Fwd: Fw: cycle of addiction/ suffering / AC/Nina

[Guest guest]

, " Pieter " <pietersa@l...>

wrote:

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/TheExperienceofDetachme

ntandNon-attachment080405.pdf

 

Pieter

 

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