October 3, 2013

"There are no forms.  There is no existence nor non-existence, no birth and no death; there is nothing known as reality, nor something which may be called unreal....Enough of such descriptions....Whatever is is--it is void, it is OM.  Enough of even such descriptions....Even the concept of supreme being is only a concept, not the truth.  Let it all be this way or let the truth be different from all this.  Abandon the pursuit of the fruit of actions.  You are enlightened.  Do not exert yourself in vain pursuit." - Vasistha's Yoga

Om gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha - The Heart Sutra

gone, gone, gone beyond, completely exposed, so be it

October 2, 2013

"It is because of the liquidity of water that the one ocean is able to give rise to waves and currents; it is because of the infinite potentiality of consciousness that it is similarly able to appear to be diverse....The diversity that arises in consciousness on account of the limitlessness of its potentiality appears to give rise to diversity of creatures." - Vasistha's Yoga

We are because we are possible.

September 30

"The universe exists in a house; but the house itself is pure void." - Vasistha's Yoga

Diversity carved out of unity, unity conjured from void,  and all of it "exists" merely as the play of consciousness  Too far out?  Consider the silicon chip.  Once encoded with an operating system it authors endless mischief via numberless virtual realities, and yet it never changes a whit.        

September 20, 2013

Imagine your mind to be a tachometer of TPM (thoughts per minute) rather than RPM.  A high TPM state might be described as follows:

"However well I realize 'this is not real', 'this is not real' after intense inquiry, the feeling 'this is' does not cease.  From moment to moment, new experiences of pleasure and pain arise and cease, like the flowing stream of a river." - Vasistha's Yoga

Given that we are both blessed and burdened by active body-minds, this river of sensory impressions and thoughts will roll on regardless of our unconsciousness or our enlightened state.  Perhaps the TPM will wind down through a meditation practice, and maybe at rare times it will cease altogether.  Nevertheless, the feeling "this is" will rise up again like a gorgon's head, and with it the engine will rev up, too.  For the liberated, this makes no difference, the clutch of self-inquiry has disengaged the body-mind forevermore.  It can rev all it wants--the awakened being ain't goin' nowhere.

"The distinction between bondage and liberation lies in the state of one's consciousness, which is conditioned in bondage and unconditioned in liberation....The enlightened consciousness is unaffected by the rising and setting of likes and dislikes, mental action and supra-mental consciousness.  When one is firmly established in the unconditioned consciousness, even these distinctions vanish.  The diversity which people experience in this creation is but an appearance, like the colors of a rainbow." - VY   

September 17, 2013

"When the life-force is not diverted by the mind and the body, it remains rooted in peace within the heart." - Vasistha's Yoga

"I am perfectly empty of all mental formations, void of mind, yet fully aware." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

"What IS is as it is." - VY

September 15, 2013

We live lives of blind impulsion, perpetually driven by unfulfilled desires to meet socially inculcated needs.  Even when we take notice of this and try to pluck them out, without sustained and structured spiritual practice they will return like weeds to a neglected garden.  We call such a life the "human condition."  We could as well call it unconsciousness.  Until we finally address unconsciousness for once and all, ours will always be this restless and discontented human condition.

"Above all, we want to remain conscious.  We shall bear every suffering and humiliation, but we shall rather remain conscious. Unless we revolt against this craving for experience and let go the manifested altogether, there can be no relief.  We shall remain trapped." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

September 14, 2013

To accede to conditioning is to live a lie, and a tumultuous, uncomfortable lie at that.  Most of us live lives blindly controlled by subconscious instincts run amok.  We are pin-balls pinging between "acquire" and "avoid" in a ceaseless quest to assuage the unquenchable.  We are raw nerves constantly juiced by low voltage anxiety.  That is the ego's straw man, fear in a thousand forms: as survival instinct, as craving, as an urge to power and acquisition, as every selfish and self-centered act we commit every day of our lives. Anxiety is fear at a low boil, and unrecognized it becomes corrosive through its gnawing "not enough, never enough" mantra forever plaguing and driving us to distraction.

Ego will spit in the eye of truth--the sound of one hand clapping is its death knell.

Freedom is immanent and imminent for us.  Do we choose the known, the "safe," with its inherent restlessness, irritability and discontent?  Or will it be peace beyond understanding, beyond ego, peace that answers all questions and ends all anxiety?

