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.