Tag: consciousness

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.