"Only when the mind is totally purified of all conditioning does it regain its utter purity; that mind experiences liberation." - Nisargadatta Maharaj         

September 13, 2013

"Of course, from the point of view of the absolute reality, neither you nor I nor this world has ever come into being.  All these are like ripples on the surface of the water.  Their appearance or disappearance are due to illusory perception and deluded understanding." - Vasistha's Yoga

No doubt this is tough to swallow at first.  We do not readily open to a truth that debunks everything we believe, especially the very "facts" of our being.  Nobody wants to believe themselves deluded and ignorant.  Whether we sense this or not, the message of non-dual reality is visceral because it annihilates the ego and eviscerates the world.

"This truth cannot be seen by physical eyes which can only see physical objects....All this that I have seen is pure void....Everything is in consciousness, everything is consciousness....Apart from the mind there is no earth....Though I stood in front of all, I could not be perceived by any....All external objects are reflected in the mirror of one's consciousness, which when inquired into is seen immediately.  When thus investigated, their true nature as pure consciousness is revealed." - VY

September 12, 2013

"He who is enlightened, however, sees not the diversity, but the one infinite consciousness." - Vasistha's Yoga

As I sit here I can tune out the body-mind dream channel and tune in to the Great Wide Open.  In fact, were I not in need of a fresh dose of earnestness, this would be my constant "state," as it were.  Meditation is no longer necessary for me to "access" something always already available, something as simple and effortless as raising my eyes to the sky, but this is an inner eye, the dynamic infinite void of pure consciousness free of duality wide open to All That Is eye. And the sky is no more than infinite, boundless void, yet it contains and is pervaded by all that is, including my boundless self.  This is not whistling past the graveyard stuff; it's real.

"One roams this samsara with its birth and death only till one beholds the Supreme.  Having seen it, he is immediately immersed in the Supreme.  Who will again abandon that which frees him from all sorrow?" - VY

We are like humans who believe themselves robots, living limited, conditioned, robotic lives because of a basic misidentification.  We are blind to our true nature, though the sadguru never sleeps and prods us constantly with restlessness and discontent.  Deep down we are hardwired to our true nature and our robotic existence leaves us ever restless and discontented.  And yet we choose to be robots, to live in the familiar rather than take the leap of faith.  The robot's fear to be human, the human's fear to be enlightened--we must learn to stop impeding our own light.    

September 11, 2013

On this, the anniversary of a horrible attack against mankind by mankind, am I to understand all of that fire and death as mere illusion?

"There is neither unity nor diversity.  Infinite indivisible consciousness alone is the reality....Just as a man who is fighting with a lion in a dream shouts in that dream, though in truth he is silent and asleep, the infinite consciousness which entertains all these notions is at peace and silent within itself." - Vasistha's Yoga

Dreams seem real to the dreamer.  They terrify, they elicit wrenching sorrow, they impose an apparent duality just as our "waking state" is also experienced through subject-object modality.  But 9/11, the death of my father, the birth of my children, are these mere apparitions?

"Birth death, Maya, delusion, blindness, non-substantiality, substantiality, wisdom, bondage, liberation, good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, embodied and disembodied states, a moment and eternity, unsteadiness and firmness, you, and I and the other, truth and falsehood, cleverness and foolishness, notions concerning time, space, action and matter, form, sight and related thought, action springing from the intellect and senses, and all the five elements by which all things are pervaded--all these are pure consciousness, which, without abandoning its nature, appears to be all these (just as space seems to be cut up though it is really not so cut up). - VY

 So the overweening answer to my question is "yes," yes in the light of pure consciousness prior to even a glimmer of a glimmer of thought.  It is then, when my ever-buzzing body-mind becomes secondary, that "I" dissolves into pure non-dual consciousness: void yet dynamic, aware yet without subject or object.  Sadly, most of us blindly embrace our notions of ourselves and ride out the currents of samsara as a ripple among rapids.  Eventually our notion of death ends our notion of birth and we empty back into a sea of peace we never really left.  In truth we are water in water, space in space, pure consciousness before, during and after this dream of life. Enlightened living is much akin to lucid dreaming: living this dream fully aware it is a dream we live.  In words rivaling the Tao, itself:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream


