Category: jnana

God is Not Catholic or Pastafarian

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Not so long ago there was a guy in Melbourne who wanted to get an Australian drivers licence, he fronted up to the Motor Registry Office to get his obligatory licence photo and to the bewilderment of the staff, he put a colander on his head, he claimed to be a Pastafarian.  Originally his wearing of the strainer-hat was rejected by the counter staff at the office, but ultimately he won out and the licence mug shot was given the green light.

Spaghetti Worms 
What prompted me to write this post is because a friend of mine is suing the Catholic Church for crimes against humanity, he did a simple post on a social network that caught my eye.  The post had a gorgeous sunrise over a beach and there was text heading that said ‘God is Not Catholic’.  This uncomplicated and rather eloquent post, opened the can of Pastafarian spaghetti worms.  Many of us who experienced abuse by the Catholic clergy as children have very strong views on where God isn’t; in my case I have spent my whole life since I was ten trying to make sense of the crimes, and more accurately ‘what is or isn’t God’.  Although I am clear that I am standing at the gateway, staring into forever at the undefinable and trying to fit the ocean into the bucket; every time I attempt to say ‘this is IT’, ‘IT’ moves, ‘IT’ gets bigger or infinitely minute, ‘IT’ becomes more mysterious and I resemble a physicist trying to resolve the millions of issues relating to atoms. This God thing is not conceivable by the human-mind, I know this for sure.   It is easy without too much questioning, no-blinking, quite logically say what God isn’t, this is a no-brainer.

Exhibitions of Devotion
I think most of us have seen the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of Bishops and Cardinals dressed up like they would be far more suited to an out-take scene from Alice in Wonderland or the Beatles Magical Mystery tour (sorry John and George); long gowns, staff in hand, ridiculous head-wear, self-important expressions, the nonsensical bowing and waving of arms, the haughtiness, hideous opulence, wasting of flowers, smokey myrrh and frankincense odors… it is beyond my comprehension how any community would tolerate this nonsense and not twig that something was not right. The story of the Emperors New Clothes always comes to mind. “Houston, Apollo here, come in Houston”, we have a very serious problem back on Earth.  And it’s not that I don’t like dress ups, I always try to look my best, it’s just that when your dress-ups have an agenda and are placing you in a position between God and men, we are heading for strife. I wiil say with great confidence, “everybody is hypnotised”

Men in Dresses
The global community is unaware of the scope of Catholic abuse, there are snippets regularly in the news, it may seem incomprehensible, but if you want to get a clear understanding of it all, multiply by thousands what you hear on the news about the issues and you will start to see how BIG the problem is; and I say this because I would be one of the more informed people in the country about it this topic.  I would like to be able to see the good side of the ‘being uninformed about the magnitude of the issue’, maybe there’s a way to frame it in a manner and to follow the line of thought of ‘see the good in everything’, or ‘ignorance is extremely blissful’.  But considering the impact on the individuals, the suicides,  those who have destroyed their lives with intoxicants, the mental health issues and the way it affects the families of those of us who have experienced the crimes, I struggle to see the light in this darkness, and not for want of trying; this dilemma has taken up a large percentage of my life.

Dropping the Robes in the Sand
From my perspective, beyond doubt, I can clearly say it chased me away from the church, at fifteen I said to myself ‘God’s not in there’, but intuitively due to the inquisitive nature we humans have, I felt ‘something is doing I don’t know what’, and was confident there is a bigger intelligence, a totality that resonated through things, in people, all creatures and across the skies.  The idea that the care-taking of such a sublime thing is in the hands of a bunch of guys in dresses who have alienated themselves from the community, many of who think it is their privilege to have sex with boys and then pray to God for forgiveness and then do it again, is absolutely absurd, unreasonable and so small minded that it seems incomprehensible that so many people can be duped into believing their version of the story of Jesus; it’s just not sound. And the excuse that “it’s only a small number of clergy who commit these crimes”, is an uninformed totally uneducated view. From my readings, it is clear to me that a great human being passed through the world, but the idea that the guys in dresses are the caretakers and are responsible for our destiny, is questionable, particularly when you look at the formation of the church, it’s choices and the hideous crimes committed; if the God these people speak of is represented by the values exhibited by Jesus or any great Sage, He/She/It would not select a group such as those in the church. The ‘we have all sinned’ rhetoric does not work for me at all; the small misgivings of the man on the street does not generally include the slaughter of humans because of a religious agenda, and most of us well balanced emotionally intelligent people, have much clearer and respectful boundaries with children.

Time Out 
Solitude that may be found in a monastery or church can be important, yes.  I will say from my personal experience that ‘time out’ of the world of madmen is critical. Being out of the loop of madmen is good,  it’s similar to how it’s not until a junkie stops using and stands back and looks at the big picture of the impact of drugs, the condition of the people around him and sees the tragedy of it all, it becomes clear. Following that line of thought, when we are immersed in the ‘play of life’ we can really only see a small perspective, it’s easy to miss what is going on over the fence, the lens is too small, everything is too familiar and there is little breathing space.  Time in solitude is a healthy thing for most of us, and it is in this ‘space’ that we can begin to unravel the world of men, to see what we do to each other, we can come face to face with our dark side and say, “i am never going back to that place”, then we take full control of our life instead of being kicked around by our thoughts, and following them in the opposite direction for what is good for us.

Redefining the Foreverness of God
Standing on the beach on clear moonlit night, it’s there that we can see the shooting stars, a hint of the enormity and beauty of it all; the men in dresses lose their power here, God – whatever that be, does not know them; they are strangers in His/Her/Its house, their mad ramblings about being guilty, repent, fear of the Lord, gloom and doom,  on the third day the faithful will be rising from the grave; the hundred and forty four thousand chosen ones; when we put that stuff under the microscope we can see it for what it is. When we feel the sun on our skin, sand between our toes, hold the hand of someone dear to us, or dive into Emptiness and ‘lose’ the world, that’s closer to what those on bended knee and joined palms are seeking.

