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
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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

India, Death and Love

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Life in the Senses
The smell of the bakery surprised me today, the one I have never seen, hidden away just down the street from where I have lived for a few years, maybe it’s in a back lane, it fires up just in time so I can wander by and taste its goodies in my thoughts.  The corner flower shop, it’s colors, bundles of heaven in soft fragile shapes making me think it’s spring in autumn, and there’s sun, yesterday the winds were distressing, almost a hundred miles an hour,  if it wasn’t for my coffee non-addiction pleasure and a need to break out of cabin fever, I would have stayed in, hidden under my sheets.  The beauty of the morning got me thinking, ‘why do we run?’

Death is Stalking
I grew up with death stalking me, it has taken years for me to settle into life.  I don’t know if other people have this ‘running from death thing’ but my life has been shaped around it.  India, seems to ‘do’ death better than anywhere else.  I have had a deep love affair with India; when my plane landed in the far south at Trichy over thirty years ago, I wept..  I am not what you would call a Indiaphile, a traveler, a passport stamp collector; my  experience is different.  Oddly enough I have always been more Indian than western, my only genetic connection is one I heard about recently from my Irish American based second cousin, she informed me our DNA traces us to Pakistan.  I saw a picture of India at about eight  and as a child said to myself, ‘I must go there,  my real fascination with the land of Bharat started at fifteen when I saw a newspaper cutout and the heading was ‘Jesus Lived in India’. Regardless what the facts may be, it was truth to me. This was a cue of how the future would be shaped.   India, death and who I imagine myself to be, are intertwined.

India on Our Doorstep
It is a great tragedy to the world, in the West, historians, intellectuals and academics have written the story of the world according to certain criteria based on a particular set of values and opinions.  Thank heavens for food and its secret hidden powers, fortunately Indian cuisine is desirable to many people.  We have a lot to thank the global chefs for, they have brought the flavors into our mouths; they are ambassadors who unify humanity, they do what politicians and mainstream religions can’t.   In the spaces where we go to eat these mouth-watering delicacies, on the walls hang pictures of Krishna, Elephants,people wrapped in cloth, the Moguls and while sitting knockin’ back a dosa or spiced tea, floating around the eating space is the sound of the sitar, the sarod, sarangi, tampura, tabla and musical notes that our ears have now become accustomed to; a scent of incense floating. India creeps up on us. In my case I dived in deep at a young age because death was chasing me, so I thought. Really death was my teacher tapping me on the shoulder and India was the classroom, its wisdom and very existence my textbooks.

Opposites Unpack
Each moment we are faced with two entangled opposites, mortality and immortality, being present and detaching.   When there is the ‘passing’ of a loved one, these two mysterious things knock loudly on our door and come in to sit for a while with us.  It’s uncomfortable for us, the fragility of it all; often we just click back into to ‘normal’ with a BIG piece missing, sometimes broken, or maybe philosophical. We can, if we have enough personal power use this time to ‘see’, (‘personal power’ means a type of stability, to be able hold steady against all odds, something that has been developed throughout our lives through extracting the wisdom from experiences, and ‘seeing’ means to use the totality of ourselves to gaze into something without prejudice or a limited opinion).  At the time of the passing of someone dear to us, we are at our most alert, on the edge of two worlds and if we can harness the waves of grief, use them as a type of fuel for transformation, a change will come about at a core level, even if we return to everyday life when the exterior is not much different; we will never be the same again.

The Beauty and Insanity of India
Death has been my teacher;  India and death seem to be intertwined; the world of Gods beyond the human form, their visits to the world, the rushing Ganges, a symbol of the flow of life, the passing show, the billions born into human existence, rolling through space-time. The insanity of a country with so many paradoxes, where the Dharma is at its heart; the Dharma, the endless unfolding natural law that sustains all, with it’s innate tendency towards supporting virtue, and I don’t mean the morality of the small minded religious zealots.   India with some of its hideous customs towards devaluing woman, and it’s not that it doesn’t happen elsewhere;  where is the respect for Sita, isn’t she in every woman?  India where the Ramayana was born, the epic tale of Rama, outlining the roles of all members of the community can play their roles to bring about a harmonious society. India she gave us the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God expressed so potently, the arrival of the Avatar Krishna to save a bumbling humanity from itself, the prayers of the Saints and Sages heard, the Divine manifesting to its full potential in the world of the five elements. Krishna riding the chariot into battle with Arjuna standing on his shoulders, pulling on the reins of the five horses, helping those who support the Dharma in the battle of Kurukshetra, family members and friends against each other; reminding us it is our heart that is the battlefield, to overcome the part of ourselves that stands in the way of where we would be best to go.

