with Thy flame; Oh Sadguru kindle my heart’s flame with thine.”

The whole situation was so strange. I thought this was something that happened to 15-year-olds. It was as if she had thrown herself at my feet in surrender, and I was touched deeply.

So we shared that, a love of the Infinite; for her it was love of God, of presence, not of emptiness. She talked to God, and God talked to her. She told God she was lonely, and later she said God sent her to me to be loved by me.

We were together just a few hours, but a seed was born.

We wrote to each other, we phoned each other, and finally Skyped each other, sometimes for hours a day.

Something happened to us. Anyway, her love for me opened me up, and like her, we had the most amazing loving experiences 2000 miles apart.
The process was the same for both of us, but she felt it first.

At first she felt it as an energy arising out of her belly and upwards into her heart, where her heart felt a little pain like a pressure as the energy was blocked. The pressure built up as her heart became filled with this energy, until there was a puncture with the heart energy, now felt as love, to course upward through her neck and face and upwards into the world and towards me distantly removed, as love.

Later, this energy began to be recognized as love immediately even before it coursed upwards, and what had been a weak stream of energy and love began to fill out in form, until it felt more like a river of love that filled her body and which flowed outwards into the world continuously, yet still filling her more and more full, filling her entire sense of presence, with love. Then she would say she is the lover, who has become love itself, and she would say I was the source. At times too, the love transformed into heavy eroticism with almost continuous orgasms on her part without any physical touch in any way. All that she had to do was think of me or hear my voice and she would experience continuous orgasms lasting up to a half hour.

This is actually quite a simplified outline. The process’s forms, and colors of love experienced by both of us kept changing, and changing, and changing in both the quality and intensity. I had no idea love can take so many forms and have so many expressions.

This streaming love began expanding and happening more frequently, and it became more rarefied, and subtle, no longer seeming like a river of energy, but more like a gentle breeze which no longer moved as a current, but which became still and filled her body with ecstasy and swooning. She felt drunk with love, from time to time and went deep into a peaceful samadhi. This is another story altogether, how she gradually began to know about the Infinite, pulling that experience from me in an empathic embrace.

I just watched all this with amazement, and I felt so happy, so very happy that she was feeling this way with me, and because of me. Always, I too felt love of her and for her, which gradually became, as with her, a river of energy flowing from just below the diaphragm through my heart, up into my face and through my fingers and hands outwards to the world and towards her, and I too began to be filled with love, but only for her. I too had totally surrendered to her, my life, my soul.

Unlike René, I did not identify with love itself, but identified with me, Ed, as her lover. My love for her was always personal, and sometimes erotic, but was always felt as a river of love running through me, filling me, making me blissfully happy, until I felt strong yearning and longing for her, which took away my happiness, and I felt like a crying little child wanting her love. That yearning and longing, was preparatory opening to ever deepening levels of love. Love of a depth and quality that I never knew was possible, that I never felt before. My love for René was entirely not like anything I had ever experienced before.

With our love we both began to experience energies running through our bodies, all different sorts of energies running in so many ways: Healing energies that later softened the pain of my arthritis, an experience of energy “fingers” that reached out from my heart and explored the world in an “astral” kinesthetic way, chaotic energies of bliss, sometimes of heat, with a burning of my skin and muscles. My body became more alive than ever before with sensitivity, as did hers.

Sometimes our emotional embrace seemed almost psychotically deep, as deep childish fears and fantasies came out, and we both become a little nuts, demanding, childish, frightened or angry, feeling pushed away or abandoned, or otherwise narcissistically injured.

But soon I began to feel what she had felt; a rising energy of love in me that flowed upward into the emptiness that is my body, filling it with love, pausing briefly at the heart and spilling out into the world towards her. There was a progression. At first the flow seemed small, like a creek, but rapidly, over time became like a river, and then like an entire ocean of love flowing through me. Love flowed out of me through my face, head, arms and hands, and mostly directly from my heart towards her distant presence.

Gradually just as with her, my love appeared to become purified, lighter, more like air as opposed to a fluid, and my body felt filled with such sweetness, the essence of love, which was like a constant ecstasy which grabbed my entire being like a wrestler grabbing a child. I totally identified with the ecstasy of love, and I began to feel God's love for whomever or whatever appeared in front of me. I say God's love, because by now it was so great, so overwhelming, so beyond me, I felt it could not possibly be human.

Alternately we both felt almost drugged by the states of ecstasy that possessed us. Sometimes just saying a few words, like “René I love you,” sent her into multiple orgasms which gradually transmuted into ecstasy. I did not feel the orgasms as did she, but I did feel the ecstasy, and a deep desire to be with her every moment of the day and night.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, René is married, and we never met again. We never touched each other again as we wanted to, and perhaps we were afraid that if we were to meet everything would dissolve. So our love became transmuted into God's love. That is the only way to explain it. The whole thing about how it started, how we never met again, and yet the love grows, and how the love permeates both of our beingness to the extent we both feel as one, is just so beyond explanation or beyond anything we ever felt before. Only attaching the word “God” to our experience makes any sense. Even this day I still feel her presence in me all the time, and she feels me.

Muktananda wrote a book called, "I Have Come Alive." This is how I felt. Because of her love, I became alive.