Letting Someone Else Think for Us
There are a number of reasons why men and women hand over their thinking about what God is and leave it to others.  Simply put ‘it’s easy’.  By taking on a story of how things are, knowing there is a God and IF we get enough points together, one day we get to heaven, we can go about our business, then when the body runs out of fuel we can pick up the certificate as we go through the Pearly Gates.  Game, Set, Match, too easy. Really?  We can go through the motions, be a nice person, say all the right prayers, pull God out of the pocket in times of great trouble; for me that does not have enough depth.  A sense of order about God seems good; we know Jesus supposedly lived two K years ago, we believe this to be true because the “Bible tells me so”….. But hey, any thinking person  who has explored the structure of the churches, the history of the texts, the crimes, the abuse of power; even simple things like the missing years of Jesus….. will tell you something is drastically wrong.  I am not saying Jesus did not exist or there is no God, it is just that there are so many things that just aren’t right, blind faith does not suffice for any man who is prepared to ask a few basic questions.

Changing Outfits and Going Nowhere
So what can we do?  Do we become a Buddhist instead?  No maybe not, do we need another somebody to tell us what IT is?  But maybe we ought not discard the ‘Buddha perspective’ completely, the Dhamapada (collection of Buddhist sayings) is sensible; Tibetan Buddhism (a loose term for the Vajrayana teachings) has magnificent material on keeping the mind in check and an emphasis on compassion, whereas other religions focus on faith, or relationship between God and individual, the techniques and approach when we push aside the statues, pictures, beads and outfits, can help move aside the ‘nonsense’;  Taosim helps us normalise the chaos and come into harmony; and then we have the Ramayana, the tale of Rama with guidelines on being noble, how to play each role in the community to its best-est, with Hanuman the wise monkey ever faithful as a model; and the Bhagavad Gita, the Sing of God describing the battle for the hearts and minds of men, the book that many people erroneously think belongs to Isckon (the Hari Krishna movement).  As we know, there are numerous other approaches East and West, some do have substance. The idea of taking a bit from each and creating a personalised version is fair, but not really sound, it may put the mind at rest, go about our business and we can throw God or whatever IT may be into the back pocket, but all we have is a collection of ideas, concepts.

Wherever I Lay My Hat
So if we ‘leave the monastery’, the church, the safe zone, what’s going to happen? There is a natural tendency for many people to religion hop, to jump from one spiritual group to another to change from orange outfit to maroon, a bit like those bods who are collectors of stamps in their passports, they usually say they have ‘done Cambodia, are going to do Uzbekistan’, running from one destination to another, not really feeling or getting inside a culture.  I always liked Alan Watts, his best work was the Wisdom of Insecurity, a magnificent book, the title may be misleading.  The book covers the very thing I am talking about.  If you leave the monastery, church or whatever be your flavour, the ‘space’ does not need to be filled with something else, no new philosophy required to cling to; there is great freedom in Emptiness, this IS the wisdom of insecurity, not stacking up more info or religious, spiritual stories to fill the void; no story to ‘protect us’.  An important point to get to is understanding that ‘questioning does not betray God’, the God most people have is a creation of their thoughts, and I am not saying there is no God; it is our ‘picture of what God supposedly is’ that needs addressing, it’s a fantasy, a story.

Getting Rid of the Middle Man
And this is the problem with organised religion, it tells you what God is, and then sits itself between that vision and you; there is a potential for abuse of power.  And nobody does it as good as, or it is better to say worse than the Catholic Church, and I don’t say this out of spite, nor do I have a ‘bee in my bonnet’, as an experiencer of Catholic crimes I made it my business to find out the extent of the breaches of power, the crimes against humanity.  And I will say it quite openly, without blinking, without malice, the general populace has absolutely no idea of the scope of what has gone on.

  • God is not Hindu, but there is something in Hinduism to explore; great men and woman have come and gone in the land of Bharat (India), they have spent thousands of years mastering the craft of answering the important questions.
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  • God is not Christianity, but Jesus showed us how to live with empathy and compassion to be selfless.
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  • God is not Rastafarian, but if God needed a musical groove, singing about Jah would definitely be in the front runners.
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  • God is not Taoism, but we can bring our lives into harmony with small-nature and the rest of the omniverse .
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  • God is not Buddhist, but we can learn to understand suffering and manage it.
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  • God may be the Beloved to some, seen and felt in all of the creation and in the foreverness.
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  • God is definitely not Pastafarian, when it rains your head will get wet.
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    Tilopa 2.0 – with love

New Song of Mahamudra 2.0

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A poem that emerged when I awoke on the 7th of April 2016

Mahamudra’s Sweet Sound
————————

in Mahamudra, am i inside or outside?
is it past that i return to,
or is it something new emerging and forming in the future?

time is a slave of the universe,
not its master
like water chases after the moon;
my shirt is made of clouds,
the sun is just a speckle
overstating its brilliance

dogs howl at the sky
their noise a whimper against the backdrop of eternity
they cannot bite me where i wander

the song wont leave me alone
even when my ears are covered
it is louder than thunder
and sweeter than the honey

the melody wraps itself around me
holds me in its spell
i fall deeper and deeper
the silence is roaring

like my beloved’s eyes
the touch of her hands
the warmth of her nearness
i can’t run, the beauty is unbearable

Mahamudra i found you
i just forgot where you were

tilopa 2.0

The Yoga of Love

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About nine years ago  I wrote a short blog post on one of my many blogs; it is about LOVE. Although my understanding of this mysterious living thing has deepened,  I consider these words to still have some meaning to ponder, love is an unfolding experience.  Words are like seeds that trees of contemplation grow from.  When I look at the relationship between what I call Yoga, and Love, I can’t see a difference, in real Yoga there is no separation.

