When others talk to me, I remain steady inside. No more leaping and dancing with them. I look and sound like I am participating, and I am. But I am only participating by listening and talking. I do not squander my shakti. My state stays steady.
The motion and sound is often shocking, jarring and disturbing, I think particularly from people who are trying to subtly manipulate my state, i.e. codependents.
There is a stillness. I experience it at the center place, inside. l have become that place.
My sadhana has been juggled around, and is moving in a new direction. I believe my Guru has been leading all of us up to and through this change.
I have to realize that actions that attempt to use discipline to overcome my limitations and delusions currently never work for me. I have spent my whole life disciplining myself and wildly grasping with super-human effort to try to get the grand experience I have been seeking, and to address what has been missing, and my misery about this.
For me, the "dos" like disciplining my activities with specific goals about meditation and other practices, as well as trying to keep spiritual experiences permanent, are not the opposite of sadhana. ALWAYS using my life and moments to try to create a new and permanent state is based on a delusion that I am lost, unfulfilled, away from God. Grasping and doing for my own limited results has created huge karmas and samskaras for me.
I found myself writing about how Karma and Bhakti Yoga--and much of Jnana Yoga--have come to the fore in my sadhana. The fourth Yoga, Raja Yoga, is a synthesis, with elements that form a system based on discipline, which is not helpful for me.
Krishna talks about how an individual will find that some yogas will work for them better than others.
1) KARMA YOGA~THE YOGA OF ACTION: Any time I am grasping or pushing, trying or making myself do anything, I am jumping on the great wheel. The harder I push and hang on, the harder I'm going to fall when the wheel goes around the other way. Rajas creates karma. I've got way too much longing made into rajas in every moment!
My path is not doing, and it is not not-doing. HOW? Through dharma/duty. Lord Krishna has taught me about Karma Yoga, and this knowledge and yoga is very important to my sadhana.
2) BHAKTI YOGA: Bhakti Yoga is a new emphasis for me. It is divine love, longing, and worship in a personal relationship with a chosen form of the divine. This is the "doing" that I offer, avoiding karmas (Karma Yoga). Commitment to experiencing love and worship for the Divine fills me with an intensity of shakti that is burning my impurities away.
A short description of a very powerful yoga.
3) JNANA YOGA: The focus of my sadhana for the last few years has been to notice and name the elements of my mind in action. I challenge delusion by noticing what arises and holding what will bring delusion. When I hold a train of thought or etc., it naturally dissolves. Consciousness dissolves into consciousness.
I have for the most part eliminated self-pity, collapsing (giving up), and self-hatred, and I at least notice many things such as jealousy, anger, and competitiveness. I especially have benefited from noticing when I begin to make a story about what is happening in the moment, with the assumption that it is happening to me.
My mind has become much more still and centered.
Other parts of Jnana Yoga which have been important are recognizing what is transitive in my reality and letting go my attachments to these things. "That's not real," and "that isn't permanent" are my mantras in using my mind in this way. I also practice "seeing" the world of the senses as consciousness, and remembering it may promise many things, but none of it will be truly satisfying or permanent.
4) RAJA YOGA: Royal Raja Yoga is a higher yoga that incorporates elements of the other yogas in a powerful synthesis. It is based on meditation and other tools to work with the mind.
Systematic and disciplined is not helpful or useful to me at this point in my sadhana. When I meditated, I went after dinner. I wanted to meditate. I ran down the steps to the kriyaloka meditation room at the ashram, sinking into my spot, my consciousness dropping into the depths of me as I settled in.
"It's almost 7:00, time to meditate doesn't work for me, at least not now. I have to wrestle with myself about it, my intention, and my fear. It is very unpleasant. It runs me, and I am stuck with it.
I need to go around this stuff. I realize almost all(?) yogis do this. I think I did so much of this in a past life that this time I am doing something else.
It is my birthright, my nature, to feel this bliss in every moment.
I can shake off these mistaken beliefs. I will not claim them.
Now. The truth is where I stand.
In Buddha statues with the Bhumisparsha mudra, the Buddha, more specifically, the historical Shakyamuni Buddha is seen seated with his right hand as a pendant over the right knee reaching toward the ground with the palm inward while touching the lotus throne. In the meantime, the left hand can be seen with the palm upright in his lap.
This gesture represents the moment of the Buddha's awakening as he claims the earth as the witness of his enlightenment.
Just before he realized enlightenment, it is believed that the demon Mara tried to frighten him with the armies of demons and monsters including his daughters who tried to tempt him to get out of meditation under the Bodhi tree. While the demon king Mara claimed the throne of enlightenment for himself, his demon army claimed to be the witness for Mara's enlightenment. Mara then challenged Siddhartha about the witness.
Then the former prince reached out his right hand to touch the earth as it is believed that the earth itself roared "I bear you the witness!" Hearing the roar from the earth herself, the demon king disappeared. The following morning saw the first appearance of the one who is awakened, the Buddha. Hence, it is believed that the Bhumisparsha mudra, or "the earth witness" mudra commemorates the Buddha's victory over the temptation by the demon King Mara.
I let the eddying curl of a floating appetite slip out of my grasp, expanding as it is dissolving, becoming one with all that I am. Consciousness dissolving consciousness.
How do I avoid disappointment and regret?
I haven't even thought about it. No goals were set. No decisions were made. It just happens, again and again. Grace.