Love Revealed
The giant orange tennis ball in the sky, suspended in space over the western plains, ladies in saris in the fields, their backs bent, natural yogis, like phantoms on the stage of life.  The sound of Bhajans, Kirtan, music for the Gods, little cymbals, drums and the drone of an harmonium moves across my thoughts. The words of Bhagavatam deeply ingrained in my thoughts.  When I set out to write this a few days ago, I was thinking about an article about how all the things of India do not represent Spirituality, how they get in the way of the view of the formless absolute and how they are just passing forms in the show. I was thinking how anything that presents itself in the world of shadows and light is an obstacle to self-transformation…..and here I sit entangled; I solved death years ago, but India still enchants me; her mystery, her beauty…. I often wonder why I was born in the West, maybe it’s a love affair from a distance. the deepest longing that makes me appreciate her more, like the master musician who waits for the perfect note to emerge from the Silence.

The Yoga of Being Gentle on Ourselves

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It’s a Crazy Mixed Up World of Men
There is madness in the world of men; economic growth, a push for getting from point A to B at a faster rate; okay, so what to do when we get there?  Making more money by giving less to the community; buying houses for babies so they will be ‘set up’ for the future, but forgetting the people around us are homeless…. what if the children become gypsies, nomads with invisible camels, wanderers and wayfarers, roaming Buddhas?   There are guys in suits, and stern looking power dressing women who model themselves on the worst of men, they struggle to get ahead in an insensitive arena of male mini tyrants; the cold stark air conditioned buildings with plastic plants, people shuffling papers and balancing numbers, lots of ‘doing’; children in daycare with strangers while their parents micro empires rise, and so often it falls in chaos as the family members don’t get to experience each other, overworked and too busy to appreciate the extraordinary meeting place called intimacy.

AS A SPECIES, WE MAY HAVE LOST OUR WAY.

The Spin dryer of Thought
Yesterday I hit the edge of despair.  This is not really a big  problem for me as my ‘Future Yogi’ (the part of me that lives outside time) looks at the experience and reminds me to change my point of perception, to stop and watch the play of life.  What was troubling me was, I am under pressure to deliver the fine details in a written testimony to my solicitor regarding crimes against humanity that happened to me as a child.  As I need to enter the memory of the experience so the legal team can proceed with my case, I got the wobbles, for a brief moment I was lost in the space-time tunnel.  It felt like I was in the spin dryer, trying to stop the emotions from jumping out and flying across the room.  My son was beautiful at this moment, and I understand why we chose each other as parent and child, he just said, ‘dad, is there anything I can do to help?’,  I said, ‘no, just saying that is enough’.  And I know from experience, I can usually sort things myself, nobody needs to do anything, it is knowing there is someone there that really counts.  So I decided to be gentle on myself.

The Warriors of Thought
I was too serious to do my usual therapy, the fine art of holding up my left arm and tickling my underarm with my right hand; this often works.  But these things I am dealing with are crimes against humanity, abuses of human rights that I have experienced.  For most people the heavy artillery would need to be called in, psychiatrists, meds, medical teams, guys in white coats with expressions of concern embedded into their wrinkled foreheads . Being the ninja that I am, I understand that there is always a point that holds everything in balance, there is a centre point at the heart of things.  If we can locate and manipulate that very fine whatever-thing that everything depends on,  the most powerful enemy can be defeated with a minimum of ease.   I know the greatest enemy of man is ‘thought’, knowing this gives me a starting point, I have an advantage, all enemies are already defeated.  If my problem is thought, there is no need go into battle and create more turmoil, things will just get broken.  A true warrior brings about peace with the least harm possible.   The dull, the bold, the buffoons will destroy the landscape, there will be carnage, collateral damage, everything gets stuffed over…. a wise warrior enters and leaves without anyone even knowing, while the villagers are sleeping, we come and go adjusting things to bring harmony, I took this path as there is no other one worth contemplating. And here is that path…..