What Might Be Love

LOVE, has no boundaries or judgements.
It embraces the totally of all things born and still unborn.
It waits patiently for us to take her hand and follow her to our greatest potential, it forgives our shortcomings and speaks quietly to us when we need her most.
Love creeps through our life often unnoticed but catches us as we fall.
Love is our only true friend, our faithful companion that walks with us from age to age, beyond the graves.

Tilopa 2.0 (2007)

Not This – Neti Neti

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The Endless Unfolding
The Ocean of Consciousness unpacks itself and rolls across the Multiverse, in the same way a painter splashes paint on a canvas, flicking the brush around in a detached, almost uninterested manner.  There are numerous forms coming and going on the screen of existence, most may never be seen and their presence will be felt from within themselves, only known by the internal pulsing, like a heartbeat we hear when we sit in our silence. No-one there to ‘name’ what presents itself or to add a ‘story’ or give any type of meaning or understanding to the ‘what is’.

Self Questioning
“Neti Neti” is a form of Vedic Inquiry, it is used by those exploring the Yoga of the Self to negate anything that presents itself in consciousness. The loose translation of it would be ‘Not this, not this’.  A simple example would be if a phantom appeared in the mind-space of a meditator, a God, a Master a great Yogi,  enticing him or her into an experience of some sort, the experiencer would use the phrase “neti, neti” to detach from the passing phantoms.  It would be done in a manner without a struggle, gently pulling ones attention back into the underlying emptiness.

Misunderstandings
This ‘detachment’ is at the core of Jnana Yoga, the Yoga of Knowing, or in truth would be better to be called the Yoga of Unknowing. There are many misunderstandings regarding Jnana Yoga.  In the same way that if you give a musical instrument, a hand made lute to someone who doesn’t understand how to play it, they would make strange sounds that don’t really resemble music, such is the fate of Jnana Yoga, the Yoga of Being at this point by the populace in space-time.  When people interpret Jnana Yoga who  come from other forms and traditions of yoga such as Bhakti  (the Yoga of Devotion), Karma Yoga (the Yoga of doing good stuff to sweat off all the supposed bad deeds and balance the account)  or those who come from any other practice,  all these others look through a window that has their own set of rules, visions and understandings.  To be quite clear, I will say it’s the wrong set of eyes.  And also there are those who are exploring Jnana Yoga who start to intellectualise the process and create a philosophy instead of being able to speak from a depth of experience, it all goes skewiff.

Making Sense
One of the very common pitfalls and misunderstandings of Jnana Yoga is there is a tendency to ‘run’, to attempt to transcend life, to turn things into an ‘us and them’, a ‘spiritual and a material’, as if spirituality was an island and everything outside of it is evil, ‘it’s gonna come and steal your fruit and veges or eat your porridge, it’s coming after you’; and if ‘life’ grabs you, you will be lost in the tunnels of time forever, a slave to delusion.  If we are serious about spirituality, we need to stop this nonsense and bring some sort of order and practicalness to it all; claim it back, do ‘our thing’ whatever that may be, and leave Jnana to its rightful owners instead of everybody having their tuppence worth about something that is outside their comprehension and field of experience, in the same way that a brain surgeon knows his or her area of expertise and stays out of dentistry, and does not attempt to use those annoying sounding drills on their friends and family.  Christians need to take back Jesus from the church, in fact all the faiths need to get their statues and baggage out of the way, it only interferes with the transformation process of the individual; without moving things out of the way, it will just reinforce the walls between ‘supposed self’ which is just thought, and Self… and i use the term Self with great caution, a word which has a lot of erroneous interpretations.

Not This, well What Then
Firstly and maybe mostly, the Universe is not our enemy,  I think this really needs to be addressed.  I have grown up around and in a number of so called spiritual communities; the division between ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ seems to be a ‘constant’ that presents itself far too often.  In Buddhism (and I must state I am not a Buddhist), there is a leaning towards a middle-way, something that has a self discipline that allows life to mingle with practice, this is healthy. Having said that, any ‘ism’ will have zealots, we will always be able to identify them because they fit closest to the ‘ad’ and tick all the right boxes.

Misunderstanding ‘Not This’
When we take ‘not this’ to the extreme, we may find that we put ourselves in the situation of trying to walk on water, to live a life with a fear of water, as if we will drown if one drop gets on our skin.  It’s a bit like being chased by a dog across the heavens, avoiding its bite, not realising that it’s a tame puppy, or a shadow puppet. When we stop and look at the beauty around us, and give thanks to the rising sun, the chubby smiling faces of kids, savor the chocolate, or the kiss of someone tender to us, when we watch the colors of spring and autumn, feel the joy of someone overcoming something against all odds, watch a shooting star or an otter playing around…. when we stop to feel these things, then we have come home, heaven and earth are in balance. If we continue on ‘running’, separating heaven and earth, we will lose our spark, a withered vine, no grapes, a barren vineyard will be what we move in, tasteless, barely alive.

Dumping the Gods
Where we get into strife is ‘clinging’ to something; wherever we go, bringing the past with us, like a bag lady with her bags stacked on a shopping trolley; dragging our ‘story’ that we have left behind with us; swallowed and a slave to our acquisitions.  If we want life, the bitter and judgemental Gods need to be put out with the garbage, buried as landfill.  False Gods and their hypnotised followers are often life haters, they create a vision of how they think the world ought to be and pollute it with their ‘unnaturalness’, they push against the flow of the river, they train people in fearing life and pass it on generation to generation.  We do not need these people telling the world what is wrong with it and offering salvation and liberation.  With an alert questioning mind it is easy to resolve most things, to bypass what is not needed; most morality is ugly, it is not virtue, it is not integrity, it is fear and control based. Virtue unfolds in acts of natural kindness, tenderness to the world around us, by softening and trying to understand ‘our’ differences with others, constantly ‘giving in’ without submission to selfish agendas, by looking outside our square and attempting to make sense of the pain and needs of others and allowing them to be.

