Basic Meditation Practice

    Meditation practices pre-date organized religions by thousands of years. All major religions adopted; then - except for Hindus, Buddhists, Eastern Orthodox Christians & Quakers - forgot about; then over the past 50 years or so, most progressive religions re-introduced meditation practices. 
    Nowadays, even outspoken atheists, like Sam Harris, proudly practice meditation. Zen, a branch of Buddhism, is seriously practiced by, and even officially taught by, some Roman Catholic nuns & priests, Jewish Rabbis and atheists.  
    Meditation is profoundly beneficial, even "transformational," regardless of what, if any, belief system one holds. Avoiding meditation is easy. Practicing meditation regularly, like regular physical exercise, takes a bit of effort, but is very wise.

    Basically, meditation practice is about cultivating the courage to remain present to anything your mind & body throws at you, resisting the urge to turn away from pain by turning this physical felt sense into an abstraction, a mental & emotional concept – which actually causes suffering. The pain alone causes less than 10% of the suffering, our attempts to resist feeling it & dealing with it directly causes over 90% of the suffering.
    (In meditation,) face physical as well as emotional & intellectual discomfort, as merely data (simply information) coming from the senses. Be curious about it, 'lean into it' & learn from the data. This practice is designed to teach equanimity, or self-control & awareness, no matter what arises in life – pleasure, pain, boredom, jealousy, anger, lust, longing, sadness. It's designed to interrupt the common habitual impulse – to turn from pain and toward pleasure as fast as we can, … which in the long run leads to greater ignorance & suffering.
    Keith Martin-Smith. “A Heart Blown Open. The Life and Practice of Zen Master Jun Po Denis Kelly Roshi.” Devine Arts, 2011. A REAL EYE-OPENING READ!    

    As with other challenges, it's best to start with baby steps. When starting meditation practice, we're advised to remain still & silent (not engage in internal conversations) even when we feel some minor physical discomfort, like a tickle on our nose. We simply stay with the physical sensation of the tickle, only observing the physical sensation of the tickle, not moving, not talking to ourselves, simply observing JUST THIS physical sensation. We learn experientially that everything ends, so we don't have to immediately react to unpleasant physical sensations. Succeeding in this, gives us the confidence to face more difficult challenges with equanimity.

    As we steadily face whatever unpleasantness we've always avoided & run from before, remain fully-present to the physical feeling of discomfort, the degree of discomfort will progressively diminish, until it disappears, and we are suddenly rewarded. In the long run, this same issue, that we just physically processed, will either recur in progressively milder & milder manifestations, or might only recur without any negative charge at all, as only a powerless memory. This physical processing - remaining with only the physical feel of whatever we're averse to, is a powerful DIY way to disarm psychological baggage.
    If you can't do this on your own, the right meditation teacher, and possibly, the right mental health professional, can definitely help you with this essential healing.

    There's no way to shortcut the essential step of emptying our closet of 'skeletons.' No matter how religious or spiritual you become, significant remaining untreated psychological baggage will continue to sabbotage your life, resulting in needless suffering for yourself and all those around you. 
    Avoiding needed psychological / psychiatric treatment, and instead choosing religion or spirituality, is a common serious form of avoidance called 'spiritual bypassing.'

    Only after we're able to deeply face our small self (personality) - the fictional 'story of me' we've been telling ourselves & others; and have forgiven & accepted this perfectly imperfect small self with kindness, are we able, with an established meditation practice, to repeatedly, lovingly, recognize whenever we relapse into small self behaviour, and effortlessly & lovingly shift back into our true Self (shared aliveness, Buddhanature, Christ consciousness, etc).
    Sitting wishing, hoping, to eventually become awakened takes us further away from awakening (shared aliveness, Buddhahood, Christ consciousness). But as soon as we embody our true Self, we ARE sitting AS shared aliveness (AS the Buddha, AS Christ consciousness).
    Getting hijacked by the tired old 'story of me' pulls us right back into unnecessary suffering. 
    Becoming aware that we're lost in our self-talk / 'story of me' drama, we learn to immediately choose to return to our true Self.