    

September 10, 2013

So if enlightenment is such an end-all, be-all (perfect words for it, actually), then why isn't mankind swept up in this sustained effort to realize it?  Why isn't it integral to our education, to our heritage, why are we obsessed with preservation of the body-mind rather than liberation from it?  It is because we identify ourselves with body-mind--in fact, mis-identify--and it is from that central mistake all others flow.  We must awaken from the spell of conditioned awareness.  Things long assumed real and true must be recognized as illusory and false.  Everything goes, even, says Vasistha, the apparent objective universe propped up by "direct sense experience, inference and scientific investigation," this, too, must be unmasked as false and unreal.  And that includes ourselves and everyone we hold dear:

"What is seen here as you and I and what is seen as this dialogue between us are like two waves colliding in the ocean and making a sound.  We are like the waves of the ocean, non-different from the ocean of consciousness.  We are but notions that spontaneously arise in it." - Vasistha's Yoga

No surprise, then, that seekers after genuine enlightenment are few and far between.  It entails sustained effort completely antithetical to our body-mind experience.  We must subvert everything we know and love--no wonder it takes exceptional avatars to promulgate this teaching, the Christ's and Buddha's and Ramakrishna's, and even they had to bury the message deep in spoonfuls of sugar to adapt to their listeners conditioned resistance to it.  Look what happened to Jesus when he turbo-charged "the Kingdom of God is within you" into "I am the Son of God."  Crucified.  Who wants to hear that this Kingdom of his must take precedence over self-interest?

Must we abandon all that we love and value to something that sounds so cold as "pure consciousness"? When this is divine abandonment, yes.  Nor does it mean that we can no longer step into that screen and participate in the movie.

"He [enlightened being] does not abandon what is natural and plays his appropriate role in this drama of life.  He sympathizes with the sorrowful and rejoices with the happy ones, without being tainted at heart....This scripture does more good than father and mother and all your friends put together."  VY



          

September 9, 2013

"O sage, this is the only path to salvation: one should be totally devoted to the desirable cause, one should be instructed in the right effort for its attainment and one should again and again engage oneself in such right action.  By the right effort ignorance is dispelled and the ignorant become enlightened." - Vasistha's Yoga

So what happened to the "pathless path" and "gateless gate" of Eastern philosophy?  What of all that effortless effort and doing without expectation?  Phrases like "totally devoted" and "follow instructions" and especially a word like "salvation" all smack of religion with a savior such as Jesus or a book such as the Bible, do they not?  Actually, no, enlightenment through any tradition, whether it be religious or mystical, usually requires sustained and structured effort.  Bhakti yoga and Karma yoga accomplish this through sustained devotion or sustained action, respectively, while Jnana also entails sustained effort through study of scriptures and continuous self-inquiry.  These are not paths for a lazy man.  Jnana is a prolonged effort to use the thorn of the mind to remove the thorn of ignorance, an ignorance long reinforced and validated from the day of our supposed birth.  The thorn must dig deeply to penetrate layers of accretion:

"False relationships have been forged by persistent effort; they should also be resolutely abandoned by persistent effort to the end of one's life." - VY

Mystical pointers such as "gateless gate" refer to the post-awakening recognition that we are always already enlightened (to borrow Ken Wilbur's phrase); With hindsight we recognize that regardless of self-effort nothing is attained, per say, just as nothing really changes when we awaken from a dream.  However, for the seeker sustained, determined, persistent self-effort--contemplation of scriptures, mindfulness and self-inquiry ever uprooting the false as false--is necessary to break the spell of our deeply conditioned minds, to at last recognize the paradox in which we live.  Reality is completely counter-intuitive to what we believe true:

"The obvious is unreal and the unreal becomes obvious....The truth is omnipresent and matter is but illusion, even though it may be experienced - just as the 'braceletness' of gold is an illusory appearance of gold." - VY

Everything we normally do must be undone, everything we believe put to the lie.  What we understand to be physical reality is no more than "water in a mirage."  And those pleasures we chase after day after day of our brief illusory lives?