The Art of Neti Neti
Neti neti,to me is the ‘practice of constantly abandoning’, of letting things rise and fall in our consciousness with an attitude of ‘is that so?’; it’s a way of arriving at a form of constant unfolding peace.  Trying to define the ineffable is the job of madmen, not the Divine Madmen, the other ones, the ones who miss life and try and package the universes into a bucket, it just ain’t gonna fit, we don’t need their help.  The poets can point in the right direction, the quantum physicists can write formulas to imply the nature of ‘things’ to help break down traditional thinking that imprisons much of humanity. The lovers smile and the poets dream, the musician pulls the strings that touch the heart of the listener, children laugh, and the camel spits…. ahhh the beauty of life.  It is “not this, not this”, but if we allow it to have it’s moment on the blank canvas of the universe, to do its thing then take a bow and move on, then we are not bound.  Heaven and Earth are in order, and I am grateful.

Tilopa 2.0

The Yoga of Water

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Water the Guru
When I watch the movement of water, I know that I am in the presence of something that can teach me a lot about myself and show me how to navigate the world around and within me;  if I am quiet and alert in my thinking, I will extract a wealth of wisdom from it.  Water takes the form of what I would refer to as a guru.  No, not a slightly chubby swami, looking smug, bathing in his feeling of self-importance with his followers, smiling and chewing on the fruits of their wealth. Nor an emaciated yogi type with hardened skin, a tree branch walking-stick, subconsciously clinging to an ancient tradition, living out a story of being a wandering mendicant; placed a little uncomfortably into a caste system that allows breaches of power, bullying, elitism and an acquired submissiveness by those who feel powerless, imprisoned by a cultural system, educated into accepting their roles in the community, bound by what their society says they must be.  Nah, not that type of guru; the other ones, the ones who give, not ‘takers’, they make you realise that what you are seeking is right where you are, this very moment, it’s there if you dig in; they don’t create a dependency, the guru could take any form at all, and why not, what’s this obsession with the human form anyway?

Water Water Everywhere
My father was born in a tent on the beach; a child from the meeting of two great cultural streams, this has a been an advantageous meeting-ground for me, it has given me a lot of skills, gifts from my ancestors. I lived a number of my formative childhood years near a beach just across the Tasman;  I learned to enjoy as well as fear the water.  The childhood bliss of rolling in the waves with the hot sun on my skin, the sand between my toes, ice blocks and coconut oil.  And the pain; at about twelve years old, my friends and I found a body floating in the surf; that day my world changed  forever.  Death is that ‘something’ most of us are never quite ready for, even when we know it’s on its way and gives us fair warning, just there watching us or circling around those dear to us, waiting to snare those beloveds who we cling to; there is always a sidestepping, a looking away, a saying, “nope not yet”. The alternative is challenging and questioning, to look straight into the heart of the enigma of death, to embark on the journey of a man or woman of ‘power’; power over ourselves not others, a quest to overcome our perceived limitations and be more than we ever dreamed of.  We can make death our teacher and use it as a yardstick for measuring what is important, a filter to sort the small stuff from what really is critical or needs our attention. As we know from every day life, this water stuff can be big or small, and knowing what we do about quantum physics, size, distance and volume doesn’t necessarily always matter;  it’s the ‘essence’, what is at the ‘core’ that counts… in the same way a drop of rose oil in a burner can scent a room, the potential of the wisdom of water is not bound by its size; its very presence  is enough, it’s in the drop; the ocean can come to us.  Water is always ‘giving’, that is why we can learn from it, it gives, it swerves, it takes on what it associates with, it’s beauty is in its purity like when it flows from the Himalayan mountains, potent in its unity, the rolling Ganga.

The Pure Liquid
The water brought death right to the seashore where we were playing, that in itself is a teaching.  I am not sure whether I have genuine a fear of death any more. Either way, my response no longer matters so much nor troubles me; it was something I walked with every day for many years, and was probably because my goal had always been about ‘getting out’, stepping into forever-ness. My issue was more about fearing that maybe I wouldn’t reach the goal, it was crucial that I ‘be’ a man who could walk in the company of Jiddu Krishnamurthi, Ramana Maharshi, Nisagadatta, Kirpal Singh, Shams, my superheroes bigger than Batperson and Superperson.  I now see it wasn’t so much about death at all, it was more about integrity of being.  Initially, I used to relate the journey to the after (human) life, heading towards the ocean that holds all things; my focus was on the totality, not seeing that the water in the bucket is the same as other water.  If we were to look at the scriptures, the philosophers and dreamers, they imply a merging of the small with the large, the river to the sea; for me this is not it, I don’t really think like that, I go the other way.   Even though many times in my formative years I heard the story of the drop of water and the ocean,  I had been chasing the ocean and never seriously considered entering it through the drop;  I was looking away instead of trusting that everything I needed was right here.  We are made of water, attracted to showers, puddles, tin roofs pattering with raindrops, sea shells singing; and hey, coffee consists of water and although chewing beans is delicious, it’s better wrapped in fluid.

