Fw: cycle of addiction/ suffering / AC/Nina

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NondualitySalon

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 22:17:52 -0000 "Nina" <murrkis >

Re: cycle of addiction/ suffering / AC/Nina.

Hello, AC, I will assume you mean teachings that describe the way out

of suffering. To have heard of such teachings does not mean that

those teachings are understood or applied.

Why is it difficult to get out of suffering? There is a certain

comfort in suffering. Think of addicts, and how they respond to their

'hit'. At first, it is a great comfort. Gradually, the effect wears

off, and another 'hit' is sought. This cycle continues, as gradually

the amount of 'hit' must be increased to receive the same effect.

What are the choices here? Continue on with the doping until death or

rupture, or willingly enter into withdrawal, with all the

pain it entails, in hopes of overcoming the addiction. Drug addiction

and addication to emotional behaviors do not differ in how the brain

processes them. The hypothalmus emits chemicals, these chemicals seek

out receptors

in the cells of the body, the cells of the body respond and demand

continued relationship with those chemicals. Once that pattern is

set, it is not a simple mental decision that can break the cycle.

That, AC, is why so many remain in addiction.

Nina

Dear Nina,

Yes, you're exactly right. Back in 1972/73, I was involved in a drug

rehabilitation program of 3ho, which was developed by Yogi Bhajan.

The practice, which was very effective in all the Centers I went to

over 3 years, used the wide variety of postures and movements

combined with breathing to burn out the chemical addictions.

These addictions penetrate, as you pointed out, to every aspect of

living, binding us to a limited notion of identity we adhere to with

a vehemence, so that even when given ways out we refuse to believe

that the "out proposed can be real, let alone try to persue what that

"out" may be.

The whole practice I took up is to bring up the voltage of the life

force throughout the body to a stage where the encoding of mental

tendencies and habits dissolves, leaving over a higher frequency.

The higher frequency and energy vibration radiating throughout the

body converts the body into an amplifier of sound, so that mantra

produces a further powerful increase in the electro-magnetic impulse

of the body that centers in the Heart and polarizes. The practice and

effect is cumulative, so that gradually the radiance increases and

deepens, and one feels a sensation of penetrating de-contraction

throughout the cells of the body. As the focusing power of attention

is related to a certain level of energy awareness, meaning that, as

you focus your awareness, energy consciousness fills the area with

sensation or insight (whether attention is directed within the body

or outside through the senses), when the voltage of the body begins

to increase, the awareness becomes pervasive versus focused, and you

discover that who you are is a field of consciousness, not a subject

focusing on varied objects.

With penetrating radiance the vibratory frequency of the body rises

above the frequency of thought patterns, the result of which is

stillness of mind within which you experience non-objective

awareness.

As the nadis throughout the body brighten through continued practice,

like incandescent brightening of filaments in a light bulb, the

apparent darkness in and around the body gives way to being able to

see and experience the inside of the body and field around the body

without the use of the senses or the mind, but as a direct experience

of consciousness itself. Here seeing and seen are not distinct nor

separate, and you realize very practically that it is though this

consciousness that the mind is illumined and in turn the senses, and

that what you apparently see and know comes as a result of focused

consciouness, which is already pervasive, rather than some separate

knowable.

As one's Sadhana continues, interest in seeing diminishes, the mind

begins to reflect the seer purely, and when one reads or is told a

story about the lives and teachings of any of the Sages, Saints and

Saviors, there arises a sudden inexorable "recollection" of one's

true nature and the experience of the "I" pulsing as "I" - single

pervasive, self-illuminating being.

Every experience, joyful or filled with sorrow and misery, experiences

of anger, hatred, as well as patters towards love, are all enactments

of powers of the mind that become addictive in one way or the other,

and the patterns of addiction - the behavioral patterns of action and

reaction, chemically encode themselves throughout the body until the

experience of single pervasive being illumining the mind becomes

focused into a sense of identity to only those repeating patterns of

thought and behavior.

Nevertheless, there is some sense that we are in some kind of a

delusion, some amnesia that we need to awaken from. Some take up

discussions of the philosophical possibilities of non-dualism, others

go to the temples and churches to hear the words of the Saints, Sages

and Saviors (hopefully) repeated that in "hearing" they will awaken,

others try out various yoga and meditative practices, New Age ideas,

and so on. The archetypal Self exerts Its force towards recollection

and awakening.

The key is to find some means to become pure enough that it becomes

possible to "hear" the Truth when read or spoken. Part of purity is

also the rise in the sense of belief that who one really is is some

Truth and, with that belief, the fervent desire to penetrate into It,

to figure It out.

The pulsing of the "I" is an experience of being entirely consumed, of

having penetrated though to the other side with such a determination

in trying to "grok" what the Truth is, that one abides in a sort of

perpetual inward determination unwilling to relinquish the Truth once

found and yet being consumed and overpowered by Its realization. The

frequency of determination to realize the Truth suddenly impacts for

the pervasive eternal radiance of That Truth like 2 magnets whose

fields have converged.

Then, you have a pervasive sense of being sucked in by a graviton,

while radiance penetrates through every cell of the body,

decontracting and blowing apart the power of the mind to any

refocusing of attention. You become undifferentiated.

What Sadhana to take up? There are so many means to become pure

offered, means to "overcome the world." Means to "hear" the Truth.

For myself, I was practicing the Raja Yoga that Baba Ram Das taught

in Franklin NH back in 1969, living 5 days a week at a Carmelite

Monastery, fasting, 2 times a day the series of postures, 4 times a

day the series of pranayama. There were a number of people that took

up that practice in tents and teepees on Baba Ram Dass' father's 88

acre estate at the time, many others took it up in the mountains of

Big Sur, others in the mountins of NM.