"Momentary pleasure is pain. Real delight is unmodified, beginning-less and endless.  Hence, investigate the truth with the help of direct experience.  One who abandons this experience and runs after illusory 'realities' is a fool." - VY

Direct experience is almost always the result of sustained right effort.  Only then, like an Atlas flipping the entire world from his shoulders, will we shrug off the ceaseless sensory input and reflexive cogitation besieging us.  Only then are we left alone without distortion, in truth, as we really are.

"One alone is." - VY
     

August 20, 2013

"While the wooden man is singing,
The stone maiden starts to dance.
This cannot be reached by our consciousness.
How can you give any thought to this?"
- Pao-ching San-mei

Not a thought, not a moment wasted
On this silly nonsense.
But damn it, whenever I do hear that singing,
I dance.

Clever response there.  Perfume overwhelmed by the stench of logic.  When Hung-chih Cheng-chio was asked, "How is it that substance is lacking in the reality of purity and Void?" he replied: "It is the instant of origin where refinement has not yet made any marks, and the moment when a message has not yet been conveyed...." - that perfect, pure and boundless moment - now - free and ever free from mind.  When I abide there the top of my head tingles.    

August 19, 2013

"Every cause and effect is a dream.  There is no Triple World [realm of sensuous desire, realm of form, formless realm of pure spirit] which one leaves, and no bodhi to search for.  The inner reality and outer appearance of man and a thousand things are identical.  The Great Tao is formless and boundless. It is free from thought and anxiety.  You have now understood the Buddhist teaching.  There is nothing lacking in you, and you yourself are no different from Buddha.  There is no way of achieving Buddhahood other than letting your mind be free to be itself.  You should not contemplate nor should you purify your mind.  Let there be no craving and hatred, and have no anxiety or fear.  Be boundless and absolutely free of all conditions.  Be free to go in any direction you like.  Do not act to do good, nor to pursue evil.  Whether you walk or stay, sit or lie down, and whatever you see happen to you, all are the wonderful activity of the Great Enlightened One.  It is all joy, free from anxiety--it is called Buddha." - The Fourth Patriarch

"All, all have the Buddha nature, but it cannot be seen when covered up by the passions." - The Nirvana Sutra  

August 17, 2013

"Now instead of wondering how to get it, or trying to understand it or to analyze it, the essential thing is to take a resolute plunge into death, to give up one's body and life itself.  It means to cut off all our discriminating fancies at the root and source." - Takashina Rosen

Can't we
Just before we grab it by the neck and throttle the purity out of it
Before we despoil and pillage this present moment
Before we release the hounds of our senses and all their baying yammer
Can't we just be, here and now, unspoiled and pristine,
Always already awakened, at peace, simple keepers of the stupa?

"It is a fact that anyone, if he devotes himself wholeheartedly to spiritual meditation without wavering, reaches the supreme state." - Takashina Rosen
  

August 16, 2013

"Let your mind be in a state such as that of the illimitable void, but do not attach it to the idea of vacuity.  Let it function freely.  Whether you are in activity or are at rest, let your mind abide nowhere.  Forget the discrimination between a sage and an ordinary man.  Ignore the distinction of subject and object.  Let the essence of mind and all phenomenal objects be in a state of thusness.  Then you will be in samadhi all the time." - The Sutra of Hui-neng

August 15, 2013

"To seek enlightenment by separating from this world
Is as absurd as to search for a rabbit's horn;
Right views are called transcendental;
Erroneous views are called worldly.
When all views, right or erroneous, are discarded
Then the essence of bodhi appears."
- The Sutra of Hui-neng 

August 12,2013

"Subhuti answered: 'As I understand the Buddha's meaning there is no formulation of truth called consummation of incomparable enlightenment.  Moreover, the Tathagata has no formulated teaching to enunciate.  Wherefore?  Because the Tathagata has said that truth is uncontainable and inexpressible.  It neither is nor is not.  Thus it is that this unformulated principle is the foundation of the different systems of all the sages.'" - The Diamond Sutra

"Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream." - The Diamond Sutra


  

August 10,2013

"And to rest content with the knowledge gained from the scriptures, considering oneself to be enlightened, is like the vain imagination of the born-blind." - Vasistha's Yoga

"Nirvana or liberation is the non-experience of the egosense.  Let this truth be clearly understood." - VY

August 1, 2013

"Movement in consciousness is considered creation; and when the movement is seen to be false and non-existent, that is nirvana." - Vasistha's Yoga