The Satori and Samadhi Trap
When we first start to enter the great ocean of Samadhi  (deep mindlessness), it may seem delightful, to many it would be a surprise to hear it might also be like a scorpion sting; or for some, initially it is a bitter potion that gradually steals everything you held close to your heart;  the totally of what we consider as ‘us’ breaks apart; trust me on this one, the lot is going to shatter, this is a ‘given’, so don’t be fooled by the smiling pictures of happy swami people, that’s Hollywood, or India philosophy spam marketing… but it’s ok, it changes shape further along the timeline, the waves settle.  Many people get caught in the initial Satori experience, the ‘awakening’ state, they milk it long after the cow is dry; they set themselves up, the robes, the incense, the books, the pictures, people bowing, micro communities, the gatherings, blissful smile, shoes off at the door; poor pitiful souls; this is nice but it’s nonsense, it’s a bit like playing three chords on a guitar and calling yourself a musician.  If people with a genuine depth of experience are not outspoken, the trail of casualties and tragedies is going to blow out even wider.  All those gurus screwing the pretty vulnerable women – staring into their eyes pretending it’s a spiritual experience, taking the money of divorcees, fiddling young boys; people wasting their lives with narcissists who pilfer the treasures of great traditions and build a private empire with them.  Let’s face it, it is worth having a little common sense here, and carefully investigating who might be the charlatans under a delusional spell; it is quite easy to  research these days.  People who are trapped in an ethereal euphoria always minimise the abuse of power, they cannot see the trail of deceit because of the spiritual fantasy, they confuse their mild ecstasy with someone who says the things they want to hear or believe to be true it’s escapism from the pain of life.

The Half Baked Cake
The experiences that many people have, are no doubt genuine, something has gone on, I would never question that, it’s not my business, but often they get lost in the exhilaration.  When people take their Satori (awakening) or Samadhi experience into the marketplace prematurely, quite often many naive trusting bright-eyed-bushy-tailed followers will get totally stuffed over. I have mixed feelings on whether the stuffing over is always intentional or if it’s more about immaturity.  There’s a certain amount of energy/power which comes with various experiences, and people paint themselves into corners they don’t know how to get out of. The lies get bigger and everyone gets hurt.

There is No Mountain
I used to live in the mountains, I had gone through a bit of a leap in my consciousness. I had to ground myself by going to the city, my world was disintegrating, I was quite young, twenty three.  We all have experiences when we start poking around in super-consciousness, it’s a version of normal, it’s no big deal unless you make it a big show.  I guess I am writing this because some people don’t know how to deal with the experience that goes on in the field of ‘consciousness’. The world although still there, at times becomes a little less solid for a while, this is only an elementary stage on the journey of self-transformation.  Actually it is not so much a journey, it’s more like sitting on a train and throwing all your bags out the window, the surroundings change but you are still in the same spot, it just looks and feels a little different, at times a bit misty, and like phantoms are playing roles.  It would be fair to say there is a ‘gate’ we go through, it is not a final destination, it’s the beginning.   By saying this I do not wish to create an impression that this ‘gate’ is a necessity or common to all or ought to be a goal,  it is still within the ‘known’ on the screen of life and ultimately it will lose its over-importance; it can be a milestone to some.  Spirituality is about losing self-importance, being nothing; if we are ‘something’ it’s always going to get in the way, the guruness gets in the way, the purity, the sadhana, the altered-experience is going to block the view, it all becomes a new chain.

Stealing Our Life Blood. 
We live at the tail end of a fragmented civilisation where there are many petty tyrants, boof-heads who are in the way of themselves and others; they are overburdened with self importance, they dirty the water; they see themselves as the ‘centre’, this is the biggest error a human being can make, not knowing that the ‘centre’ is everywhere, whether someone is a tyrant or not, it’s the same problem.  These mad men wish to control the flow of our water, to deprive communities of what is essential for the human body to function in this world of the five senses and coffee, it’s a necessity for all life on this big emerald colored rock floating in space.  Not only is their manipulation of this life giving substance disturbing our well-being; the mother earth, that wondrous living being we move upon also suffers.  This situation shows us how far we as a species have moved away from what is truly of value, when we poison the life-blood of our world, and others, we have lost our way.  These men, the tyrants who manipulate wealth and resources, hold too much power over a spellbound humanity,  they have become the false Gods.  They are ruthless, they experience a type of sick self stimulation by acquiring what is not really theirs, everything is for their empires, their kingdoms, they gather power by disempowering others.  In their taking, their lack of compassion, empathy and anything virtuous, they poison the world. They do not reflect the wisdom that is hidden in water.  How we treat others and respect the world around us is a benchmark of where we are at;  when we lose our compassion, our sense of care and sensitivity for the very Being we move in, we need to start again.

When we watch the water we see how adaptable it is, it is malleable, it bends when it needs to, it takes on new forms, it works it’s way around things,  we can learn everything we need to know from this glorious element of nature, it is a much better guru than most you will encounter.

Tilopa 2.0

Please note … guest writer coming soon to the Future

Overthrowing the Guru

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Welcome to the Spiritual Circus
When we look from the outside at what is going on in ‘spiritual’circles, it would be very easy to say, “these people seem mad”, rest assured it’s madder than anyone would imagine on the inside, and I don’t mean on my inside, I mean within the walls of the ashrams, the monasteries, the yoga schools and the retreats, it is insanity.  However, we live in a very mad world, so why should madness stop at the ‘supposed’ gates of salvation?

There is a type of elitist arrogance in religious and spiritual groups that is often referred to as ‘separating the wheat from the chaff’, it comes from a biblical passage about the end days; it’s the core of the ‘us and them mentality’, the saved and the lost, it’s a prepubescent attitude that can linger and be passed from generation to generation, or from the guru to initiate. Let’s leave that aside now that I have normalised the environment.

Hook, Line and Blinkers
By nature, humans are easy to sell to, if you do it right, people will buy anything.  The classic example is the dummy in the window, a person wandering down the street,  looks through the glass, a desire emerges, imagines themselves dressed as the dummy, thinks ‘wow I will look better than that’, goes into shop, walks out with a spring their step, new outfit in bag.  This is very similar to what happens when newbies first find some type of perceived pathway out of pain, heartache and chaos of life. Because of a natural innocence and naivety with spirituality, people often don’t know how to act in a spiritual group, it turns into a monkey see – monkey do, instead of being oneself.  And this is where the trouble starts.

