My sadhana has become very subtle, outside of my mind, beyond words. I live for my Beloved, who is all the forms of God and the Guru, all that is.
My Beloved, you hide in plain sight as everything, you love me as whomever you find in my heart. You draw me away from attachment to the world of the senses, to the place beyond, the place of magic I have longed for all my life.
Come, I will bring you across... to me, to my world of magic, for I created all of this, I am all of this, I am all that is inside I am love I am love I am you
Confidence is my favorite word. It is the foundation of my state. Confidence is the talisman I grasp with my mind, the energy to push out all thoughts of weakness and doubt. The still point. The constant. I need not defend. There is no question. CONFIDENCE defeats the primary weakness in the spiritual culture of Mormonism: a constant indulgence in moral assessment and questioning which easily leads to a life of self-doubt.
“It is confidence, and confidence alone, that must lead us to love." -St. Therese
Someone might wonder: Didn’t St. Therese ever become discouraged over her small failings and inability to do the great things she desired for the love of God?
In fact, Therese had by her temperament a natural tendency toward discouragement. That she recognized this disposition is evident from the first of the three resolutions she made on her First Communion day: “I shall not be discouraged.” In Carmel, she wrote a beautiful prayer for a novice about humility. In it she said that she would wake in the morning with a strong resolve to conquer her pride; in the evening she would be discouraged knowing she had failed. Then she realized that this discouragement itself was but itself a form of pride, and this would make her more discouraged. It is the vicious circle many of us have experienced. St. Therese explains how the dilemma was resolved:
“Since it has been given to me to understand the love of the Heart of Jesus, I own that it has chased all discouragement from mine. The remembrance of my faults humiliates me, and urges me never to depend on my own strength, which is nothing but weakness. Still more does this remembrance speak to me of mercy and of love. When, with all filial confidence we cast our faults into the devouring furnace of love, how should they not be totally consumed?”
It was only confidence that could conquer discouragement and melancholy.
“What offends Jesus, what wounds Him to the Heart,” she insisted to her novices, “is lack of confidence.”
There came a moment, I think it was less than a week ago, where I said, "no more."
"I'm done."
I watched myself decide with complete certainty that expecting anything in return for participating with this play in my mind was a complete waste. There was a shift. The "inside" world became more important to me than "the play," the play that has occupied me every moment of this lifetime, until now.
An invisible door closed. It has stayed closed.
It's still closed when I awake in the morning. It's still closed whenever I inspect it.
Yes. Still closed.
This may or may not last.
That's not up to me.
How different my state is. I concentrate on whatever I am doing.
I am no longer making up a story about life as I go. 'Now' is all that is real.
Not because I think it is so, (laugh)! It's just how I live, how I am alive, now, here.
There is a change in my subtle body, in my energy. Absolute steadiness. When I choose to consciously experience this feeling of steadiness, I can increase it at will.
(I remember when she visited me a few times recently, invisible, touching me so slightly. "Steady," her touch said, communicating the feeling of steadiness to me. Grace.)
I have finally got full control of my mind. Nothing knocks me off of my center place. Drama comes and goes around me. There is no question of participating. It is jarring, irritating to think otherwise.
I am finally, fully confident that the steady progress of discipline is NOT my path, and that I am not deluded in thinking so.
I remember recently the moment I found there was no difference between inside and outside. God has become so close I was supremely embarrassed for a few days.
Moments come during my day when God touches me, reminds me in my being, again and again, rising through me as a tickle of loving bliss. My every dream, my heart's desire, coming true as eternal union with my Beloved. My realization takes the form of a magical fairy tale, in my heart.I always tear up, cry a little when this touch of romantic bliss comes.
A gift. From my Guru. From God. The perfect gift. Forever. It is all because of Grace.
My ego is not involved. This may or may not be happening to all of my guru's other devotees. I don't need to know either way. I feel no need to evaluate what is happening to me by this or any parameters.
For the first time in my life, I am not struggling to shape an intellectual response to what is happening. I am not trying to bring the previous moment into the current moment as part of a recipe for achieving progress and attainment.