The Ever Changing and Emerging Unborn
I love learning; the new, the fresh, the potential unborn, that’s where all the possibilities are. I am a musician and was gifted with the greatest teachers, masters of their craft.  One thing that these brilliant beings reminded me of was, we can always go into new territory, even if the terrain looks familiar we can take it out further, there is something we can extract and use.  I decided to learn a simple raga and play it on one of my beautiful guitars, (a raga is the underlying foundation of classical Indian music tunes), the guitar was in an irregular tuning, this requires additional thought and focus, and I was also playing in a different key, another set of notes than the original.  What this meant was I had to translate everything I was doing.  Although what I mentioned may sound irrelevant , or out of context, the underlying idea was to keep my mind active, to distract and create some new neural pathways instead of digging deeper into the ones that no longer serve me, those old ones were hurting, they were smothering me with emotions.  These ‘new pathways’ is where we can disable some things, ward off those arrows of life that seem like they will destroy us. If we want change and healing, we must take charge of the process, else we will always be a slave to things that no longer exist.  Things happened, true, they are in our past, they will have an affect…WE DO NOT HAVE TO LET THEM DEFINE US, to derail us and steal the joy from our life.

Healing is an Inbuilt Thing
I am confident that healing can come about naturally, this may be contrary to the ideas of many health practitioners, honestly I am not sure how others feel about this. From experience I know to ‘back myself’ to trust what works for me, regardless if someone says it’s impossible.  As musicians we get to play with many different people of various skill levels, and lots of things are not said at times.  I will use the example of everyone in a band being told before a music session starts that a piece of music has been changed, except one person was not informed.   The tune starts,  everybody else ‘in the know’ starts playing; the musician who hasn’t been informed looks momentarily puzzled, he has a number of choices: get upset and walk out, play the wrong music just to be annoying, or just listen and feel what is going on and call on the skills in the musical toolbox and adapt. Life is a lot like this; if every time something happens, we respond in a manner that is against the flow of what is going on, we will always be running, missing life; if we decide to struggle against what is going on and do something that is ‘never going to work’, we will suffer.  But if we are sensitive enough and trust the inbuilt wisdom we have developed in our lives, it will be less painful, we can navigate safely, slay the paper tigers and imaginary dragons who roam around in our thoughts.
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I say what I say from experience. I have learnt to be gentle on myself, to face what in many cases probably should have broken me, but I treasure my life, an adventure not to be missed or treated with disrespect.  We are creative beings, the past is gone, never to return.  By ever seeking the new, the past recedes in the rear-view mirror of life.
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When I struggle, all I need to do is to think ‘be gentle on myself’, the world around me softens.
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Tilopa 2.0

Silent Love, Meditative Bliss

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Thoughts on what keeps us connected, yet keeps us from connection; experiencing love in silence and in the silence, as the goal, focus or locus of meditation.

Silent Love, Meditative Bliss is a very thought provoking article by a guest writer