The Sanity of Skepticism
As a long term Ufologist and OOBer (out of the body traveler) it would seem odd for me to say that if you are interested in religion or spirituality, get yourself a friend who is a skeptic.  A skeptic will fast track you through all the nonsense, and on condition that your new skeptic buddy is not an extreme fundamentalist skeptic or very arrogant and condescending , he or she will probably ask the right questions.  Because the honeymoon stage of any new spiritual group can seem euphoric to most because of the new friends, supposedly liked minded seekers, happy people, revelations, the open arms, the feel good quotes, the challenge, the hope of a glorious future; it is critical that the new hot-air-balloon that you have hopped aboard, has a few sandbags to allow a descent back to earth.

Being Well Informed
I have been around a number of cults and sects, it started early in my life as I wanted to be a priest, fortunately I realised ‘that’s not it’,  I stole back Jesus from the Catholic clergy abusers, headed east, and into the mystic doctrines instead. Being well informed on doctrines, scriptures and approaches for transformation made it reasonably  easy to see who was just doing ‘dress ups’ and had hidden agendas, and who could push the visitors through the doorway of foreverness.

Overtaking the Teachers
So where is this going?  As I have been a musician for most of my life,  one thing that was critical has been for me to find my own music, to get inside sound, to get an understanding of how it all works and to abandon the idea of ‘being or playing somebody else’, and to some degree, to disregard the known.  This attitude is something that I consider important when dealing with the sublime subject of spirituality.  When I was about twenty years old I studied guitar with a great musician and he said to me, “I don’t mind if you go past me”. This statement and pass-out to freedom was a great gift.  And this is an attitude that is worth considering when it comes to spiritual teachers, gurus, masters or anyone who has sat a crown on their head in the spiritual empire.  Ultimately we need to go past them. Dependency is the enemy of the spiritual aspirant; it would be very easy for people to start throwing scriptural quotes in my direction in response to this statement.  I did have a great teacher, I owe him a lot;  his death was a major milestone in my endless transformation, it meant I had to put into action everything that I had remembered, this was not comfortable, I had to become responsible for myself.  But we don’t need somebody to die, for us to die to them.  And dying is what this is all about.

Death of the Known
The process of meditation is what I would call the drinking of slow poison. Generally if we think of poison, alarm bells go off, images of sickness, a slow and painful exit from the body, a lot of sweating, gasping for air as we squeeze the last words out of our being.  OK, let’s change our definition of poison to it being an elixir, something that pilgrims have been seeking for eons.  In meditation everyone is equal, in the Silence there are no show-ponies, there is no feet kissing of gurus, no bowing or prostrating, there are no phantoms, by understanding this, a lot of unnecessary stuff can be dumped.  It is important to not confuse the world of forms and sensations, or any real or imaginary spiritual hierarchies with where we are going, or more precisely, with what is at the core under our awareness. In ashrams and monasteries there is a tendency for the ‘been here longer, know more’ attitude to exist, this structure can be a little delusive because the newbie may use a more ‘senior’ member of the community as the model to shape themselves on.  The ‘disciple mannequin’ is then the point of focus and what happens is the newbie takes on the habits of someone else, thinking the accrual of habits is development.

When the Guru Stuffs You Over
So what if not only the ‘senior’ monkeys have got it all very wrong, but the guru or teacher themselves, they may be a schyster; people are giving up not only time, but are placing some sort of future life importance around someone who has gotten it total wrong or may just be a control freak?  What to do?  This entanglement is dangerous, it may even cost us our friends, family, money, our thinking, our precious life.  We see this all the time, betrayal, abuse of power, sexual abuse, misappropriation of monies, the building of empires at the expense of others. There are a trail of corpses on the guru trail, there have been numerous tragedies where there has been betrayal; if one were to say “the Spiritual Path is treacherous”, it would be correct from the point of view that a great teacher is rare. Personally I think it is important for everything and everyone to be become our teacher, as life emerges we can savor the wisdom

Growing Outwards
I had the greatest of teachers, this gives me a good window to look through that allows a certain amount of empathy.  I get this ‘teacher thing’, I understand the feeling of obligation that people have; the hooks, the feeling of loss when it doesn’t work; the strings that are similar to being in a family.  This relationship being like our families, may be a clue to how to navigate in, through and out of the many spiritual and religious groups we may encounter.  With families, we are born into an environment that allows us to grow, we don’t have a choice, in some cases we are nurtured, cared for, guided, but there are situations where people are in fear, are bullied, feel worthless, dis-empowered. Regardless what the family structure may be like, we do know that good natured, well balanced people come from varied family backgrounds.  My dearest friend, the man who was my teacher grew up in an orphanage, but he morphed into the wisest man I ever met.  With this in mind, if we can learn to take from our family backgrounds and grow into versions of self-reliant independent thinking, emotionally intelligent people, we can also ride through the various ups and downs, wisdom and insanity of the spiritual circus and not get ‘caught’.

Claiming Ourselves Back
What I learnt from my teacher, and this was from the very first meeting, was to start letting go of everything that was in the way, from the outset it was critical that I let go of him, I had to come back to myself and get rid of everything in the way; to see the teachings, the gurus, the experiences as something on the periphery and secondary; to not have anything in the way to block the view; and ultimately that anything else was ‘looking away’.  When we are lost in the drama of cults, religious institutions, gurus, practices, spiritual teachings, they sit between us, or more specifically they create a division; where we need to be is in ourselves (not totally up ourselves with some story of spirituality), all these things create ‘another’ and are things that are rising and falling on the screen of life, just consciousness and energy.

An attitude of ‘not betraying God, our guru or teacher’ by claiming back our power is critical.  The Universes we move in are benevolent and it is our playground, we are not its slave, and freedom is in coming home to ourselves, not moving away.

