Tag: meditation

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

Published on by Arizona2 Comments

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

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

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.