I notice the moment, so many each day. I slip out from the closing hook; lifetimes of grasping, lifetimes of pulling away.
The restless, endless searching stops for a moment.
There is a little prick of pain, the very slight jar of separation. Ouch.
Dissolving karmas, samskaras... what was that? I forget. I need not know. I am forgetting. It has become meaningless.
Then, grace. I am expanding so slightly with a gentle in-rushing of bliss, warmth, and freedom. My birthright.
I hold my mind when I am visited by shakti. Intelligence as warmth, as bliss.
I notice it. I feel a warmth emanating through me, head to toes.
Going against a lifetime of seeking, I stop my mind.
I hold my mind the very second I notice it stirring, surging. I stop my mind when the action of thinking begins; tasting, then starting to talk about a surge of bliss.
Stop. Hold.
I do not make up a story about my experience, or decide what it means.
Hardest of all, I do not to try to augment and shape the event through mental action.
All I know is that these actions have enchanted me, have enslaved me. And this moment of stopping, of self-control, becomes a sacrifice, an offering. The fire of tapasya burns without the outward appearance of sadhana.
My sadhana is the tapasya of the mind.
I am simply alive. I have no agenda. My spiritual apparatus has stopped, settled. It seeks nothing.
No process. No language. Only the immense freedom of holding my being, holding my mind.
My mind is mystified, concerned, skeptical.
My sadhana isn't about making me better at control, analysis, pushing ahead to the ultimate goal. I am over the spiritual tantrum I recently had about this. That is when all action stopped.
I no longer indulge in the sadhana of action. Now. One-pointedness. No wandering. I often forgo the mantra--silence is my mantra.
I challenge myself, and my fears. "This is a big risk," offers my mind, the expert I built up and leaned on all of my life. "Might we waste a human birth if we are passive about our sadhana?"
I have discarded the lifelong obsession that I will somehow fix my broken life.
I finally reached a moment where I stepped back and looked at myself. I noticed that I was in a great deal of pain. Familiar pain. Constantly unresolved pain. I was contorted by it, the last to know.
I freed myself. I whispered to myself, "I don't care." I no longer care about my life's work, a lifelong obsession to fix a ruined life. I don't care about the many past moments of failure and pain that flood into the my consciousness at the cost of now.
"I don't care" is the mantra to loosen caring too much.
My dance with this obsession is bondage, and letting go of an epic grip on my life is freedom. The details do not matter.
"I don't care."
I visualize each painful memory when they arise—a slip of consciousness that I mistakenly thought was happening to me, the truth traded in for a kind of karmic coat check.As I focus my consciousness on the memory, I see it slipping away from me, burning in a sudden whoosh, or turning to dust, the pain rejected and spun off like dross. Consciousness disolves into consciousness. Immediately I feel lighter, slipping into the center place of bliss.
I am not the story, the places or the people. I am this inner place of bliss.
I am watching myself become free and completely in the now, carried on my guru's grace. But my mind is waiting and turns it all into concepts, then and now, "do" the path (not).
There is only this, only now. The Self is attained now.
My guru has said that it is very very hard to attain the Self without the grace of a guru. I have this grace, but she cannot give to me if I allow my mind to dictate the samskaras again, the habit and lack of discipline, subtly pushing her out, filling that space (again) with mind.
I am craving discrimination, in the moment. It would help me to see what is happening in my consciousness right now.
Maa Saraswati
I pray for your grace and wisdom, beloved Devi Saraswati. I pray for wisdom and learning. Your lotus symbolizes the source of true knowledge. Your vehicle, the white swan, symbolizes Sattwa Guna, or purity and discrimination.
These are treasures that I seek.
Om Saraswati Mahabhagey, Vidye Kamala Lochaney |
Viswarupey Vishalakshmi, Vidyam Dehi Namohastutey || Jaya Jaya Devi, Charachara Sharey, Kuchayuga Shobhita, Mukta Haarey | Vina Ranjita, Pustaka Hastey, Bhagavati Bharati Devi Namohastutey || The beautiful human form of Saraswati comes to the fore in this English translation of the Saraswati hymn: "May Goddess Saraswati, who is fair like the jasmine-colored moon, and whose pure white garland is like frosty dew drops; who is adorned in radiant white attire, on whose beautiful arm rests the veena, and whose throne is a white lotus; who is surrounded and respected by the Gods, protect me. May you fully remove my lethargy, sluggishness, and ignorance."
Maa Saraswati
Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and arts, represents the free flow of wisdom and consciousness. She is the mother of the Vedas, and chants to her, called the 'Saraswati Vandana' often begin and end Vedic lessons.
Saraswati is the daughter of Lord Shiva and Goddess Durga. It is believed that goddess Saraswati endows human beings with the powers of speech, wisdom and learning. She has four hands representing four aspects of human personality in learning: mind, intellect, alertness and ego. She has sacred scriptures in one hand and a lotus – the symbol of true knowledge – in the second. With her other two hands she plays the music of love and life on a string instrument called the veena. She is dressed in white – the symbol of purity – and rides on a white swan – symbolizing Sattwa Guna or purity and discrimination. Saraswati is also a prominent figure in Buddhist iconography - the consort of Manjushri. The learned and the erudite attach greater importance to the worship of goddess Saraswati. As a practice, only educated people worship her for knowledge and wisdom. They believe that only Saraswati can grant them 'moksha' - the final liberation of the soul. From Subhamoy Das, Hinduism Expert, About Religion, About.com