After around 4 to 5 months many internal experiences arose for which I

had no guidance or explanation, apart from the various books I had,

such as Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa, Raja Yoga by Vivekananda, the

Upanishads translated by Nikhilananda and the New Testament. So I

left the Monastery and started hitch-hiking, as many others at the

time, around the USA looking for someone that could guide the way on.

In April 1970, I met someone, while on the way to the Lama Foundation

in NM, who told me that probably the only person that would be able to

help explain the experiences was Yogi Bhajan in LA. So, I left

Espaniola for LA, and when I met with him and explained everything

that happened, he was the first person that could explain exactly

what it was, where I was in the practice and what to do next, a bit

like Yogi's one would read about from ancient times.

After a month of going to the classes and collecting a number of

Kundalini Yoga sets and kriyas,apart from the ones Yogi Bhajan gave

me to practice, I set off to find a place in seclusion I could

practice, along he lines of the ideal of Milarepa, and by September I

was in a small village between Paris and Lille, where I had rented a

house to begin the practice Yogi Bhajan perscribed, which I took up

with the same fervor as I had done after Baba Ram Dass had instructed

in the practice of Raja Yoga.

In February (10-12) 1971, radiant from the practice so that even the

sun seemed dim by comparison, I happened to go to Paris and, while

waiting there, went into an English bookstore on the corner of rue de

Rivoli and the way to Place ven Dome, where there was only one

spiritual book, "Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self Knowledge." As

Baba Ram Dass had often spoken of Ramana Maharshi as the embodiment of

the Self in modern times, I bought the book and stated to read.

I'm sure many, if not most, of the people on this list have read the

book by Arthur Osborn. It's a book in which on the one side one

reads with a sense of awe and devotion the life of a great saint, and

on the other one is confronted with the many questions posed in so

many ways by a great variety of people regarding God, Sadhana,

spiritual practice, Self Realization, the quest for the Self and so

on, where in every case the question is turned back to the questioner

to find out first "who is asking the question?" The result of this

was that for 3 days I was in a state that moved into and out of

single pervasive consciousness, where there were thoughts percolating

up from the heart and a body performing actions, but no thinker nor

doer, yet everything continued automatically. Near and far had no

meaning. Inside outside, totally transparent. The body at the Heart

a radiation and in and around the crown, with the atma nadi irradiant,

and a multi colored flame rising through the spine and through the top

of the head, the knot binding the sense of "I" to the images of the

mind completely disengaged. Even the sense of "I" had no meaning.

When this finally subsided, there remained an inexplicable pulsation

of "I" as "I" in the Heart, what yogis call the Anahat, the soundless

reverberation of Self, giving, on the one side the perception of the

world through the mind and senses and, on the other the expanding

deepening penetrating experience of single pervasive consciousness.

(Now what???)

I wrote everyone I knew that had any spiritual inclination, including

Baba Ram Dass, who advised that I continue my practice and

meditation, and Yogi Bhajan, who wrote back with a clear explanation

and advise of what to do next. The next became his directing me over

3 years to going to different ashrams in London, then Washington DC,

then Phoenix, then Tucson and then Pomona, where he had different

teachers that had been taught at different times with the same

practice but different sets and kriyas. (At one time I had collected

over 1,000 from classes taken.)

And then it ended, and I went off on my own, occasionally writing Yogi

Bhajan with questions or with what I was experiencing and receiving

his replies. Towards the end the replies were mostly of the nature,

"Always abide in the non-dual."

When I took up the Sadhana Yogi Bhajan taught, he had been saying that

anyone that took up the practice ardently would within a matter of

months have an experience of Reality so different from their

perceptions that they could not imagine it. I took his words to

heart, and something inexplicable happened, something radically

different from anything I could have thought or imagined. And then

there was unobtrusive always available guidance. In an abstract

sense, a bit like Vashishtha's continued guidance of Janaka, after

his sudden realization.

In Reality, the advent of the pulsing of the "I" - like Christ's

advent of the Holy Spirit, is just the beginning of one's Sadhana.

In Kundalini Yoga parlance, we call it Crystalization or the

perfecting of a Diamond from opaque to clear.

Afterward, though, the reading of the lives and words of the Saints,

Saviors and Sages brought about the increasing force of the pulsing

sense of "I" obliterating thought impressions and vision even while

watching them.

Thus, the matter is to start some Sadhana, some practice that will

cause the voltage to increase throughout the body in a manner that

dissolves the chemical electric encoding throughout the body that

reinforce patters of behavior and thought, so that the progressive

state of amnesia we are all in can be reversed, and a simple reading

of a spiritual text can invoke the sudden and clear recollection of

who we really are, so we can abide as That.

The only purpose of Yoga Sadhana is simply to make the mind pure.

When that purity comes about then"hearing" becomes possible and

manifests. "The pure in Heart shall see God ('I AM')." Detachment

ensues, and eventually dissolves into non-attachment.

http://www.kundalini-matashakti.com/worddocuments/Pieters_Articles/TheExperienceofDetachmentandNon-attachment080405.pdf

Pieter

[Guest guest]

Dear Pieter,

 

It is good to have you around to remind me

that one should not post to the web anything

that one would not want forwarded on by others

through the web. That said, I am glad that my

letter inspired yours, but I would like to

point out that it is a common courtesy to

ask the original author's permission prior

to crossposting to numerous lists. I was

a bit surprised to see this message popping

up on the several lists you and I share in

common. Thanks for your future consideration,

and best wishes to you...

 

Nina