That word "nirvana" has sure been through the wringer ever since Vivekananda embodied it for Americans in 1900.  The wringer, of course, is irresistible accretion of human hope and expectation of a nirvana, of escape into something better than this moment--which is just another craving camouflaged in spirituality.  In the 60's the Beatles put Vivekananda into hyper-drive with their dalliance with a supposed Maharishi, added drugs to the mix and vvrrooom!  This chase after nirvana then became the single greatest hindrance to awakening.  But Vasistha tells it like it truly is, and all of the sages concur: nirvana is not to be acquired, but to be exposed, revealed, and this realization is the direct result of recognizing the false as false no matter what our minds and senses tell us to the contrary.  Nirvana is experienced as absence, as the end of all craving, as grace, not effort, as the home we never left.  This is not the nirvana of the Facebook crowd of hatha contortionists, tantric wet dreamers and Osho-worshippers.  These folks lock themselves into half-way houses of the soul. No.  We must step outside, burn the houses, the false concepts, or better yet, see right through them, because so long as we have body-minds they will haunt us.  But they are ghosts, mirages, secondary to what we truly are: consciousness.  And when this world, this life, this dream in which we dwell from day to day dies, only then what we truly are, nirvana, only that abides as it ever has as the great, silent space ever undisturbed by the brief breezes of our lives passing through.

"Brahman is unconditioned and unmodified.  The entire universe is absolute Brahman, without any division whatsoever." - VY

And while I'm touching on the Beatles, let's have a shout out for George Harrison:

Without going out of my door

I can know all things on earth

Without looking out of my window

I can know the ways of heaven

The farther one travels

The less one knows

The less one really knows

Without going out of your door

You can know all things on earth

Without looking out of your window

You can know the ways of heaven

The farther one travels

The less one knows

The less one really knows

Arrive without traveling

See all without looking

Do all without doing

--Inner Light

        

July 29, 2013

"That which is annihilated by happiness or unhappiness in life is so annihilated; but that which is not annihilated is not annihilated.  This is the essence of the scriptural teachings.  One who has desires undergoes pleasant and unpleasant experiences.  If one wishes to get rid of the disease of such experiences, the only thing to do is to get rid of the desires." - Vasistha's Yoga

Thar she blows! - the great white whale of any spiritual path worth its salt of the earth: Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism of every stripe, even that strain of Christianity that still recognizes moth and rust in the temporal (as opposed to the prosperity theology infecting so much of Christianity today).  But from the moment we are born the conditioning begins and we are besieged by insatiable cravings passed on from generation to generation.  We are addicted to the pleasant, ever fleeing the unpleasant, notwithstanding our peg legs stumbling ever after in this futile chase from sea to whining sea.

"Who has invented these expressions and superimposed them on the pure void which is supreme peace?"

You know who. 

July 24, 2013

"The notion of 'I' is utter ignorance; it blocks the path to nirvana or liberation.  Yet the foolish man endeavors with the help of this  darkness of ignorance to find the light of truth!" - Vasistha's Yoga

Something along these lines was quoted from Vasistha in my last entry.  He repeats himself often, driving the most important points home as many times in as many ways as he can.  Vasistha is a teacher, his work is an explication, a dissection, a distillation and summation of jnana yoga, just as Dogen explicated Zen or Meister Eckhart did Christianity.  Vasistha repeats what bears repeating, and the passage above is integral to awakening.  As body-minds we stand within our own light, blocking its radiance just as a planet blocks the light of the sun during eclipse.  Recognition of this is what enlightenment is all about.  But even as our conditioned thoughts and senses interfere with this recognition, even as the planet stands before the sun, a dim outline of truth still penetrates, attracts, instills in us a restlessness and discontent with our lives which drives us to seek the end of discontent: peace beyond, literally beyond, understanding.  It's an amazing thing, these paths we take chasing something ever beyond human comprehension.  Some folks decide it best to just settle down in the warm light of realized sages such as Jesus and Buddha and Ramakrishna.  This is fine, but it is not full realization.  The jnani must be the sage he worships, must taste the truth exactly so.