“A meditative mind is silent. It is not the silence which thought can conceive of; it is not the silence of a still evening; it is the silence when thought – with all its images, its words and perceptions – has entirely ceased. This meditative mind is the religious mind – the religion that is not touched by the church, the temples or by chants.
“The religious mind is the explosion of love. It is this love that knows no separation. To it, far is near. It is not the one or the many, but rather that state of love in which all division ceased. Like beauty, it is not of the measure of words. From this silence alone the meditative mind acts.”
– Meditations, 1979
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Meditation is love
At that point, two worlds collided. Bliss as the love goal, silence as the meditation goal. I had not connected meditation to love, as love, connectedness, silence. If there is no separation, there is no need to speak – to whom are you speaking? In moments of bliss, there is no need to speak – what needs to be said? In moments of connectedness, the mind is still – what more do you seek? When the mind is still, there is no need to speak – what words can form in stillness? In moments of bliss, there is connectedness.
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The Obstacle of Disconnection
The many tools of meditation are a menu for the individual to choose from, flip through them until one resonates and you make a little progress, see a glimpse of what is possible or frighten yourself and move on or retreat. Some days might be days to count your breath, others might be days where the ringing sound is so loud that you can’t not focus on it. What I’ve seen is the obstacle to many people to exploring meditation or even stillness is the thought of being alone in it. It’s the prospect of realising that we are each ultimately utterly alone in this world, endlessly separated by the fact of being the only inhabitant of one’s assigned human body. Many people cannot bear silence, cannot sit still without fidgeting, cannot be comfortable with the thought of not having their comfort-phone-of-connection in their hand. Stimuli simulates connectedness, and we’re all addicts.
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Love as Silence
But in this thought – the explosion of love as silence, no separation and meditation – is a precious key. It’s utterly motivational – who doesn’t want to feel connected? And if, in that connectedness, stillness of the mind is possible, the rest for the mind can arrive, the brainwaves relax which is so healing for the whole being. Who doesn’t want to experience healing? And if, through that healing, more experience of connection in possible and love arises, or perhaps the experience of love that is essential human nature is revealed to you. Who doesn’t want love?
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The Obstacle of Possession
Love is often misunderstood, mistaken as possession which is not love, opposite to it perhaps. A bad experience or two with this unfortunate impostor and many swear off love forever, closing the heart. And thus arises the obstacle to connectedness. It hurts to think about being connected, because the pathway to love requires each obstacle to be examined and gently placed aside as irrelevant. The prospect of sitting still and examining each obstacle is frightening, particularly if one believes that the goal of stillness, of meditation, is an endpoint in which we are each utterly alone. The motivation for such thinkers is to retain each and every obstacle because the perception is that these obstacles are the safe walls that keep us close to our experience of what we thought was love, the experiences wherein the hurt arose that created these obstacles. But that’s a mistaken belief. In fact the ultimate goal is love, is connectedness, to know what that truly is, and it resides on the other side of any thought that creates space or distance between you and any other.
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Love is the goal. Love is all you need. What is keeping you from it?

By Guest Blogger – Arizona

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

Yoga and the Rawness of Being

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The World Goes Ouch
It’s a ‘normal’ to feel raw, a little closed in, as if the Universe is a size nine pushing against a size ten body; something isn’t quite right.  For me, it started yesterday, and has puzzled me, I do like puzzles.  Instead of becoming a slave to it, I decided to be on alert, I don’t mean the anxious state like someone crossing a busy road in Mumbai,  more like a cat watching a mouse trying to escape, although the sensation inside me, is closer to that of the mouse thinking “this aint lookin’ too good, Fluffy hasn’t had his breakfast tuna yet, and he isn’t going anywhere”.   From my life’s experiences, I know that being both the cat and the mouse is where the wisdom will lie.

The Stream Out of Contol
The crowning glory for me today, where my rawness peaked, was something that would lead most men to despair, it was when Facebook, the insensitive digital matrix, offered me the opportunity to share a photo of my long deceased beautiful son, send it out into the world of lunch photos, selfies, narcissistic home business posts, yoga-mamas in leotards, poor translations of scriptures, political hatred memes, Donald Trump’s hairpiece, glorious backyard wisdom, Leunig cartoons, tales of my dear friends lives, and other snippets of genius.  Fortunately I gave up long ago; it’s not the giving up of a broken man, more like seeing the absurdity of trying to say ‘no’ when there isn’t any way of stopping ‘yes’, or saying ‘yay’ when ‘no’ is going to unleash a tsunami of grief bigger than my ‘island of self’.

