It's Time We Stop!

    Since the age of 18, I was strongly attracted to, and began reading (a lot) about Zen, other forms of Buddhism, Taoism, Shamanism, Christian Mysticism, and psychology. Thirty years later, I finally started a sitting meditation practice, and for over 15 years, I sat with a couple of local Zen groups. With my wife and two sons, we also sat numerous 7-10 day silent meditation retreats at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS), and with my wife, a one month retreat at Forest Refuge in Barre MA. Then we sat a few annual week-long retreats at Dharma Retreats in Toronto, led by teachers from IMS.
    At some point I took Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher-training, and then facilitated about a hundred 8-week courses at Dalhousie University and the IWK Children's Hospital in-person, and since the beginning of Covid, online.
    All this time, I continued to read, blog, and contemplate this spiritual journey we call life. When I first started reading about spirituality & psychology almost 60 years ago, the material was puzzlingly paradoxical yet, attracted & fascinated, I kept at it. 

    “All truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally it is accepted as self-evident.” Arthur Schopenhauer, 19th-century German philosopher

    SO it's no surprise, that many - including most of our relatives & friends - quickly reject & avoid concepts & practices that strike them as unfamiliar, foreign, not quickly & easily understandable, too deep, religious, and especially spiritual. AND YET, healthy maturation, which involves at least some evolution of consciousness, REQUIRES acceptance, patience & perseverance BUT is BLOCKED by fear & avoidance.

    Over this lengthy period of slow maturation, books written by wise spiritual elders have slowly but progressively come to reflect my own lived experience. My blogs showcase what I currently resonate with, inspire me, and hopefully, help you evolve spiritually. If negative judgments quickly pop up about wise spiritual elders' experiences, consider the possibility that what you just read might not be 'just crazy talk,' but simply beyond your current level of understanding.
    The more we're able to 'unburden' our 'parts' - Internal Family Systems (IFS) talk for the less self-centered & neurotic we become - the more we actually start to experience life the way shamans, mystics & saints of all traditions, places & times describe. IFS would say that these people have become 'Self-led.' See: http://www.johnlovas.com/2021/06/frightened-children-and-wise-elders.html

        “... as self decreases,
         the Divine increases.”             Bernadette Roberts

    From her wise, inspiring 2024 book, “Psyche & Spirit. How a Psychiatrist Found Divinity through her Lifelong Quest for Truth and her Daughter’s Autism” here is Melinda Edwards:

    “Ramana Maharshi (one of the great sages of India, 1879 – 1950) taught that the ‘Self’ or real ‘I’ (our true or ultimate identity) is a non-personal, all-inclusive awareness, not an experience of individuality (small self, noisy ego). He said the individual egoic self was a fabrication of the mind that obscures the true experience of the real Self. He maintained that this universal Self is always present, but the self-limiting tendencies of the mind must cease for one to be consciously aware of it.

    Contraction & separation, when acted out or discharged externally, cause suffering & pain, not only within the target of our words or actions, but also in ourselves. Contraction and separation are the same. When we allow our hearts to open to the pain our contraction has caused in the other or in ourselves, a healing of the wound of separation takes place. The illusion of separation dissolves. This healing is a return to Love, to recognition of our Oneness with the very object of our illusion of separation. The pain itself is the doorway Home. In truth, the tenderness of pain is not separate from Love. All is One. All is born in Love.

     With all spiritual paths, although a mental concept or paradigm can be useful in conceptually understanding where the transformative process is heading, the real transformation takes place at a deeper level – at a level where habitual patterns of thought, emotion, and energy shift in a foundational way. As the veil of my fear about (my autistic little girl) Saachi’s ability to be in the world dissolved, space opened up in my system for a deeper truth to reveal itself. The hallmark of every spiritual path is the dissolution of contraction, of fear, which is the source of separation & suffering. When fear dissolves, that which is deeper and truer than fear emerges. When fear & separation dissolve, love remains.”
    Melinda Edwards “Psyche & Spirit. How a Psychiatrist Found Divinity through her Lifelong Quest for Truth and her Daughter’s Autism” 2024.

