LARGEST FISH - WHALE SHARK
The best part of my spiritual journey is the clarity that lets me read scripture with understanding.
It’s like my eyesight suddenly improved.
Jesus spoke in parables - brief, unexplained stories, like koans.
There’s something so wonderful about finding meaning in parables that used to baffle me.
A classic head-scratcher is the parable of the strong man’s house.
(This is found in Mark 3:27, Matthew 12:29, Luke 11:21, and Thomas: 35.)
No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, except he first bind the strong man. (Mark 3:27)
This describes the inside-out approach to life.
If someone broke into your house, you’d protect yourself, instead of running around trying to guard your TV and laptop.
If you remain free, you can get help, or scare off the robber.
When our life unravels, we run around from fire to fire.
If we only focus on keeping our mind free from distraction, our world will be whole.
A similar parable is Thomas: 87:
The kingdom of God is like a woman who was carrying a jar full of meal. While she was walking on the road, still some distance from home, the handle of the jar broke and the meal emptied out behind her on the road. She didn’t realize it; she had noticed no accident. When she reached her house, she set the jar down and found it empty.
Like the preceding parable, this has been interpreted in various ways, by assigning a metaphor to every image (the jar, the meal, the road).
What if Jesus meant it straightforwardly?
How would you react if you were this woman?
You would really see the extent of your inattention.
She didn’t notice the accident, the continual spillage, or that the jar was getting lighter and lighter.
The Kingdom of God is like a woman who realizes the value of attention.
Attention is the kingdom and the pearl of great price.
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KY
A wise Sage once said: “Do not oppose. Opposition is dangerous to immortality. If you do not expect anything from others, then their actions cannot be in opposition to your wishes. Give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear by itself. The secret of inner peace is accepting things as they are. To accept others as they are. To accept life as it is. By learning acceptance, you will learn above all to accept yourself. To achieve self-acceptance, you must be clear in your true conscience. Such clarity comes only when we accept that our higher Self is our eternal reality. With that acceptance will come forgiveness and a joyful sense of inner release. Accept adversity calmly: It is an intrinsic part of the cosmic drama. But there is no adversity so great that it cannot, if accepted calmly, be turned to good advantage. The devotee who sincerely offers his life, with all its tests and fulfillments, up to God, finds that every test accepted with faith is followed by a marked increase of inner freedom. Acceptance of that One Reality that lies within ourselves makes everything else acceptable. Instead of learning to come to grips with a thousand individual challenges, rather make the supreme effort to accept God unconditionally into your heart. Accept all that comes in life as coming from His hands. He will give you what is best for you, if you live for Him alone. Because your duty as a devotee is to accept whatever He sends you and whatever He doesn’t send. Accept reality as it is, harmonize yourself with it and the very Universe will be your friend and your support. One of the greatest lessons of life is not to cater to your likes and dislikes and to your desires and aversions by learning to express kindness, forgiveness and compassion to all and by steadfast contentment in the Self. We must learn to love others not for their human personalities, but because they are manifestations of God, Who dwells equally in all. A yogi achieves equanimity and perceives the divine equally in everything. During deep Kriya yoga meditation, dualities and differentiation vanish. Only pure consciousness, the soul, the all-pervading One is perceived. To the God-realized person, in practical life, all the various forms and species of creation are superimposed on the all-pervading One, the power of God. Therefore, spiritually advanced people perceive the undifferentiated soul in everything, including the high-born brahmin, the animals, the ignorant, and the sinners. They behave impartially, mercifully, lovingly and kindly to every creature and treat it with respect. They perceive their own soul, the Self in every creature.
The most important aspect of Zen practice, whatever the support chosen may entail, is the cultivation of non-dual practice.
Achieving enlightenment is a dualistic concept and therefore not Zen practice. In such an “achievement” I (subject) and the enlightenment (object) to be achieved, are separate.
Even in the Japanese Rinzai school of Zen, which loosely refers to “achieving enlightenment”, the practice of focusing on a koan is non-dual: becoming completely one with the koan. The first part of this practice is painful because it is totally dualistic: I (subject) must become one with my koan (mental object).
Sometimes we hear certain enlightened ones say there is no path or method. This is only true in the sense that our minds cannot reach into or realize enlightenment. But there is a path. It is commonly called “awareness”. Awareness is enlightenment itself. It must only be realized for what it is.
All that our minds can and need do, is raise the sails. The winds of reality, which is awareness, will then effortlessly carry us to port.