To this day my own beingness is constantly suffused with this love that I first felt for her, and the same is true for her. Our sense of presence interpenetrates and is mingled. Sometimes I feel my own love for her, and sometimes I feel her love for me. They are the same. In a sense there is no need to meet, even though I deeply desire it, but I recognize that the yearning and neediness I feel sometimes, is a prelude to a deepening of this love, and it seems that there are no limits to how large it could grow.

Already I have been astounded each time my love for her grew another step, but each step upwards in intensity, was followed by a plateau, and a diminishment of the intensity, which was again followed, almost as if I fell in love with her again, and the intensity would grow, and grow, and the quality of my love would change, becoming ever more fluid and vacuous, until it filled the emptiness that is me with a constant sweet ecstasy. And so was it too with her.

More importantly, we both discovered that an awareness of these energies made an awareness of the ‘I Am’ sensation first felt as my heart alighting, then gradually developing into a sense of presence, a kind of astral body of a new sort that interpenetrated my and her physical bodies, but also gradually expanded to include the external world, and in our mutual sense of presence, we incorporated each other.

The movement of love gave vitality to my sense of presence, my 'I Am', purified it, rarefied it, made it more subtle, and more powerful. It is a constant unfolding. ‘I Am’ is Turiya, the fourth state that interpenetrates and supports all the other states of consciousness, including that of the body, the mind, the dream state and deep sleep. All are penetrated by ‘I Am’, divine love so exquisite. I say divine love only because it seemed so vast, so powerful, so beyond anything I had experienced before that it seemed to transcend anything “personal,” at least at that time. Later, even that vast love became “me”; became Ed in the first person, and I began to own the divinity as me.

I finally understood that neither of my previous awakenings had involved experiencing Turiya, the Fourth State of consciousness; the ‘I Am’. I had gone directly to the Absolute, entirely beyond consciousness, but now I was returning to explore another, the most vital level of consciousness and understand the true nature of humanity and Self- Realization.

masterblaster napisał(a):Mc, a Ty nie myślałeś o założeniu bloga?

mc napisał(a):Tu jest nieformalny blog w tym wątku

Robert Adams napisał(a):The second rule:
Is to sit in ‘silence’ at the prescribed hours that the Sage tells you to.
This is important.
For this is the time that you tune into the grace which flows forever.
The times that we sit together for this group is from 12 to 3am and from 6 to 9am.
I know they seem to be un-godly hours, but try doing it for a week and see what happens.
There are people all over the world sitting at these hours and we’re all tuning into each other.
Again if you’re serious on this path, if you want to make progress, do not look to read every new book that comes out but do the work that we’re talking about.
Take the action.
So many of you get involved in all of these books by new teachers that pop up here and there.
And you’re always reading reading reading reading reading.
And for those of you who are reading like this, take a look at your life.
How much progress have you really made in all these years you’ve been reading.
You want to start doing and not reading.
Sit at those hours and watch what happens.

T. 216 Three Simple Ways To Make Progress - January 14, 1993

mc napisał(a):powiedział, że może rozmawiać ze mną o 3 rano i zapytał czy mi pasuje ta pora Napomknąłem tylko, że wolałbym inną,

mc napisał(a):najwazniejsze jest ścisłe zastosowanie się do wskazówek guru, całkowite posłuszeństwo i poświęcenie, wtedy to działa.

Cytat:Odnośnie blogowania, przyszło mi do głowy, że można by zmodyfikować nazwę tematu,

mc napisał(a):Raczej wydaje mi się, że może to być rodzaj ćwiczenia na wyzwalanie się z własnych pragnień i wygodnictwa, które tamują drogę do głębszych zmian..

incomplete napisał(a):Jestem złym, złym człowiekiem. I chyba nie ma dla mnie ratunku

mc napisał(a):

incomplete napisał(a):Jestem złym, złym człowiekiem. I chyba nie ma dla mnie ratunku

No nie żartuj sobie, bo któż tutaj jest dobry? Zło to to dopiero wyjdzie z ciebie jak zaczniesz coś praktykować, narazie jakieś 99% tego zła jest w ukryciu. Jak to powiedział Gurdżijew, jakby sobie człowiek w jednej chwili uświadomił cały ten syf, który w nim jest, to nie przeżyłby nawet dnia.

mc napisał(a):No nie żartuj sobie, bo któż tutaj jest dobry?

Cytat:jezu, to strach w ogóle zaczynać! już na starcie nie mam sił

Cytat:There is no good and no evil. In every concrete situation, there is only the necessary and the unnecessary. The needful is right, the needless is wrong. In my world, even what you call evil is the servant of the good and therefore necessary. It is like boils and fever that clear the body of impurities. Disease is painful, even dangerous, but if dealt with rightly, it heals. In some cases death is the best cure.

Cytat: "Indeed, the hour may come when, purified from the ego's partiality, he will kiss the cross that brought him such agony and when, healed of his blindness, he will see that it was a gift from loving hands, not a curse from evil lips. He will see too that in his former insistence on clinging to a lower standpoint, there was no other way of arousing him to the need and value of a higher one than the way of unloosed suffering. But at last the wound has healed perfectly leaving him, as a scar of remembrance, greatly increased wisdom."