I'm not thinking of attainment.
I'm only writing all this down so I can refer to it later. I'll want to remember how it happened. My guru advises doing this, journaling.
I was born within 100 miles of Zion's National Park. My roots from this incarnation sink deep into this soil.
I am not Catholic, but I have been praying the rosary and the Liturgy of the Hours for a few days now. I feel the need to pray.
Prayer for me is made of worship, and of self-sacrifice. I offer up my body and soul in prayer. I offer my time and my focus. I am focused on God; my love and longing for God, which has been so great all my life.
I remember when I was a girl, and standing in the street near my house, and asking myself: what do I want to be when I grow up? My answer was either a nun or a Playboy centerfold! I do not see these as being all that far apart. They both celebrate life and the source of that life.
Still, I thought. That must be why I have a huge scar on my stomach, God wants me to be a nun instead.
Later, when I found out Mormons do not have nuns, I was not devastated--but it was close. As an adult, I have found Catholics to be pretty weird. But I am coming to understand them better by borrowing their prayers. They feel an unbroken line from, and are the keepers of the people and events of the Lord's time on earth. They think about these constantly, in rosary prayers to Mary and others, in the Stations of the Cross, in their Mass, and in their religious peoples' lives, their activities, the symbolism of their habits and the structure of their days.
I am trying prayer in a specific way. I do not pray unless I want to. A feeling of wanting to pray comes up naturally. No desire--no pray. Also, if I lose interest in the middle of praying, (which does happen occasionally), I choose to stop praying.
Today, I felt strongly that I didn't want to pray. I thought everything to do with praying was more than painful, a sort of jerking around in my collapsed, depressed state.
"I will not pray unless I want to. Even if I don't pray ever again."
The thought I might stop made me sad. I found myself clicking on "nun links" that now come up on my YouTube side bar. I began to feel the desire again, to pray.
Praying is a way to get around the part of me that wants to use control of my mind and feelings to "get somewhere," spiritually or otherwise.
I have been seriously and continuously contemplating how to move forward in my sadhana--and to what end--for months now. I tried a lot of things, and mostly accomplished a bunch of trying. My life goes in a big circle. Everything I'm doing now will become the opposite eventually. When I try to do it, I get in the way of grace. I have to step back.
Wrestling myself to the floor at 5am is not me, never will be. The life of a nun is not for me. Which is hard because I long so much for a completely spiritual life. I don't feel that my current life fulfils that purpose in me. I am still learning.
After I pray The Office and The Hours, and the Crown Rosary or daily rosary, my body has a serene feeling of energy all in-line and in a gentle, persistent flow. I feel lighter, my mind and ego at rest.
"I feel that my karmas, my pain, my despair, all of it is dissolving in the sweet attitude and daily results of prayer."
In the question I have been asking over and over, should I go through or around my obstacles, I have always returned to this answer: go around. I'll never wrestle that mess to the ground. Or if I do, I'll only keep it down for two seconds. It's all an illusion. Why sacrifice everything to fighting an illusion?
I think I have found the answer. I offer my prayer, including the results. If I can desire to pray, and then pray, I create the shakti in my being that dissolves all that has burdened me, and chained me to the vagaries of the world around me.
And so, I desire very much to be freed, and also to be continuously apart from the world. God is what matters to me.
After I pray, I'm at a loss of what to do. Everything else seems course, and destined to pull my lovely state back into illusion and pain. I don't think I can pray all the time. Just as sure as the desire to pray will come along, the desire to stop praying will come as well. I'm not going to fight it out with this part of me. Making myself do something is sure to eradicate any possibility of doing it at all. I'm just that way.
Meanwhile, I do continue to repeat the mantra silently, and I am trying out experiencing this as worship, in addition to my main experience as identification and purification. It's interesting to me that this feels too intimate! When I think of God, I no longer think of God as "inside" or "outside" of me. I guess there's no way to worship God without worshiping myself. Which is the point of the mantra in any case.
"My discipline is to only do it when I want to!"