    The more we practice awareness of when we're lost in the old story, the more kindly & effortlessly we remember & re-embody our true, original Nature, the more we stabilize in embodying our original Nature, and the more difficult external circumstances need to be to pull us back into our old story of a separate adversarial self.

     Our awakened shared aliveness is the 'home' - we all look for, first in all the wrong places ie outside of ourselves - money, possessions, experiences, addictions, etc. BUT embodying who / what we truly are, always have been, and always will be is the ONLY 'place' or state that provides real, lasting, peace, satisfaction, contentment, stillness, silence, real happiness - it is our only home.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI8oH2I-iLg   

Wayne Boucher "The Well at Heaven's Gate" www.harvestgallery.ca

Four Paths of Meditation Practice

    It can be almost impossible to have any sense of where we come from, who / what we really are. Usually we only get brief, vague, glimpses, intuitions, insights. But these nudges are recurrent, and our openness, readiness, preparedness to receive them fluctuates. At some point, some of us are drawn to open up & assent to this whispering call, to at long last say, 'Yes!' 

    There have always been those among us - shamans, wisdom keepers, prophets, mystics, saints, and countless ordinary folk - who remember their True Nature more clearly than most, and live as closely as they can to align with that insight: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=perennial+philosophy

 
    Hearing / reading about our True Nature, especially for those with minimal direct experience of it, can be challenging. Language itself is dualistic - it comes from & reinforces a perspective that each of us is a separate entity in a harshly competitive relationship to people, animals, Nature, life itself.

    Those who've had profound direct experiences of ultimate reality, have powerfully experienced how everyone & everything is one, profoundly interconnected, expression of timeless, intelligent Love. 

 

    One of these awakened folks is the Zen teacher & poet, Henry Shukman. A few words he says about his latest book, "Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening" 2025:

     “What I’ve come to feel in the world of meditation, and what my book is really about, is that there are different paths. They’re all closely related, but they have slightly different purposes. They’re not all one and the same.

    So there’s a whole world of practice around mindfulness, which is basically therapeutic, healing. It’s about taming our anxieties, de-stressing, and getting our nervous systems in better shape, more balanced, more subtle, responsive and well-toned, rather than jammed into an accelerated position all the time, stressed-out. So that’s great.

    There’s a whole world also of discovering deeper connectedness, and discovering that underneath our surface life of name & gain and trying to get things, or what Wordsworth called, ‘Getting & Spending,’ beneath that surface life that we’re all so engaged in, there’s a kind of deeper life where we contact something some call the soul, like a deeper level of our personalities, a sort of truer, somehow more authentic self, that has very different concerns. It’s much more concerned with beauty, with spiritual things, and with deeper connection with others. Sometimes it feels connected to forces in Nature, and Nature itself. So to uncover that more connected part of ourselves is a whole other kind of practice. Mindfulness and meditation can help with it, but it’s a slightly different target zone from foundational mindfulness.

    And then there’s the whole world of flow states and absorption practices and what we call Samadhi in Buddhism. This deep absorption, beautiful states of mind that we can cultivate in our mediation, which are wonderful. That’s another world of practice.

    And then the fourth one, I say is Awakening, which is also not like any of the others. Yes, closely related, but it’s a sudden, dramatic shift from one way of seeing, where I am me, which basically I am in those first three kinds of practice. I remain me. I don’t have to suddenly discover I’ve never been here the way I thought. I can work with who I feel I am in mindfulness. Likewise in the deeper connectedness, I’m still a person. There’s no doubt about it. But I am feeling myself in a very different way, but it’s still kind of me. And likewise in cultivation of flow, my sense of self may get quieter, but I haven’t radically discovered that I’ve never been a self the way I thought. 
    In Awakening, we do discover that. Suddenly, we see that what we have taken ourselves to be, has just been a figment of our imagination. And somehow, what’s really been going on is something – well we can get it on different levels really, different depths. There’s no time, there’s no space, there’s no separation. It’s just one unfolding happening now. Just like this. And that’s what we are.” 
    Henry Shukman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ6uKrhAc_s