“Raising the sails” entails directing attention in a skillful way: non-dualistically.
Attention is awareness, and awareness is by nature non-dual. The purpose of Zen practice is to realize ourselves as awareness.
How can we realize enlightenment - ourselves as non-dual awareness - when our practice doesn't incline towards non-duality?
Inclining towards non-duality, which may then sooner or later be realized, requires a Zen meditation practice that is directed from attainment to non-attainment. This is the most important part of any non-dual meditation practice. In non-attainment, there is no separation between I and enlightenment, between I and now.
Thus, the ultimate meditation practice of non-duality - non-attainment - is to cultivate awareness of I as subject. If there is zero separation between I and my enlightenment, then enlightenment am I. Likewise, if there is zero separation between the present and I, then the present am I. Therefore, to live in the now completely, non-dually, all I have to do is cultivate awareness of I as subject.
Yes, I am advocating self-enquiry as the most direct, painless technique to realise enlightenment. In this regard, the question, “Who am I?” (self-enquiry) is a Zen koan. One way of solving the koan is to concentrate on the question without thinking.
But there is a different, more gentle approach. This is to separate I from everything I am not. This simply means to separate I from all dualistic modes of thought, feeling and behaviour.
As mentioned earlier, the mind can and need only raise the sail of awareness. Once awareness of I am established, there is hardly any effort. All efforts are now non-dual.
The way for my mind to raise the sail of awareness, is to substitute attention of what I see, think, feel and experience (apparent objects), for I (subject).
All human suffering is caused by I (subject) identifying with certain aspects of my experience, taking such experiences to be I. The primary identification is with the body. Thoughts (mind), feelings, speech and behaviour are aspects of the body that are commonly identified with.
This identification between I and my body is entirely dualistic, like the practice of achieving enlightenment. This is evident from me trying to control my body, mind, thoughts, feelings, speech and behaviour. If I were them, there would be no need for control: no need for a controller, and these objects - body, mind, thoughts, feelings, speech and behaviour - to control.
This simple practice of self-enquiry consists of shifting my attention from my experience to I, whenever I experience an unpleasant feeling. In so doing, I am withdrawing my attention from this unpleasant feeling, allowing the unpleasant feeling the space to be as it is, and to dissolve when it is ready to do so. Furthermore, in awareness of I, the apparent controller / thinker / doer, I become aware directly of the movements of desire within me. I see whatever issues from I: desire. Awareness of desire means that awareness and desire are separate. That is, disidentifcation from desire and what desire hopes to achieve - such as enlightenment - now occurs. Thus I (subject) am now emptied of my body, mind, thoughts, feelings, speech and behaviour, and the bridge (desire) between I and them.
As I am emptied of these substantial, dualistic forms, I realise myself as formless. This formlessness is non-duality: the gateless gate. The gate is gateless because there is no barrier from the very beginning, thus no gate to pass through. This is how enlightenment is realized, rather than “achieved”.
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- Goose bumps evolved to make our ancestors' hair stand up, giving the appearance of being more threatening to predators.
- All of the blood vessels in the human body would encircle the Earth four times, if they were laid end to end.
- Humans are the only animals with a chin. One theory goes that we need the extra bone to deal with the extra effort involved with chewing, but a more accurate theory could be that humans evolved chins to enhance their physical features and appearance.
- Over the course of our lifetimes, the heart beats approximately more than 3 billion times.
Meditation means not-doing: perfect mental inaction.
Our usual mode of action is doing, being mentally active, trying to figure the fuck out of everything.
So, when our usual mode of behaviour causes personal problems, particularly in the form of unpleasant emotions, as it inevitably must, we are well established in a “doing” mode of being and behaviour. Our habit is doing, thinking, and controlling, without even trying.
Then we hear of meditation, as a wonderful discipline that could potentially solve all our emotional and mental problems. So we sit down to meditate, usually after joining a group.
The teacher tells us what to do. It is very common for teachers to instruct beginners to count the breaths, from 1 to 10, to repeat a mantra, or to simply observe (feel) the breath.
Me, beginner, then sits and attempts to follow the teacher's guidance. I am then surprised that I don't immediately experience a stupendous sense of peace and happiness. On the contrary, ten to one my experience is just the opposite: more frustration, more emotional vexation. I may even feel as if I am being “burnt” by this practice, which I am therefore now sure is not for me!