As Mother Teresa said, "God does not require that we be successful, only that we be faithful." The idea of being faithful thrills me. It frees me from the content. If I prayed, or not, if I felt like praying or not. These dark waters would suck me down right away. I go around them! If only I can be faithful, and pray when I desire to pray, today. Who knows about tomorrow.
So, today I did not feel like praying. I was sad. "It's all over," I thought. "Like it always is." I have been wrestling with this off and on my whole life.
As I say, I started clicking on "nun links" that were coming up in my YouTube sidebar, since I've been surfing around looking for prayers. And I found that watching just one of these videos brought up all of my desire to pray, and to live a life that is based upon what matters, which is God.
It's part and parcel of the thoughts of a young girl who found that the things that mattered to me were not reflected in the world around me.
Finding my place in the world has been the real struggle of my entire life. I wish that I could be a nun. Maybe I can be, after all. A convent of one.
My "go to" dharana/dhyana. My focus and practice. My contemplation.
My "go to" dhyana is to nudge myself out of multiplicity. I experience myself as formless, unlimited consciousness, the knower, and everything else a play of consciousness on the screen of life, the known. The play normally seems three-dimensional because of the magic of maya.
Inherent in this contemplation is acknowledging that the projection of maya cannot satisfy/protect me, or cause lack/harm me. Thinking otherwise is bondage.
I want freedom. I see myself "unlatching" from the screen of the world going by. I let the illusion of satisfaction and lack slip away. It becomes a dance of light. And I choose freedom, the source. The real prize.
I can only do this because of the grace of my guru, because I have received shaktipat.
Step well
I also use my mind to slip out from the experience of multiplicity. When I am in this state, I experience Oneness, One without second. A singularity. My awareness resides in the great consciousness, the only Self. Immediately I am filled with great bliss.
I can reshape my consciousness like this for several moments at a time.
An interesting aside is that my ability to shape my own consciousness was greatly improved by my years in Wicca, where "spells" are created by this containing and shaping of awareness, a discipline and practice that grows in effectiveness over time.
I also use this skill as a writer of fiction.
Swami Lakshmanjoo:
The word dhyana means “contemplation.” It is another mode in anavopaya (a means of enlightenment). Dhyana is contemplation on some point.
There are different forms of dhyana. For example, you are practicing dhyana when you contemplate on the lotus in your heart, or on the meaning of some mantra such as the mantra “so’ham” or the mantra “Shiva.”
This is a higher form of anavopaya because it is contemplation without any shape, without any form. If you were to contemplate on Lord Shiva as having a particular form, a particular shape, that is a lower form of anavopaya. It is contemplation with form.
(A gentle hand). Be still. Smile. Find wholeness within.
Oh! Oh no!
(A reassuring touch). Be still. Smile. Find contentment within.
God is at play here.
The entirety of God is here. I find it inside. Always here for me.
At last I can catch myself at the start of the surge toward or away from. Soon after an instant in which I have travelled so far, and not at all.
My dharana: I look around with a new awareness, strengthened each day with practice.
There is only One here.
My dharana: All of this, including me, is One. How peaceful it is to have no other. Endless, perfect solitude. This unity consciousness surges through me as great bliss.
How my Lord loves to be found, observed and known with the awakening gaze of one who has slept.
I awaken in Your arms.
How my Lord loves to be found, observed and known with the awakening gaze of one who has slept
Yesterday I felt this immense experience and manifestation of grace. Yesterday.
How can I keep that going? How can I hold onto it, build on it, and not let it slip away? asks my mind. Am I losing what is precious, and missing a precious opportunity to have what I most want in this life? There will be devastating regret. So says my mind's mighty "fear of regret" samskara.
Thinking I have to build on grace is an attempt to add to what is divine and unlimited. No.
(Thinking of) yesterday happens only in my mind. Why hang out in my mind when all that I most want is already attained??
Lord Krishna looks on as Arjuna kneels to receive the
precious gift of bow and arrows from Lord Shiva
I help my mind. A dharana.
What about today? Now? What is the sadhana of my heart, where there is no "here" or "there," no limitations, outside of time?