 

         “There are only two ways to live your life.
         One is as though nothing is a miracle.
         The other is as though
         everything is a miracle.” Albert Einstein

 Now is the Time

Now is the time to know 
That all that you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider 
A lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand 
That all your ideas of right and wrong 
Were just a child’s training wheels 
To be laid aside 
When you can finally live 
With veracity 
And love. . .

My dear, please tell me, 
Why do you still 
Throw sticks at your heart 
And God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside 
That incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know 
That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time 
For you to compute the impossibility 
That there is anything 
But Grace.

Now is the season to know 
That everything you do 
Is sacred."

Hafiz 'The Gift' translated & interpreted by Daniel Ladinsky

 

Insight Meditation Society (IMS), Barre, MA

 

     

Exploring Perennial Wisdom

    Excerpt from two delightful Rami Shapiro interviews:

    “A holy rascal is someone who thinks religion is much too important to leave in the hands of the professionals. You know, there is such wisdom, brilliance & genius, in religious stories, myths, practices, contemplative practices. And what happens when you put them into an institution, is they become very dry, very cold, and self-focused – not self as in some contemplative way of the capital s 'Self,' but self-focused in the sense of the purpose of Christianity, even though they’ll say it’s salvation, it’s really to make you a better Christian, according to the denomination (((boosting one's tribal ego or strengthening one's 'partisanship'))). The purpose of Judaism is to make you a better Jew, according to the denomination, etc.

    So a holy rascal is curious about the deeper meaning of religion, not at all interested in the self-focused nature of religious institutions, and is convinced that these myths & symbols & rituals are gateways to something that cannot be articulated in any other way. And so a rascal is someone who breaks the rules and tries to get to the heart of something. 
    I am really quite dogmatic. I believe that, whatever we’re going to call it – God, Kali or whatever – is a nondual Reality. I don’t believe that there’s a God separate from Nature, who created the world, who judges us, and all that. I’m not a dualist. I’m a nondualist. And so I’m interested in the nondual aspects of Hinduism and Vedanta, in Taoism and Zen, Christianity, Islam, wherever – they all have this nondual perspective among their mystics. I’m interested in that. I will play in all those arenas, because I think they’re all leading us to the same ineffable experience. When you’re talking about that nondual reality, the labels become irrelevant. And I mean, every religious tradition has this mystic element. And because the mystics understand that - God or whatever they’re going to call it - can be experienced directly, in, with, & as you. And that’s not what the conventional religious teachers tell you. And I’m interested in that experience.
    The number of people who register on those Pew Religious Polls who say they don’t have a religion - ‘I’m spiritual, but not religious’ – I call them the ‘spiritually independent’ – people who are interested in spirituality but they’re not going to tie themselves to one tradition in particular – yes, I think that’s a growing segment of the human population, certainly in the United States.

    Just to put in a good word for Catholicism, there’s a lot of rich mystical stuff in the Catholic tradition, that you may not be aware of. But the problem is there’s not a lot of marketing for it.