The problem? I, beginner, am caught in my usual doing, figuring out, mode of existing. I come from my usual external, outward peering existence, and, unsurprisingly, find that my internal life doesn't suddenly magically change just because I decided to follow the teacher's guidelines. On the contrary, my mind keeps on doing what it has been habituated to do: automatically controlling, ceaselessly commenting, criticizing me without letup (if that is what I have been taught), seeking release from this dreary, mundane, mediocre existence that is my life, here now.
What then is the remedy?
The remedy is to understand that all techniques are skillful means. They aren't the purpose of meditation. The purpose of meditation is mental inaction, not-doing, non-attainment. It is therefore better to focus on a mental concept of non-attainment, not-gaining, while counting the breath from 1 to 10, than to simply count the breath from 1 to 10 with your habitual mental attitude.
Furthermore, consider what is involved in following guidance, such as breath counting. Here am I, a separate entity, and I am going to do something (separate from I: counting my breaths), to achieve a certain outcome (gaining: peace). This meditation practice stinks because it is steeped in the experience of duality. This dualistic mode of being and practice is the only problem, really.
So, all you need is to understand mental inaction, not-doing, distinct from your current doing, gaining, becoming mode of being.
This requires awareness, not thought. Thought by its very nature is judgment and choice. To think is to choose, judge and do. To think, “I am going to count my breaths", is thought: choice, doing, becoming, gaining. How can I drop all this?
A very good answer is awareness of doing and its effects in the form of mental and emotional vexation. How am I to get awareness of my own doing, thus directly observing that my doing is the sole cause of all my mental and emotional problems?
The answer is really simple, but subtle. Any difficulty lies purely in the subtlety of this practice, and not because it is in any way actually difficult.
The answer is to cultivate awareness of I who am reading this. I am what body, mind, thoughts and feelings (objects) appear to. So, when I keep shifting my attention from what I see, think, feel and experience, to I, inside and outside formal sitting meditation, I become aware of my habitual doing, choosing, controlling, manipulating, adjusting, becoming and gaining. Not only do I see this, but I now realize that what I am doing is directly responsible for all my mental and emotional vexations. Not the environment. Not circumstances. Not events. Not anyone else. Not a defect in my own personality. Not because of my past.
Seeing my doing as it occurs here and now, perpetually, I now therefore notice the alternative: not-doing, perfect mental inaction, is perfect freedom from all mental and emotional problems.
Not-doing, mental inaction, requires no thought. Recall that thinking - how do I handle my own anger, anxiety, fear, frustration, or jealousy? - is doing. In not-thinking self-awareness - awareness of I, not awarenessof what I see - the structure of I as a being of form comprised of body and mind, is transfigured. Doing ends. When doing ends, the particular person who did all that, ends: body and mind (as I: who I thought I was) drop off. When body and mind drop off, I am realised as formless, without boundaries, without inside or outside.
In conclusion, what is realised in meditation, skillfully approached, is the nature of awareness as non-dual, formless, without centre or boundaries, without inside or outside, undetectable to the mind that thinks, and undetectable to any senses.
How do I detect something that is invisible, formless, vast and empty like space? Since that is who or what I really am, there is no way for me to realize it. The tooth cannot cut itself. The eye can't see itself. The only way for the eye to see itself, knowing itself as it is, is in reflection. The reflection is this Universe, a giant mirror in which the eye (awareness) can see its own reflection.
Self-realization is only possible as an ineffable reflection in the mirror that is the Universe: the eye can't see itself in any other way
However, for awareness to comprehend its own ineffable perfection in the universal mirror that is my life, the mirror must be without any distortion. This brings us back to the need to see, and drop, what is distorting this beautiful, ineffable reflection. What is distorting it is the experience that “I am this" and “I am that". Thought. Fashioning an identity, as I, from all my knowledge, and then operating from that identity.
Therefore, by first observing how I am defeating myself and my objectives, through awareness of I who am reading this, I arrive at a posture where I don't do a thing. I do absolutely nothing, mentally.
Now,, inwardly, when I experience anxiety, I don't do anything to make it go away. Instead, I turn attention to I (subject), observing what I am doing with my anxiety right now. I also keep a lookout to see what I might do about it. When I notice that I am doing nothing at all, the anxiety either collapses completely, or it is now experienced as having no bearing on who or what I am. Disidentifcation occurs. In either case, I am now free. This is the conclusion of meditation.
This doesn't mean you stop sitting. It means you keep cultivating not-doing, ceaselessly building on the tremendous silence that now reigns within your own mind-body system.