Start here: Offering the fruits to Krishna is the beautiful pranam of my soul. He is always there with a playful, gentle surge of love. Play, he says. When Krishna shakes his curls, the play of the world surges with universal longing.
There is a most precious gift of grace in this moment. Become that.
My mind keeps running around! Around!! GET BACK HERE.
My mind might run, but I'm the one who likes and believes in the feelings of gratification it seeks. I choose to pursue them.
Tiny little lights that sparkle and charm, that make me shimmy a little with excitement and release. In this way I miss out on the true treasure.
The Guru's feet symbolize a divine mystery, the place where Guru
and disciple meet as One in the ocean of divine consciousness
The place of action is to look at it, to put consciousness on it. What is this? Why do I pursue soimething that is not really there?? I believe over and over in gratification, and think I am achieving it, even if only for a moment. More pursuit. Repeat.
It's a sparkle!. A shimmer! A happy shimmy! No more. NO SUBSTANCE.
I want what is real.
I have disciplined my mind in key ways. This is next. I no longer believe in gratification.
"I don't believe in ________" is my playful way of saying _________ is an illusion."*
I don't believe in suffering. Suffering comes from wrong thinking. It is only consciousness. Nothing happens to me.
Now, I do not believe in gratification. Believing in it is followed closely by thinking I am experiencing lack, or frustration. None of these things are actually happening to me.
I don't want to fly on this mental swing, mistaken storymaking anymore.
Consciousness dissolves consciousness.
The place at the Guru's feet is a place of surrender which transcends the physical.
The physical Guru offers service to Her disciples by accepting this worship of
Paramashiva, the Guru that is all. Worship at this place is beyond profound.
*In Kashmir Shaivism, everything is made of divine consciousness, which is real. This includes consciousness as delusion. Everything. It isn't things or consciousness that are not real.
The beginning of delusion is to believe in something that is false. The experience of delusion is persisting in being mistaken.
I am permeable. My habitual boundaries of self, the age old boundaries of my heart are softening. I can relax what I thought to be rigid in my nature. Consciousness, love and bliss flows into and through me like water.
Float on grace.
Grace keeps touching me, gently refocusing my attention, waking me up.
My dharana is larger than my mind. I am essential, with no qualities or dualities, seeing my limited consciousness from the outside, watching the play of seeing and moving without moving or being seen.
The bliss gushes up each time.
I want to live entirely in that higher consciousness.
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 don't have to let this upset me. I don't have to let it affect me.
I am the fullest feeling of my own true nature, this: a silent stillness that scintillates with bliss.
My mind is not involved, though it is always perched nearby, thinking it is everything.
I find it challenging to blog about my experience, for it is by default understood by most readers as a choice--things and my reaction to things that happens because I want them to. This is understood as reality, everything that becomes in each moment. But I am so much greater, infinitely greater.
What if it all comes, then floats by? If I do not fight or follow, it is no longer about me. I no longer store up debts of consequences.
For my limited mind is not involved with my true nature, though it is always nearby, perched within it... thinking it is everything.
INTRODUCTION: "This
is my new commentary on this Bhagavad
Gītā."
Swami Lakshmanjoo exclaims, as he tells us what we should do when
eating and while experiencing śabda
(sound),
sparśa (touch),
rupa
(form) . . . all of the sensual pleasures.
Although
this verse of the Bhagavad
Gītā
by Vyāsa is complete,186
but Abhinavagupta has not commentated upon it as I would commentate
upon this śloka.
I will tell you his commentary, his first commentary, [which he gave]
in his first life.
Āhāra means
āhriyamāṇeṣu viṣayeṣu [comm.],
when you will go here and there–this is āhāra.
Yuktāhāra
does not [only] mean eating. Yuktāhāra
means śabda
(sound),sparśa
(touch),
rupa
(form) . . . all of the sensual pleasures.
In
sensual pleasures, what should you do?
Keep
it on one side, vihāra.