"The infinite consciousness reflects itself as the infinite and unconditioned consciousness in all, and that alone is experienced in all....This world appearance is but a notion [a mental construct] and it is utterly dispelled by enquiry [as per Ramana Maharshi or Nisargadatta Maharaj]....When one is able to abandon the inert materiality of the mind, the intellect and the egosense, one attains the pure unconditioned being.  This is liberation." - VY

"Attain" is a misleading word.  We are already there, bathed in the light, consisting of the light, but ignorant of this.  The sages lead us to this living water.  Vasistha shoves our muzzles deep into its depths and holds it there until egosense suffocates.  I love it.  .     

July 20, 2013

"It is absurd for the egosense to seek this emancipation, for it can never comprehend the truth.  The infinite consciousness surely stands in no need of realizing the infinite consciousness!" - Vasistha's Yoga

How many paths have I followed, how many exist to lure us forward with their promises of liberation?  Too many, perhaps.  But even when we get caught up by the latest supposed yogi's and swami's and priests and Zen masters and their golden roads to unlimited devotion, there is value in these experiences, however frustrating.  Because no matter what dead ends they seem to take us to, the path will always be one of "neti, neti"--not this, not this.  As the song says, another one bites the dust, and then another, then another, until ultimately, hopefully, we arrive at the place to which Vasistha alludes, a place of surrender, vacancy, freedom from egosense: Being-Knowledge-Bliss.  We haven't wasted time.  All along these paths unbeknownst to ourselves, we have progressed by grinding away the egosense in our futile attempts to "attain" enlightenment.  Do not despair, or better yet, do.  There will always exist another huckster to delude another spiritual addict desperate to escape his or her painful round of existence.  Hell, even my copy of Vasistha's Yoga has a forward written by one, Swami Muktananda, who, if the internet is to be believed (?) was a pedophile as well as a preacher--and where have we heard that before, O Vatican?  No matter.  These Muktananda's are just another lesson learned.  Each time we try to name Him, we spread another veil across the face of God until, in the end, like the magician who finally whisks away his veil of illusion, nothing stands behind it except clarity and peace at last.

"Ignorance points to the hidden wisdom.  Wisdom then destroys that ignorance and eventually that, too, comes to rest.  That is the supreme state." - VY       

July 17, 2013

"VASISTHA replied:
 'I was silent not because I could not answer but because silence is the only answer to your question....all verbal statements (whether they are verbose or brief, whether their purport is subtle or trancendental) are all limited by logic, by duality and division....I am firmly established in the pure non-dual and indivisible consciousness which is the supreme state.  How can I subject myself to the imperfection of expressing the inexpressible?'"- Vasistha's Yoga

Yeah, what he said. 

July 10, 2013

"In the self is unity and diversity, yet not unity or diversity as opposed to each other....The one self exists--subtle and omnipresent, like space.  It is undivided by the birth and death of bodies.  'I am the body' is delusion, not truth.  You are the pure self or undivided consciousness." - Vasistha's Yoga

Therein is described the nebulous yet very concrete "feeling" of enlightenment: "unity and diversity, yet not unity or diversity."  It sounds nonsensical because it is nonsensical--beyond our human array of senses or anything our minds manage to conjure from them.  My own halting attempt to verbalize it has always come down to "emptiness filled to brimming."  But try that out on a friend or spouse and see where it gets you!  Usually a look at best quizzical and at worst concerned for our mental health.  Just last week I tried to reassure my death-phobic wife to quit worrying about it.  "We'll be fine," I said.  "In fact we'll be free, fulfilled, uh--"  "How do you know?" she snapped.  "Have you ever been dead?"  Well, yeah, sort of, at least to the degree that it is clear to me what a pest this body-mind really is when I take it to be real.  To rest in pure and undivided consciousness is indeed to be dead while still so-called alive.  This is not to avow suicide.  Life is the sound of a songbird breaking the silence of a windless night--provided an ear exists to make it so.

The education of a modern day jnani might follow this course:

Eckhart Tolle = high school
Nisargadatta/Ramana = college
Vasistha's Yoga = grad school

July 7, 2013

"O sage, that which I intellectually understand to be nothing still appears to me to be a real entity or substance.  My senses are eating me away." - Vasistha's Yoga

Here is the complaint of every "book yogi" who ever nodded in agreement as he read some illuminating scripture, then looked up from the page and was lost in a world of deeply conditioned things and thoughts.  Balance was yet to be found, clarity yet to be experienced.  Repeatedly the very sages who write them exhort us to not just read revelatory scripture, but to practice self-inquiry ceaselessly, to seek the company of the liberated when possible, and to remain established in equanimity until that becomes the default state midst all of the attractions and distractions of everyday life.  In time we will wear the world like a loose garment.  Earnestness is imperative, said Nisargadatta.  Ripeness is all, said Shakespeare.  In time and with right effort the "I" and "my" of Manki's complaint above will lose their grip on what we truly are.  But first these pages of scripture must burn in the fire of jnana.