    I first met Father Thomas Keating in 1984 - he died a few years ago. I met with him, at least once a year for those decades, studied with him, learned from him, and practiced meditation with him. He is, along with Father Basil Pennington, the founder of the Centering Prayer movement. That’s a Benedictine practice that he sort of modernized for the benefit of contemporary Catholics, but now, it’s in a lot of different movements. But he was a beautiful holy rascal, and a deep contemplative. And I don’t know if I ever heard him say this specifically, I mean, he lived a monastic life, and so I don’t know if he ever said this, outright. But yeah, I think he would agree that Christianity, Catholicism is hiding its brilliance under a bushel.
    ... so does Judaism. So there is a 1000, probably 2000 year-old Jewish mystical tradition, that includes various types of meditation. ... Jewish meditation practice ... is talked about in the Bible, it’s taught by mystical rabbis, but it’s a universal practice. ... ultimately, it will separate you from your addiction to ... narrow mind, and open you up to the other dimension of consciousness that you have, which is ... spacious mind. So I spend time every morning in ... focused mantra practice. So I just repeat (a mantra) ... there are lots of different names you can use. 
    Mantra meditation practice is a rich Jewish practice, but nobody talks about it in Jewish context. So it’s there, but unless you’re looking for it, or unless you’re lucky enough to have a teacher who’s steeped in it, and willing to teach it, you’re never going to know. We could go on for an hour just on the different kinds of meditation practices, but mantra is one. 
    But you also have something similar to what’s called nada yoga in the Hindu tradition, listening for it, sound yoga. And so in Judaism, you’re listening for what’s called ... ‘the still small voice’ in the King James version, or ‘the fragile voice of silence.’ And whether you’re talking Hinduism, or you’re talking Judaism, there’s this teaching that the Universe has 'a hum.' It's a musical thing that’s happening, and you can tune into it. It’s not magic. Just be quiet and listen. And I practice that every day also. Hindus say the sound is ‘ohm’, we don’t have an actual sound for it. We just call it this ‘fragile voice of silence.’ But you can hear it, and you know it’s not coming from your head, and it’s not exactly coming from any place outside your head. There’s just this sound, and you can take refuge in that.
    I was in Prague, and I was part of this wonderful interfaith group that I used to travel with pre-Covid. And we were at a European Union gathering, at this ancient monastery in Prague. And at one point, the leader asked me to teach (synchronization through music). So we 30-35 people huddled together into a clump, and I asked them to find their own heartbeat and just tap their own chest to their heartbeat, like a drum. And then we started to chant. Now because there was this great Indian mantra teacher in the group, I used a Hindu chant – ‘Om Namah Shivaya.’ And so I started with that. And within just moments, everybody’s heartbeat was in sync. And there was this real palpable sense of unity. It sounds silly, but it’s like Bob Marley – ‘one heart.’ It was just this one heart beating. And when we stopped the exercise, and went back to our chairs, the whole energy in the room had shifted, because there was a real union there. Because we were all in sync to the one heart.

    There is something greater than us, this nondual reality of which we are a part. And you’re always connected to it. There’s no way not to be connected. But you can block it. And unblocking is what these practices are for.

    I think we’re entering into a new dark age. I think this is the Kali Yuga (((“the age of Kali," or the age of darkness, misery, & vice, the final, most corrupt stage in a Hindu cosmological cycle of four ages (Yugas). Characterized by a decline in spiritual values & morality, increased conflict, & a focus on materialism, a period of significant degradation for humanity, according to Hindu scriptures))). It’s a global crucifixion of human civilization. Not very uplifting, but you have to go through the dark night in order to come out into the light, it’s a spiral. It’s not a devolution, and then we can’t get out of it. You go into the dark, and then you’re going to come out again in the light, and then it’s going to be dark again. So there’s this dynamic between the yang & the yin here as we go through cycles.