Tilopa 2.0

The Tao of Not Naming the Universe

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All, or maybe most of our problems come from wanting to place things in the Universe where they are not or wanting to remove them from where they landed.  If we can sort or at least understand this problem, then the chaos in our thinking ‘softens’ and ‘thought’ becomes easier to manage. It is our ‘hardness’, rigidness, tightness that is stifling and leads to pain.

Thinking Scattered Across the Room
Someday’s it’s as if our thoughts have been put in a blender or I could offer an even better description.  Remember when you were a kid and someone said, “Do you want to play a card game?” and you go “Yep” and they say, “Let’s play fifty-two pick-up” and you go “OK”, then your world suddenly goes temporarily out of order as you watch them throw the cards in the air and they land everywhere.  That’s what thought is like, there is a similarity to the cards on the floor and the disorder in our thinking.  We have a rough idea about the ‘elements of thought’ in the same way that we know there are hearts clubs, spades and diamonds on the cards but the lack of order is where the struggle seems to be.  We humans are constantly wanting resolve, to bring order into the world, to align things in an effort for our minds to be at peace.  The great teacher of life Lao Tzu hinted at this when he said, “The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth, the named is the mother of myriad things”;  it may not seem obvious at first but in this text from the Tao Te Ching there is something there that is worthwhile for us to unpack, everything is always waiting for our wisdom to kick in.

The Naming of Things
We live in a world of descriptions or better said,  we apply descriptions to the world we experience and move in. This ‘naming’ allows us to place things where we like them and then we can go about the business of everyday life; when we are ‘uncomfortable’, it may be because our thinking can’t file something in the right place.  When my oldest boy suicided some years ago, like every parent who has been to this precipice, I struggled, it was like having raw chili rubbed into every molecule of my being, when I thought of his death it was unbearable, debilitating. But then magic happened, something that I am exceptional at is ‘magic’ (I would describe it as the art of deceiving the observer).  As the observer of my own life, I managed to reshuffle my ‘naming of things’ and said to myself ‘he passed over’, this masterpiece of thinking, ‘wisdom-magic’ allowed my son to jump to another part of the Universe.  Regardless whether my beautiful son now moves in a new form or is in deep rest within the glorious Emptiness of Being is not so important here; freedom came about by a tiny adjustment in my ‘thinking’, without this, if I had stuck with an old worldview my vision of my universe, it would totally disempower and destroy what I sometimes refer to as ‘me’.

Renaming the World
When we fall in and out of this ‘love’ thing people speak of, we bring to it a story.  In the society we live in now, it has become more complex, there are now numerous descriptions on how we relate to each other.  Even children have labels for friends ‘my besty’ and then suddenly the child’s besty does something, whether it be knowingly or unknowingly there  will be a version of heartbreak.  No longer is the ‘besty’ fitting the model that sits in the thinking of the child.  What normally happens is we as big children have some type of ‘subconscious order’ of how people fit into our lives. Our besty stuffs us over and then it’s, “ok, alright,  I never saw that coming” and there’s a game changer;  depending on our smarts and ‘Emotional Intelligence’ (that mysterious-wisdom-thing we have built up through our lives and sometimes does a runner when we most need it), we ride the waves of change and settle on new descriptions such as ‘ex-besty’, ‘they who cannot be mentioned’, ‘dickhead’,  ‘ouch, do not say that name’, or ‘gee i miss that person’.

Wait a Minute
I think of all the skills things that are required to navigate life, it would be ‘patience’ and I do not mean the patience of inaction. There is an Indian word called thamas, it implies dull or inactive; no I don’t mean that type of waiting, there is another word from the Indian dictionary that is better to align ourselves with, it is called sattva.  Although there would be many descriptions, I will simply say it implies harmony or balance, not being over-excited nor dull.  From my experience and also from  watching everyone else get more deeply entangled in chaos, confusion and sink deeper into the quicksand of life, this skill of ‘waiting’ is the one most needed to be nurtured (non-rocket science moment here). When we don’t wait, what happens is our story of the world, our understanding of how we imagine things to be gets in the way and we act on impulse.  If we are not cautious and we lack patience we end up placing things in our universe at locations where they don’t really exist, we make decisions that lead to pain for ourselves and others.

Un-designing the Universe
If we want relief from unnecessary suffering, what we need to consider doing is to readjust our thinking, to expand outside ‘our known’, to allow things to emerge on the screen of life that we have never considered, seen or experienced before.  And this is where freedom lies, it comes about by gradually disintegrating our ‘story’ of the world, by disempowering our limited view of the way we believe things to be, or expect them to be.  Emotional pain can gradually dissolve without a fuss if we start to get rid of the labels that divide us, those ones that imprison us, that disappoint us when we find out that what’s in the packet is not what we assumed was there and just let things be as they are without ‘our story’, without putting our desires and outcomes on things and situations that are totally out of our control, things that are placed ‘elsewhere in the cosmos’ and not at the address we assumed them to be; what comes about is a natural detachment and thoughts that may trouble us will fall into Emptiness.

Love Knocking at the Door
One of my super-heroes, the sage Jiddu Krishnamurti,  once said,”Only the free mind knows what love is“.  Love is a little frisky, when we try and hold it, it runs; when we try and define it, even the great mystic poets Kabir, Shams, Rumi and Hafiz are lacking in words, they point to the beauty of the moon and it’s up to us to go there. But when we soften our thinking, something extraordinary happens, it, love comes through our door and lies with us, comforts us, touches our being, wraps its arms around us and holds us until we fall into a divine forgetfulness once again and wander through the corridors of space-time in wonder and awe.

Tilopa 2.0 (13th April 2016)

Chocolate and the Mystery of Liberation

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Constant Liberation
‘We are always in a state of liberation’, this idea would seem contrary to many spiritual doctrines, religious texts and paths ‘towards’ enlightenment; but as I have wandered this landscape for many years, I will trust my own experience and ‘back myself’.  If we start to dig into the topic, we will see that this view, is not necessarily in conflict with other approaches, we may find it will loosen the constrictive belt around us and take some of the pressure off, and a new timeline of experience may emerge.