"The egosense is bondage and its cessation is liberation.  It is so simple.  Where is the difficulty?" - VY

Yes.  Ask yourself that repeatedly with a finger pointed toward the face you cannot see.  The question is answered.   

June 29, 2013

"...the self is neither born nor does it die--and from another point of view it comes into being and dies." - VY

Enlightenment is a shift--seismic, tectonic--into a new locus of orientation and navigation sans the conditioned personal self, sans the body-mind, sans our subjective compass and objective map, and encompassing and pervading all.  Enlightenment is an absence of a point of view and an acceptance or surrender to what is.  Once the mirage of jiva has been penetrated and exposed as fraudulent it resolves back into pure consciousness, amounting now to no more "than the feet of a snake perceived in darkness."  What a perfect analogy: a false assumption (the feet of the snake) born of ignorance (perceived in darkness).

"The jiva firmly believes in the substantiality of [the objective world].  When the objects of a fast-flowing river are seen reflected in the water, these objects appear to be animated, too, though in fact they are not....But in the self which is infinite consciousness there is no such movement at all, even as a pot is moved from one place to another, the space that is in it does not move from one place to another." '- VY

June 28, 2013

"He in whom the contact of sharp weapons and the contact of a naked woman produce the same experience--he is established in the supreme state." - Vasistha's Yoga

Established?  More like interred.  However...if indeed everything of the mind is transient and illusory, I guess when you get right down to it there is no difference between a knife and a nipple.  It's teachings like this that got a lot of sages killed by folks who didn't want to hear it.

June 25, 2013

"...you are that Brahman which is homogenous and undivided and indivisible, like space." - Vasistha's Yoga

Brahman is space without center or boundary, space without content and yet space infinitely full.  And it is none of these things, too.  So we saturate and dissolve all traces of the personal self back into the elemental consciousness from which it arose.  We practice self-inquiry.

"...when...one inquires into the nature of the ego-sense...it thereupon dissolves in consciousness." - VY     

June 23, 2013

"Both the entire earth and the entire sky appear in birth as well as in death." - Dogen

Earth and sky are all that is.  With you at birth or without you at death, they remain all that is.  The movie screen remains clear and untouched before, during and after the frenetic images of ego-sense have come and gone.

"This ego-sense gives birth to all the rest of the world-appearance.  When it goes, then the self shines by its own light, even as the sun shines when the veiling cloud is blown away.  Just as an object thrown into the ocean dissolves in the ocean, the ego-sense which enters the self is dissolved in it." - Vasistha's Yoga

Ramana Maharshi practiced an interesting way to hollow out the ego-sense: he lay down and imagined his own death in great detail, methodically deleting himself right down to extinguishing mind, and yet he found that something remained.  Just like panning for gold, he had arrived at pure consciousness. 

June 21, 2013

"Expert washermen wash dirt with dirt.  A thorn is removed by another thorn.  Poison antidotes poison....The very thing with which you entertain egosense enables you in the twinkling of an eye to realize the non-existence of the egosense." - VY

Mis-identification of the self with the body-mind is the root of all evil.  Paradoxically, mind, yoked to jnana, can root out the conditioning that separates us from the unconditioned Absolute: "poison antidotes poison." The fever dream of jiva must end before the fever of illusion or maya or samsara can be removed.    

June 20, 2013

"Just as the tree pervades all its parts and leaves, this infinite consciousness pervades the entire universe.  Alas, the ignorant person does not realize it though it is in every cell of his being.  He who see that the self alone is all enjoys bliss....The liberated sage may be one who has formally renounced the world or he may live a householder's life." - Vasistha's Yoga

Provided the latter takes especial care to practice jnana or self-inquiry and avails himself of scriptures.  Doing this, then despite the throes of the rat race, he will inexorably ripen like fruit in the sun. Too many householders concentrate on grabbing that shiny brass ring and come to the end of a career or a life dry and withered and spent.  This should be a time of ripeness and realization.  As householders we must be especially vigilant and disciplined about practice and ever contemplating the teachings.   