    But I think they’re all connected: the war in Ukraine, which is the first large land war in Europe since WW2. It could trigger WW3 easily. Global climate collapse in many places, gun violence in the US. All of that is a sign of this great, dark night that we’re moving into. And it’s like an Etch-a-Sketch in the sense that it gives us an opportunity to shatter all the stuff that doesn’t work. You’re going to see, as horrible as the Ukraine war is, and as horrible as the mass exodus of people trying to get into the US from Latin America, South America, that all this is just a hint of what’s coming. When climate change hits more strongly, we’re going to have this massive climate migration. And if our response is to build another wall - either virtual or physical – if our response is to keep these people out, we’re looking for huge violence on a global stage.
    We’ve got to find other ways to deal with the struggle of humans. We have to see them not as ‘other,’ but as fellow humans. Of course we have to go beyond that, and see the same with regard to all species that are all part of a single ecosystem. And if we don’t love our neighbor, who sometimes is a human and sometimes is an elephant, and sometimes is the salmon and sometimes is the rainforest, if we can’t love all of that as a part of ourselves - because it is, then we’re doomed as a civilization. Earth will continue, Nature will continue, but it won’t have us in it, or very few of us.
    We’re going into this dark night, and the question is, what’s going to guide us through it? So right now, what’s guiding us through this by this wizard from the TV, is fear, anger, outrage, different ways of manifesting, but it’s all anger-based, it’s all fear-based.

    At the same time ... there’s this incredible number of spiritually independent people. IF people like that can discover what I call Perennial Wisdom, there’s HOPE for humanity.

    Perennial Wisdom is the title I made up for the title of a book, but the idea has been around forever. Perennial Wisdom is a fourfold truth at the Mystic heart of every religious tradition. And I think you’d see it in science now too. It’s very simple. 
    • The first of the four is everything is a manifesting of a single nondual reality. 
    • Number two, humans, and maybe others, but humans have the innate capacity to know ourselves as part of this larger reality. We can move or shift from narrow mind to spacious mind. (((self-centered, fear-based to allocentric, love-based)))
    • Number three, when you make that shift, and you realize we’re all part of this single dynamic, then loving your neighbor, operating by the Golden Rule, or as it’s put in Genesis 12:3, ‘being a blessing to all the families of the Earth, human & otherwise,’ that becomes axiomatic. You know we’re all one body in a sense, I and we have to take care of the entirety. So loving one another becomes axiomatic once you experience the fact that we’re all part of the same thing. 
    • And then the fourth one is, awakening to this nondual reality and living by the Golden Rule, being a blessing – together comprise the highest human calling, that’s what we’re here to do.

    And if we can see that business as usual is devastating society and the planet, Nature, if we can understand that, then we can go, ‘Well, what’s the alternative?’ And I think the alternative is the Mystic alternative – what I’m calling Perennial Wisdom. 

    Interviewer: “Wouldn’t life be a lot easier if everyone understood those four principles and meditated a little bit more?”

    And IF the churches, synagogues, temples & ashrams, IF ALL religious institutions would say, ‘Let’s listen to our mystics. Here are the four things they say, then we would all be learning it, we’d learn it in different flavors, because there’s a Catholic way of saying it, and a Jewish way of saying it, but that just makes it more interesting. But we’d learn those four things, we’d live by those four things. And while the Dark Night is coming, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, we can navigate through it, and come out the other end, more loving, more compassionate, more just.

    ... there are people like Yogananda, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, all these great nondual teachers, and there are many in the Western tradition as well. If we break down the narrow consciousness by just even reading some of these people, and then picking up maybe Kriya Yoga from Paramahamsa Yogananda, or the practice of self-inquiry from Raman Maharshi - the practices are there, they’ve been there for millennia.
    One of the amazing things about living in the 21st Century is that you can learn from all these amazing teachers in English (in our case). You don’t have to travel to far off places and learn other languages. There are many excellent spiritual books & podcasts. There are tremendous options for spiritual revolution. But you have to seek it out.” 
    Rami Shapiro - CHALLENGING BELIEFS: Are You a VICTIM of Spiritual Misguidance? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rZLlvXFQ7k

Religions are like Languages
    “No language is true or false. Every language is an opportunity, a means for articulating experience. And I think religion is the same. Religion is a language in that it gives us a vocabulary of symbols, rituals, liturgies, actual words to articulate our experience of reality. But none of it is true in some absolute sense.