    The same theme, from one of Gangaji's wise, inspiring interviews:

     Papaji’s (W.H.L. Pooja) practice instruction for Gangaji:
    “ ‘You want freedom? Great, just sit there and do nothing.’ So since I had practiced all this Buddhist doing-nothing business (sitting meditations), I thought I knew how to do nothing, and I sat still in meditation. And he said, ‘No, no, no. That’s too much. Don’t do anything.’
    And when I heard that, it was really, deeply frightening to me. It even took me back to that moment when I was eleven-years-old and I had started doing things to get out of my unhappiness. I had a fear that if I didn’t do something, if I didn’t do a practice or I didn’t do my meditation, or I didn’t do a mantra, or I wasn’t being good, that I would fall back, I would regress, I would lose anything that I had accomplished. So it was a moment.
    And he said, ‘Yes, lose everything!’ It shook my life. It shook my life right-side up. I feel like I was walking with my head in the sand, and I knew something was wrong because I kept tasting sand, and he just turned me right-side up.
    ‘Just stop. Just be still.’ And then later, I would hear him speak to people and he would say, ‘You have to lose your enlightenment, and you lose your un-enlightenment. You lose them both. You lose it all! Lose your gender. Lose your nationality. Lose your ranking. And (now) what’s here? And what’s here that’s always here?’ ” 

Q: “How do you teach people to stop?”

Gangaji: “Well there’s a conundrum, because you can’t really teach somebody to stop. You can invite people to stop, and what I try to do, and what I saw Papaji do is you point out where they are refusing to stop or where they are active. And the way you do that is you recognize it in your own mind, because we all have the same structure. It’s a survival structure. We have active minds because we’re an intelligent species that knows how to survive. So to stop is a threat to that, and the mind will get very busy – how it’s impossible, how you shouldn’t, or you can’t ((because the ego wrongly assumes that the {healthy, appropriate} transition from 'noisy ego' to 'quiet ego' to be a physical death)). So it’s really important to be able to hear your mind chatter, to overhear your thoughts. And then there’s a possibility of choice: to follow thought OR to be still. And really, it’s just to be still for a moment.
    There’s nothing wrong with thinking or thoughts, but often our thinking our thoughts is just a re-thinking of what has been thought, and re-thought, and re-thought – obsessive kind of thinking. And with that is a lot of unnecessary suffering. So to be willing to be open to not rethink that thought – this very thought, in this very moment – then the mind is available for insight & revelation.”

Q: Stopping could be interpreted as trying to hold the mind still, or purposely letting go of attachments, but even that’s too much.”

Gangaji: “That can be an initial step because normally, in our unnecessary suffering we’re just obsessively finding reasons in the past, or the present, or the future. So I had experienced that in some of the early meditations where you were kind of arresting your thought. But there was also in that the thought of me arresting this thought. So it was complicated and it took effort. This can actually be perceived as taking effort because it definitely is a challenge – because if you’re not thinking, that means you aren’t checking your environment, something could happen, you could die ultimately. That’s the root of it. So it’s an invitation to meet your death. ((The 'noisy ego' wrongly assumes that we are constantly in a life-or-death situation. BUT we rarely if ever are! Our noisy ego or false sense of self is, however frequently challenged eg a slow driver ahead of us when we're late. Such minor incidents can & do escalate unreasonably because the noisy ego operates at a primitive 'fight / flight / freeze instinct' level. THIS is one of the reasons why some wisdom traditions formally practice meeting actual death with an evolved, peaceful clear mind ie with equanimity, instead of primitive instincts.))”
    Gangaji - “Gangaji Interview: A Life of Service to Spiritual Awakening” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmUYR2Higcc 

 

It's WELL worth listening to these lyrics again!