Vihāra
means vihāraḥupa-bhogāya
pravṛttiḥ;
vihāra
means to enjoy sensual objects. This was Abhinavagupta’s first
commentary.
Tasyāśca
yuktatvaṁ.
Yukta
means,
na
ātyantā saktiḥ na ātyanta parivarjanam,
you should not be a slave to those enjoyments. Neither should you
become a slave nor should you renounce them. Renunciation is also not
good and to be a slave to those enjoyments, that is also not good.
That is yukta,
yuktatva.
Evaṁ
sarvatra,
in this way you should commentate upon these ślokas
of Vyāsa. This is Abhinavagupta’s first commentary. But I don't appreciate this kind of [explanation].
Yuktāhāra. Yuktāhāra means take food! Go on taking food, as much food as you can take, go on
taking it but keep awareness in it. While taking food, offer it to
your own God–that is yuktāhāra.
Yuktāhāra
means when you eat food, go on eating it with awareness, go on
focusing on its taste. Which taste? The taste of whatever you eat . .
. and there will be one-pointedness. Maintain one-pointedness while
eating. Maintain one-pointedness–it is my commentary, my
amendment–maintain one-pointedness in sleeping. You can sleep but
maintain one-pointedness in sleeping, be aware while sleeping. If you
sleep, be aware! Don’t be just like a sluggish bear sleeping. Put
the trick of yoga
into it.
This
is my new commentary on this Bhagavad
Gītā.
Yuktāhāra
vihārasya yuktaceṣṭasya karmasu.
When you have to do activities of the daily routine of your life, do
all of the daily routine of life, but don’t lose your internal
yoga.
At the same time, you [should] go on practicing inside.
DENISE:
You
mean watching your breath. SWAMIJI: Watching
your breath and don’t be taken by these activities of life, the
daily routine of life.
Yukta
svapnā,
and when you dream, go into dreams with awareness. When you dream,
you will enter into samādhi
at the time of dreaming state; you won’t go into the dreaming
state. At that time, you will go into samādhi
while dreaming.
Yukta
svapna āvabodhasya,
and when you are awake, be awake with yoga.
Yogo
bhavati duḥkha,
then yoga
is very easy; everywhere yoga
is available to you. This is my commentary, new commentary. And this
is Abhinavagupta’s new commentary. You should know that. So I had
to [make an] amendment on this commentary.
yogo’sti
naivātyaśato na caikāntamanaśnataḥ /
na
cātisvapnaśīlasya nātijāgarato’rjuna
//17//
[repeated]
Yukta means yujaryoge.
According to Pāṇini’s grammar, yukta
means “with yoga”.
Attach yoga
to all of your activities of the daily routine of life and yoga
will be very easily achieved. Yoga
cannot be achieved [by remaining] in one corner. If you lock your
door from the outside and sit, you will just be wasting your time
inside. You will be . . . “idles workshop is demons . . .” what?
DENISE: Idle
mind is devil’s workshop?
JONATHAN: Devil’s
playground. Idle workshop is devil’s playground.
SWAMIJI: Yes. Don't do like that. Come out in the field and see yoga!
____________
186
“Then who is the real yogī
then? Yuktāhāravihārasya,
you should take food in less quantity. You should do your worldly
activity, [but] very little activity. Don’t become victim of your
business. Yuktaceṣṭasya
karmasu,
don’t think too much. Think very little. Not thinking at all,
anything, that is not [advisable either]–yoga
won’t take place. Think a little. Think of something, but not too
much. Yuktasvapnāvabodhasya,
and go to dreaming state also, but not always. Yogo
bhavati duhkha,
for that person, yogabecomes
successful and very easy to be obtained. Those actions should be done
in moderate way. Don’t see pictures day and night, always. See
pictures after a fortnight. That is good, that will lead you to yoga.
But [if you are] not seeing pictures at all, [then] those pictures
will leak in your mind then, and you will be filled with pictures in
your mind. So do something, but very little, in moderation. Don’t
be too much attached to it [and] don’t be detached to it at the
same time. Detachment [and] attachment should be done moderately, in
a moderate way.” Ibid.