Doing Easy the Hard Way
There is a skill, and it looks like it comes easy to some people, I will assure you in most cases it doesn’t.  It’s the same as when you watch a master musician play his or her instrument, fingers effortlessly moving in the same way a bird slowly flaps its wings and makes almost invisible body adjustments to navigate the sky-scape, great musicians spend hundreds of hours trying to resolve the idiosyncrasies of all the elements of music in search of the perfect note or phrase, that’s what brought about ‘naturalness’, it is often just a seed given at birth which flowers in time when nurtured properly.  The skill that I learnt, is to ‘sit’, to allow things to rise and fall on the screen of life and not overstep its rhythm by one moment and be out of time. The journey to this state of ‘doing nothing’ is like that of the master musician who along the way dropped a lot of beats, missed the cues, some times early, others late.  Doing nothing sounds easy, it is and isn’t, this ability has a lot of flexibility and depends on our ever changing emotional state.

I mean Yes and No
I have always liked the ‘yes and no’ answers to things, not the indecisive version of ‘yes,no.’  When we answer a question with ‘yes and no’, the chances are we are thinking, digging in.  It’s easy to form a rigid opinion, lock it up safely like an ice-cube in a freezer and just leave it, this is a lazy mans way to resolve things. That type of mind will never find peace in relation to the spirit, it will always be at war because downstream, when the ice melts there will be trouble. Great pain will arise in recognising that everything we believed to be true is always in the process of crumbling, there is eternal transition, (fundamentalists will often roll out the ‘eternal truth’ story, it won’t help you here).  By having the ability to see two sides of everything and maybe temporarily accepting one as a truth is very freeing, this is at the heart of ‘sitting’ and ‘alertness’, being able to maneuver our way through what life throws onto our screen and says ‘deal with this, you can’t run, just stay here, it’s not going away, you must be here’.

Wisdom Tools
I had a wonderful teacher, he taught me something years ago at a time when I was struggling with the ‘shape’ of my universe.  If I had to list a handful of wisdom tools I use, this would be on my Nobel prize shortlist.  It is very simple, it’s in these handful of words, “Do you accept me as this?” That may not seem like much, so let’s go there and extract what’s in it.  If I take the Jnani perspective (simply put: Everything is part of the same Being),  I have no enemies, only allies; duality brings a double sided coin, it is binary, 1 or 0, true or false; although that type of thinking is the social-norm, it is not where I need to be, it’s dangerous territory.  When something happens, whether it be in the field of my life or arising in my ‘thought environment’, I see it as a ‘form’ of the Great Being that resonates in all life, call it whatever you like; this endless shape-shifting entity speaks to me, it says, “OK, this what you are experiencing is just a part of my form, you are always wanting beauty, without its opposite, that splendor you crave is not possible.  You are seeking rest, if there is no movement and chaos, how can there possibly be a peaceful state?  What’s this wisdom thing you speak of, without unknowing, how can deep understanding ever take its place?  Without the depth of emptiness, how is the world of movement, form and shadows ever going to be? Without suffering, do you think the emotions that lead to its fruit wisdom, can take shape?”……. So I sit and watch the show, if I enter it, I am doomed, suffering is overwhelming, if I run it will chase me,  but if I stay with it, and move myself to the side and watch it in a manner that doesn’t involve ‘me’ or my opinions, its life-cycle will follow its natural course and at the other side of it, will be a softer more flexible and understanding man.  If I go to war with it, I will lose.  So I rest in it as it transits through the viewing-screen of my consciousness.

To Suffer or Not to Suffer
We can be a slave to suffering, or we can extract what’s inside it.  Inside it is an endless well of untapped wisdom.  When I see the homeless, people that seem broken, it would be easy for me to look away, to have judgments or to feel sorry for them, this would be normal.  At the time of an ‘encounter’, there may be an opportunity for me to enter into their ‘field of experience’.  If I am cautious and sensitive, I can behave in a manner where it is clear to them that we are equal, there is no above or below in our encounter, it is important that they don’t seem more broken by meeting a person who from observation would seem to have a sense of balance.  There is a way I can ‘meet’ them because of the understanding of the journey through suffering that we all take; there is no real method, no system or technique to use; apart from being able to ‘sit’ through the experience, in the same way that we go through our own pain and suffering or whatever presents itself.

Compassion and empathy emerge from stillness, from our rawness, the part of us that hurts.  Turning suffering to wisdom is at the heart of all life. And this is Yoga without leotards.

Tilopa 2.0

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)