Givens
When we look closely, we begin to see there are core things that are ‘a given’, things that we agree on that we may not need to ponder too much about.  And although I think taking ANYTHING for granted is not a great idea, I will say with a certain amount of confidence, there are two things that are self-evident about life’s mystery.  They are unity and separation. There is unity, a cosmic glue, a ‘something’ that wherever we go it seems to be there, sitting just a breath away, beneath the part of us that is aware.  I will say this based on the fact that although ‘I am aware’, someone elsewhere is not having the same ‘awareness’ experience, there is a similarity in the fact that we would both have an awareness, but this awareness is of different things; there are micro universes happening simultaneously.  We probably should add ‘awareness’ to our list of ‘givens’, there is something doing something, a type of self reflection. Regardless of this awareness being similar and diverse, if we drop beneath the ‘surface’, underneath thought, away from the world of shadows, light and changing forms on the screen of life, we are unified in Emptiness, in the deep Silence, similar to the way ‘space’ dangles and holds the stars and planets in the heavens.  And although there is this ‘unity’, the beings that we are, seem to be separate from not only each other,  but there is an age old seeking built into humanity that longs for unity with something ‘sublime’, something that is intuitively there but slightly out of reach .  There is a quest to know, to find out the answers to specific questions relating to our existence and life itself.

The Search for Chocolate 
Humanity is in a situation where it resembles a Chocolate Easter Egg Hunt, as if some big Being hid something and said ‘go find it’. Like any lover of chocolate, once the thought goes to the salivary glands and virtual chocolate bunnies, hearts or squares start racing through the thought fields, there is no relief until the chocolate hits the lips and the desire is satiated.  If it is young children on the Easter Egg Hunt, at a particular point, a parent or anyone who is organising the search, will drop hints such as ‘I don’t think it would be next to the tree’, ‘i wonder if a bunny would leave them in the letterbox’; we do not like to see children suffer or turn the game into something that would bring tears.
In the same way that parents and others drop hints to minimise the suffering  of chocolate egg hunt, if we look at the history of humanity, we will see that every now and then, there emerges in the drama of life, various people who point us away from suffering, although there are people with numerous, diverse approaches, the (genuine) Jnana Yogis are pretty good at this ‘minimising suffering’ because they can short-track the quest and help strip away a lot of the misconceptions and misunderstandings which have been added to many schools of spiritual thought by well intentioned people who speculated and interpreted the words of others without first-hand experience.

Benevolence of Life
From my perspective I see life, the cosmos, the nature-of-things as benevolent.  The return of the spring, the autumn colours, the rolling waves, the birth of new animals, stillness of the forrest, the rising and setting of the sun, our ability to feel, to love, to tingle, to laugh, to hold someone in our arms, to be enticed by a sweet melody and weep at its beauty, these things to me, are the evidence of the splendour, and the wonder of the ‘being’ we move in.  My personal experiences of rising above trauma, grief, deep longing, heartbreak and other loses; and still being able to look out into the foreverness of the galaxies in awe, and to be inquisitive about some day going there, is what tells me that whatever seems ‘temporarily’ like turmoil, something will unfold that is healing, nurturing and is expression of wonder.

So What’s the Problem?
It’s quite simple, we are LOOKING AWAY; always running, always seeking, and due to this ‘absence’, we miss the obvious.  We have heard things like “God is closer than the heartbeat”.  If we ponder this simple phrase for one moment, something extraordinary may slap our face.  I will say it again, “God is closer than the heartbeat”.  I guess I better claim the word God back from the zealots before I go any further.  The word God has a lot of baggage, it can come with some hideous attachments ‘doom and gloom, judgement, war, guilt, power, patriarchal society, pomp, misuse of power, vengeance, karma, control, bigotry’, this is not my God.  This is the God of lonely men who do not understand their own beauty nor have the ability to see past the differences of culture, the need for diversity of nature, the necessity for sovereignty of the individual, nor can they see the beauty of the uniqueness being or flowering of wisdom.

Redefining God
This ‘just past the heartbeat God’ is what we move in, it’s the essence of our being, it’s what looks out our eyes, it’s what holds the hand of someone in need, it’s what we see in the eyes of others when we disintegrate, it rises every day in the east, this God thing has multiple forms.  Not only does it have shape or mass, it has sensations, feelings, emotions, and aspects that would be categorised loosely as thought.  There is not a place where this presence is not. And at this point my writings resemble something like a fish mumbling about water.   But we, our point of awareness touches it most deeply in the formless attribute, and from my understanding, I see there a reason for this.  There is nothing permanent, or totally solid, even the physicists for some time have agreed on this.  Everything is thought, temporarily pulling together various elements that are perceived by the senses

Coming Back to OurSelf
So let’s solve this riddle.  If the world around us is thought manifest; and thoughts are supposedly present and are constantly in motion inside of us; if we are seeking in temples, texts, or going to gurus, masters, yogis (not bears), preachers and pundits; ultimately if we look closely we will see that all these people and things are manifestations of thought; this is all relating to the God of form. But it is in formlessness, the depth of Silence where we are united most deeply.  It is through contact with the sublime part of us where transformation happens.

It is the Emptiness, the Silence, the Great Void, the Ocean that brings forth all Consciousness, this is where Liberation is, it is always present.  It is thought that is in the way, and it is following these thoughts away from ourself, that is the problem.

I am not implying that anybody ought to stop doing any sort of spiritual practice, but I if the focus is on managing ‘thought’ instead, and letting the sublime peep through in the gaps, instead trying to become anything, there will be instant change.

Coming back to ourself has taken a long time, but we can rest safely in the Silence without running after fantasies and false Gods.