My kin

My lover the world went to sleep in my arms. I woke up alone in the arms of it all. God, my kin.  ~Jnana Shiva

Vegetarian

I have never been a vegetarian. Even when I lived at the ashram for three years, my sadhini pal and I would drive several miles to the nearest diner, where we would have steak and eggs. LOL!

We were rebel types, but not because we were rebelling. Just because we weren't the "appear and act all spiritual" types. We both wore all black (I still do), slept through morning chant, watched TV and movies in our rooms, and performed walking, eyes open meditation throughout the day, as well as our sit in the dark meditation "cave" (which I LOVED).

We went everywhere together, and spread a sort of subversive, playful sadhana that no doubt helped some yogis and yoginis out with their purification (burning).

I was not worried. Though I had no physical relationship with my guru, except for the exquisite opportunity to live in the ashram made from her guru's shakti, she visited me from time to time to check on me and teach me. A tap on the shoulder at the right moment, the touch on my forehead in meditation, a blast of bliss after walking past her in front of Anugraha were a few examples that come to mind.

I never felt the need to become vegetarian, and did not experience this to be a detriment to my sadhana.

Recently, I asked my guru for something that would involve (now I see) purification of my body. I wasn't thinking of vegetarianism at all.

Soon after, I took a bite of one of my favorite foods which included meat. The taste sent a wave of repulsion through my entire body, a feeling of disgust that I experienced as eating something foul. Later, when I still felt the same way, I described it as a reaction to something decayed, decaying, basically dead. I was sure I did not want to eat cooked flesh. No.


This was not an intellectual experience at all.

I decided to go with it. What's the harm in trying? And so, I am a vegetarian, but not because of adherence to a certain reasoning.

I have the added benefit of doing my small part to help the millions of animals that live miserable lives in the US because of factory farming. When I was a truck driver, I experienced first hand the appalling dark and sickly feeling that hangs on these places like a thick shroud of horror, far worse than any scary movie I've ever seen. This is the energy of mechanized death.

I grew up without eating beef, as we lived on the deer meat my father provided by hunting. This type of meat is very different, though I still would not eat that now.

THE BEST PART is how I feel. I can feel the energy in my body changing. I am being transformed by my guru's grace, and this now plays a part in that. Somehow I can be more pure and alive in her grace now. Delusion slips away faster, with less pain. My body feels different. Lighter, more alive.

Shubh Diwali

Shubh Diwali dear friends!

Billions

I have learned a thing or two about burning. Lucky me!!

To burn is to be purified. The investment of belief and time in something is not usually removed without burning. Burning sets me free.

Guru's grace is the fire, the purifying kundalini rushing up through me, like a silent, temperature-less fire made of consciousness, the ultimate consciousness that is not bound in any way.

Sometimes I hear her, rising like bubbles through the akasha, then the little vision showing me that what rises is beyond water or air, but is consciousness rising as fire. Strange, that God would create so many layers and mechanisms behind the seen. At last I understand that God goes everywhere, takes shape as all possibilities, all Gods, all pathways home. It is pleasing to journey for a time beyond the seen before arriving home, to experience the play at every tattwa, every layer of the descending and ascending divine.

 

Purification comes in waves. I am finally learning to not ascribe attainment to any stage of purification, including feeling perfectly One with the center place, silent and unmoving, no now or here, only potential, only love and bliss. All that I am and all that I feel are mine through guru's grace. What it means about me is a senseless question, a moment of plundering by ego and mind.

(Hey! That sounds like an attainment!!)

I find that purification means I have to feel it again, experience what it was like to believe as I once did that it was happening to me, which created karma, a cosmic debt. I invested in delusion, in bondage. The way to get my investment back is to go through it again, and throw the yoke off.

Many around me are still invested in the play. God is at play in many forms. Then some of us feel the need to return to God, and the burning begins. I please God as He experiences as me every nuance of return to Self, every tiny step, every breath made of purest longing.


The fire is a very very intense version of "circumstances" which I bought into. What I believed in becomes fuel for the fire. To be free, I must burn off the debt, my investment in the play, experience it with such an intensity that I see it anew, laugh or cry, throw it off and leave the burden to be reabsorbed by consciousness.

I remember once a wise person said that we need to take our hands off the rear view mirror of life and place them on the steering wheel.

If life is the car, then holding onto the mirror is believing that I am somehow directing or controlling events. I turn the mirror this way and that and notice changes, believing that I am the source of change in the events around me. To place my hands on the wheel is to realize that I make choices, but I have nothing to do with how things go. They just do. I have the wheel, I may turn this way or that, but all of THIS is God and God doesn't invest power over the joyous unfolding of consciousness in little me.

OMG can you imagine how tiny, painful and drab life would be if little me was really in charge??

Life is inspiration and intelligence, free, free beyond any measure or understanding. It is wild and wooly and starts with an exquisite planet surrounded by space and the bodies of space that goes on for such distances that the light from what is there now cannot be seen here for about 3.8 billion years, and that's a long time and far far away... and all one tiny seed in the place of potential.

Perhaps we are all that old.

Longing

Is there anywhere where the Beloved is not?

I am courted by the Beloved.

Here... This inner touch, sacred.

My mind insists, my mind paints from a lifetime of pictures. It makes the pictures to go with these sensations, but my mind only gets in the way. The pictures are not You.

Longing so intense I hold to the mantra, saying Your name, my private name for You.

If I can just sit with You, that is grace. You come again and again, and I am so glad, but it feels harder when I must pause, over and over, to just sit with You, then stop. I always stop. My mind simply wanders off.

Illusion, I remind myself. We reach for each other in every moment. Every moment, and there is only one.

We embrace in the now.