    I approach religion the way Lao-tzu approaches the Tao in the opening line of the Tao Te Ching, where he says, ‘The Tao that can be named, is not the eternal Tao.’ So as long as we’re dealing with language broadly defined, we’re always one step away from whatever that ultimate reality is.

    So when you’re talking about regular language – English, French, Japanese, Chinese, whatever the language happens to be, the more languages you know, the more subtle your understanding of reality is. 
    There’s a word for that place in your back that itches, but you can’t reach. There’s an actual name for that (notalgia paresthetica). Knowing that name, gives you a new insight into that itch. 
    So the more languages you know, the more subtle, the richer your understanding of reality becomes. And I think the same is true of religion. I find religion endlessly fascinating, because I think it’s a human creation and people are endlessly fascinating to me. So religion is endlessly fascinating, but I don’t take any of it at face value. You know when a religion says, ‘This is the truth’ – I don’t believe that. No truth can be reduced to a specific language. No truth can be reduced to a specific religion. So I just put that aside. But still it’s fascinating to see how religions approach that reality and what they make out of it. 
    So the more I know, the more I know about reality, but I never mistake what I know about reality for reality itself.
   
    Here’s my understanding of nonduality – and then someone’s going to pick it apart. Everything that exists is a manifesting of a single, dynamic happening. (There are no nouns in the Universe. Everything is a verb or a gerund.) So there’s this Cosmic Happening that manifests as everything that you & I encounter, including you & I. And there’s just one of it. 
    My favorite is a Hindu analogy that there’s this infinite ocean, and the ocean has infinite numbers of waves, and the waves are simply the happening of the ocean. So you, I, Nature, the Universe, are all the wavings of the ocean, and the ocean is not two. There’s just one ocean. 
    But there’s a difference between nonduality and monism. 
    Monism says well everything is the same: good & evil, there’s really no distinction; men & women, cis & trans – it’s all the same. That’s monism. But I don’t think that’s what nonduality is saying. 
    Nonduality is saying, no there’s something you can label as good, and something you can label as evil, and something you can label as trans, and something you can label as cis, and something you can label as black, and something you can label as white. There are actual differences, and the differences may matter, but they’re all expressions – unique, diverse expressions, of a single reality. The differences matter. And that’s different than being monistic."
    Rabbi Rami Shapiro: Exploring Perennial Wisdom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csoitdudtX0 

    Three earlier posts containing Rami Shapiro excerpts & quotes: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Rami+Shapiro&max-results=20&by-date=true

 

The Buddha’s last words were simple and profound:
"Be a lamp unto yourself. Be a light."

 

Siona Benjamin "Improvisation #12" artsiona.com

Fear and Confusion turn Peaceful

    At times we become weary from the heaviness of life, and need to get away, if only for an hour or so. Pleasant, healthy getaways include playing with little children or puppies, walking or jogging outdoors, gardening, listening to or playing music, joking or watching comedy, reading a book just for fun, playing games with family and friends, etc. Most of us don't 'play' like this nearly enough. 

    At the same time, almost all of us have an understandable, visceral fear of death. We're so afraid of the dreaded "D" word, that we expend a lot of energy avoiding / ignoring / neglecting / delaying even things we associate with it: proper nutrition, proper health-care, exercise, meaningful discussions about sickness & death, meditation, meaningful spirituality, wills & estate planning. Many of us mistakenly assume that opening our minds & hearts to the deepest, most meaningful aspects of life will somehow "make us soft," threatening our ability to earn a living or even to survive. Fear of death confines many of us to the shallows of life's profoundly vast & deep ocean.