June 19, 2013

"This is the conclusion of all scriptures: there is no avidya (ignorance) and no maya (illusion) in reality; Brahman alone exists.  Some call it the void, others pure consciousness, others the Lord; and they argue about it amongst themselves.  Abandon all these notions.  Rest in nirvana without movement of thought, with the mind greatly 'weakened' and the intelligence at peace; rest in the Self as if you are deaf, dumb and blind.  Inwardly abandon everything.  Externally [active in the world] engage yourself in appropriate action. The existence of the mind alone is happiness, the existence of the mind alone is unhappiness.  By remaining unaware of the mind let all these cease.  Remain unaffected by what is attractive and what is unattractive; by just this much self-effort, this samsara is overcome....You are that subtle and pure consciousness which is indivisible , free from ideation but which encompasses all beings." - Vasistha's Yoga 

June 17, 2013

Gikai was awakened upon hearing Dogen say "This [absolute] truth abides in the world of objective reality....In the spring, the hundred flowers are red; doves are crying in the willows."

How can this be so when we are taught that objective reality is illusion?  Here's how: in awakening, assumed boundaries dissolve, subject-object duality ceases and jiva is seen for what it is--an artificial construct born of conditioning.  Just then, like shadow before light, jiva resolves into everything that is, such as a hundred red flowers or doves crying in the willows. And more, the flowers, the doves, spring itself are recognized--penetrated--as no more substantial than a dream, as ephemeral content of ephemeral mind.  It's a different world from then on.

June 15, 2013

"He is void within, void without, void like an empty vessel; at the same time he is full within, and full without, like a full vessel immersed in the sea."  Ramakrishna nods assent.  This is as close a description of the boundless state filled to brimming I've ever come across.

June 13, 2013

"Vasistha's Yoga" forces the reader into self-inquiry mode .  If I am not the body, then who am I?  Vasistha answers "there is but the self which is eternal and infinite."  Yes, but who am I?  "What is seen as the universe is but a reflection in that self."  Maybe so, but who am I?  "Regard your body and senses as instruments for seeking, not as self."  And after all of the necessary inquiry, years and years in my case, the light comes like the end of an eclipse:  " 'I am no-thing but pure consciousness'--such understanding when it is sustained is conducive to liberation."  I feel this right down to the absence of my bones.  This is the promise of the genuine path if taken with earnestness and tenacity, the promise of direct experience.  A chime will rest silent and dormant for all eternity, but place it in the sustained wind of these teachings and it will ring.

"There is a Reality even prior to heaven and earth;
Indeed, it has no form, much less a name;
Eyes fail to see it; it has no voices for ears to detect.
To call it Mind or Buddha violates its nature...."
--Daio

June 12, 2013

"Vasistha's Yoga" is a treasure-trove of inspired language attempting to convey the inexpressible through metaphor.  It breathes liberation "like the wetness of water."  Even better, it boldly contradicts anything that stinks of logic and mind-stuff, as a good koan does:

"There is neither bondage nor liberation."

"The notion 'I am the body' is bondage; the seeker should avoid it."

Both of these sentences appear on the same page of the text.  How can they be reconciled?  They can't, which is why they are in close proximity.  It forces the logical mind to give up the hunt, while intuition takes note of two all important words associated with apparent bondage: "notion" and "seeker."  And there is the teaching. 

June 6, 2015

Reading  "Nine-Headed Dragon River " again after thirty-plus years.  Poor Matthiessen.  All that beautiful prose and intricate thought.  All of that stands between himself and what he seeks.  A beautiful encounter marks his way, a visit with an isolated lama whose physical infirmity restricts him to a small tract of mountainside   "Are you satisfied with this?" asks Matthiessen.  "Of course I enjoy this life!" responds the lama.  "It's wonderful!  Especially when I have no choice!"  Especially when he has no choice.  This is beyond an attitude of gratitude, beyond even acceptance or surrender.  This man is wide open, not even there but for that sack of flesh and bones holding him to the mountain.