Nice quotes, Richard and I love the zen koan in another one of your posts. Ok,
I'm going home now and finish watching The Hunger Games. No Internet at home.
Boo hoo! But good tapas too (-:
On Saturday, December 7, 2013 10:18 AM, Richard J. Williams
<pundits...@gmail.com> wrote:
One thing you have to consider is that the practice of "TM", or any other yoga
technique, is NOT the cause of enlightenment - TM just provides the ideal
opportunity for the awakening. No "technique" is going to cause a person to
become enlightened, even if you practice yoga for years and years. You are only
going to get as much enlightenment as you are going to get.
But, you only have to ingest LSD or some other alkaloid once in
order to realize that there are altered states of consciousness.
Once you do that, you will probably never forget it. LoL!
According to yoga theory, you build up "samskaras" due to "karma"
- the actions in this life and in your past lives. You can remove
the samskaras through "tapas" - "burning off" the accumulated
layers of past actions. But, yoga will not remove all the
samskaras - there's always a trace of karma because you still
maintain a human body which requires food, coarse or fine, and
thoughts and volitions. There is always an innate clinging to life
which is human nature.
Patanjali says that the ideal state for awakening is the cessation
of thoughts; you simply have to *isolate* the Purusha from the
prakriti and then realization can occur on it's own, or not. SBS
compared enlightement to "Light" (Brahman). The Absolute is
already there; it doesn't require anything else to illuminate it
because it is an already established ultimate reality.
The enlightened state is described in the Indian rice analogy: you
can remove the chaff and it's still rice paddy.
In this day and age hardly anyone reads or understands the
Sanskrit scriptures. The only hope for enlightenment today is to
practice "karma yoga" - giving up the fruits of your labor for the
common good, like Nelson Mandela, and having the good fortune to
meet a qualified teacher.
In the final analysis though, nobody is going to give you
enlightenment - you earn it, and sometimes, by the grace of the
gods, you realize your true nature. May the gods be with you!
"As in a pond, when its influx of water has been blocked, dries up
gradually through evaporation and use, so karmic matter, which has
been acquired through millions of lives, is erased through tapas;
there is no further unflux" (Wallah Sutra, I.4.).
On 12/7/2013 9:25 AM, s3raph...@yahoo.com wrote:
>Re "The mystical psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke distinguished between
>three types of consciousness: Simple Consciousness, awareness of the body,
>possessed by many animals; Self Consciousness, awareness of being aware,
>possessed only by humans; and Cosmic Consciousness, awareness of the life and
>order of the universe, possessed only by humans who are enlightened.":
>
>
>
>Bucke's experience of CC only lasted a minute or so. Some of his friends later
>advised him to try Indian yoga to learn how to replicate the experience. He
>wasn't interested. It wasn't that he didn't believe that yoga/meditation could
>alter someone's state but he regarded it as too much like "taking heaven by
>storm". It was evolution of the race that would gradually produce more
>enlightened humans - in the same way that "self consciousness" had naturally
>arisen out of "simple consciousness". Was he right?
>
>
>It's striking that Gopi Krishna (of kundalini fame), living in India and
>spending a lifetime on the spiritual quest, said that he'd only ever met two
>people he regarded as fully awakened. One was an anonymous sadhu who emerged
>from a forest about whom we know nothing; the other was Ramana Maharshi. Now
>one thing we do know about Maharshi is that he achieved his awakening
>spontaneously and *not* as a result of doing yoga/meditation or other
>spiritual exercises. So he was a "natural mystic" in Bucke's sense. Maybe the
>"anonymous sadhu" was a "natural" also.
>
>
>Perhaps we should all be more relaxed about the spiritual trip and just let
>Mother Nature take her course. She probably knows better than us what it's all
>about.