    “We look like (we're) rich from the outside, but mentally we have problems. (We're) all about 'face.' We don’t know how to talk (sincerely - from our true Self). We can’t ask for help. So many people are alone with their problems, and stuck, and their hearts aren’t touching. … It’s not that people lack friends. Facebook, Instagram— scroll around and you find (people) bursting with mugging, partying companionship. It just isn’t real, that’s all. There’s a real me and a masked me (and a) lonely gap in between ...” https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-incredibly-true-story-of-renting-a-friend-in-tokyo?utm_source=pocket-newtab

 

     “Our hearts do not need logic. They can love and forgive and accept that which our minds cannot comprehend. Hearts understand in ways minds cannot.” Lois Wilson “When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story” 2010 TV Movie – Prime Video

    "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." Blaise Pascal, French philosopher

    “the only thing really needed is to descend alone ... down into the silent depths of yourself to listen, and wait, and learn.” Peter Kingsley “A Book of Life.” Catafalque Press, 2021.

    "I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity." Albert Einstein

    “It is perhaps the ultimate paradox: At the heart of our loneliness, at the core of our longing for life, we find an exquisite aloneness, a Oneness with all creation, our true salvation.
    We find God in the forsaken pit of the psyche; we find the Divine in the abyss.
    We find astonishing light in the darkness of ourselves.
    This is the true enlightenment. To be alone and to be found, to be lost and to be saved, all before the moment even begins.” Jeff Foster

“In the beginning, mind is like a torrent rushing down a gorge.
In the middle, it flows gently like the river Ganges.
In the end, it’s like a stream returning to the sea.”
    Tilopa, 10th century Indian sage, on the progress of meditation over the stages of its practice

“If you look for the truth outside yourself,
it gets farther and farther away.
Today, walking alone,
I meet her/him everywhere I step.
S/he is the same as me, yet I am not her.
Only if you understand it in this way
will you merge with the way things are.” Tung Shan 

 

    Amoda Maa's pointers to help you find your true Self:

    “True healing is what happens when consciousness recognizes its own wholeness amid what appears to be broken or wounded.”

    “Moving from the stillness & silence of being gives you the freedom to start wherever you are, without having to change, fix, or improve anything. … simply but utterly present in what you do, work becomes spiritual practice.”

    “The real question is: Are you willing, whether your experience is tranquil, turbulent, ecstatic, tragic, opulent, or austere, to give yourself wholeheartedly to what is truly alive in you?”

    “If you truly want to enter the ‘kingdom of heaven’ and be free of suffering, you must put down the burden of all acquisitions and be fully here, in this moment, without a story. This freedom is available to you here and now if you are willing to die, in this moment, as empty awareness.”

    “When the dream of separation becomes unbearable, and you have the courage to honestly say you have had enough of suffering, then awareness has the possibility to turn back in on itself and recognize the deeper dimension of formlessness that exists prior to all forms.”

    “All forms are transient, even the most spiritual ones, and without an anchor in the deepest dimension of beingness that does not come and go, the vicissitudes of the world will threaten to wipe out the satisfaction, joy, and fulfillment derived from external manifestations.
    Your true purpose and fulfillment have nothing to do with what you imagine yourself to be, but everything to do with what you do with who you are beneath and beyond all forms. The invitation is to stop asking, ‘How can I manifest my dream of a better life?’ or ‘How can I do something special / important / unique / spiritual in the world?’ and to turn your attention to the primary purpose of your life: awakening out of the dream of separation. Your true purpose is an inner, not an outer one. Without staying true to this, you will keep on chasing dreams.
    If you are on a path of spiritual inquiry, your commitment to realizing your inner purpose prior to finding your outer purpose is likely, over time, to unravel all agendas and expectations of what you should be doing, what you will be doing, and even of what you want to be doing. This unravelling allows the revelation and release of an essential quality of beingness that wants to express itself through you as you. Not as a future dream, but as a present moment reality. This quality of beingness exists prior to conditioning, and is experienced as a subtle felt-sense (such as clarity, playfulness, devotion, or harmony) when you are still and silent inside.”
    Amoda Maa. “Embodied Enlightenment. Living Your Awakening in Every Moment.” Reveal Press, 2017. HIGHLY-RECOMMENDED WISE, VALUABLE BOOK

Amoda Maa "Falling Open in a World Falling Apart"

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!