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

 

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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/TheExperience\

ofDetachmentandNon-attachment080405.pdf

 

Pieter

 

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