Concept: Puri Peethadhishwar Jagadguru Shankaracharya Swami Nishchalananda Saraswati Ji Maharaj
Credits: Sandeep Sehgal Ji
There is “Ego”(I) present everywhere from Narayana Bhagwan to “Mahatatva”. That is also included in Chatushtya as my Mind, my Intellect, my Memory, and my Ego. This blog is a brief to understand these things.
It is the principle of Sankhya Philosophy, which Yogis have accepted in their own way, that the Avyakta (certainty before manifestation), which they call Prakriti or Pradhan. Vedanta Philosophers call it Maya in their own way. Its first effect is called Mahatattva. Its Importance is established as intellect in our life. If you want to know about Mahatattva, then you should try to understand the activity of your own intelligence. The function of the individual intellect is Ahamtattva and due to which ego is present in our life.
Similarly, they have five tanmatras (subtle elements) and five Mahabhutas (gross elements).
These are five elements of the universes. This gross body of yours and mine is the aggregation of these five elements in different proportions. Similarly the trees etc. are also the aggregation of these five elements in different proportions.
According to Sankhya theory, there are sixteen Vikritis (modifications); among them, five are sense organs, five are organs of action, and the mind is also included in it. So, in our life too, we have one mind, five senses, and five work organs. So there is oneness between the individual and the whole. To understand the whole, the individual has been constructed.
To understand the state of creation, we study about the awakening stage. To understand the science of the origin of the creation, we should study the dream state. To understand the dissolution of the creation, we should study about sleeping unconscious state. Mana (Mind), Buddhi (Intellect), Chitta (Memory), and Ahamkara(Ego) are known as Antah Karan Chatushtya, four instruments of inner consciousness.
Within our subtle body, we all have mind, intellect, memory, and ego commonly known as Antahkarana. Karana means tools. If we think from the viewpoint of Sankhyas and Yogis, Antahkarana has only three parts. First is intelligence which is also called Mahatattva as a whole. Another is ego and the last is mind. Chitta is left which they consider among these three only. Chitta is not a separate element in Sankhya and Yoga philosophy.
Yoga is a restraint of the fluctuations of the mind. They recognize Chitta and recognize its use as well but consider only three parts to consciousness. They consider it as one of the twenty-four discernment of Anatma Vastu (non-intimate objects). Bhawan Shree Krishna also said this in the twelfth chapter of Srimadbhagvat Gita. He took Chitta as one word for both mind and intelligence.
The function of the mind is determination and choice. Whether a task should be done or not, it is determination and choice. The function of intelligence is a decision. The function of Chitta is memory. The function of the Ego is pride. “I am wealthy, popular, I am knowledgeable, there is nobody like me, etc.” are examples of the effects of Ego. This pride also has a distinction in Saatwik, Rajasik, and Tamasik. If someone knows him as Brahamana, then his whole life should be followed according to that specific prescription given in the Scriptures. It is applicable to other Vedic segmentation also with their recommended Vedic prescription. It is the positive use of pride. On other hand being Brahmana, if he scorns everyone, it is the misuse of pride.
Hanuman Ji tells himself. I feel proud of being a servant of Shree Rama and the Shree Rama is my master. Similarly, pride also has two types of use, Easy and difficult. So, pride is the symbol of Ahamtattva only.
According to Vedanta, the subtle five elements are the cause of the mind, intelligence, memory, ego, and their formation. In Vedanta, a subtle body which also contains Antah Karana is made out of these elements. Sankhya explains it differently. According to Nyaya philosophy, mind and related consciousness is not the modification of Elements.
Narayana !!!
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“There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can’t control.” Marcus Aurelius
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“Wherever you go, there you are.” ~Confucius
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The play of causes and conditions
Anger is dukkha, even when we enjoy getting angry. Frustration is dukkha. Irritability is dukkha. Resenting someone is dukkha. Worrying what someone thinks about you is dukkha. Hoping that the traffic light will stay on green is suffering. Wishing that the driver in front of you would go a little faster is dukkha.
In your patience, you will own your heart. (1)
The Greek word for patience also implies constancy, perseverance. It is a strong word. ‘Heart’ comes from ‘psyche’ and psyche also means life, mind, soul. So, in your patience, you will become one with your heart. I remember when I first read this line being struck by it. A word like ‘patience’ which is a rather grey word in our normal way of talking comes out rather luminous and strong from this passage.
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BG
