Aspiration

I am not realized.
That is my aspiration.
What else is there, really?

"Brahman is realized through Avidya (ignorance)' – a bewildering statement from Brahma Sutras, the text which gave Advita Vedanta its philosophical entrance onto the final stage of what is known today as Darshanas  (six systems of Indian Philosophy). Though ignorance is unreal it is through ignorance that the luminosity of your awareness is known just as the brightness of the sun could be fully appreciated after a solid week of miserably dark weather (week or a life-long is a matter of relative application). Furthermore, Neo-advaita (various modifications aka non-duality) is a milked-down Advaita Vedanta which is inseparable from other parings in the darshanas (each pair of philosophical doctrine constituting in experiencing directly what is gained in the previous argument), hence Vedanta as the 'end of knowledge' is the field where the knower and the known, subject and object become so intimate as to cease to render oneness into indispensable aspects without which there is no experience what-so-ever. The dismissal of the idea of self-realization comes from that milked down version of westernized Vedanta which simply failed to implement validity of proper self-enquiry. Contrary to that, when Self-Awareness becomes an object of one's contemplation, subject (the observer) is found within the object (the observed) of one's awareness, whilst at the same time object (of experience) is found within the subject (the experiencer), and the notion of within and without loses its value. This alone renders the matrix of the language asunder, the abider abides in what is known as unity-in-diveristy. But that is not full realization of Oneness either, for there is a faint remains between the subject and object, that indescribable subtle sense of This and That though held in perfect equilibrium. Total Oneness is when there is total withdrawal of everything into pure subjectively of the Self, aka annihilation of any diversity into Oneness of one's own Subjectivity. Hence to discard the notion or the idea of self-realization is equal to throwing the baby with the bathwater."

- Vamadeva Sage (Igor Kufayev) An Artist, Advaita Tantra Teacher and founder of Flowing Wakefulness community, for over a decade Igor Kufayev has been serving as a conduit of transmission for awakening towards the new era of heart-centered consciousness. Speaking from direct realization of Oneness he inspires all seekers of truth to recognize the fullest potential present in human birth. Many have been touched by grace and awakened in his presence. He continues working towards building global community to serve as a container for exploring possibilities for alternative, consciousness-based culture.

Bubble Burst

"One early October evening in 2006, in the kitchen with a spiritual teacher named Mooji, I approached him and said, “I’ve listened to your CDs and I know you’re big on self-inquiry, but I have to tell you, I’ve tried it many, many times. It may work for some people, but not for me.” Regarding me quizzically at first, he smiled broadly, and said, “Oh really…” And then it began, the relentless inquisition:

Mooji: “What is this me that this inquiry doesn’t work for? Show it to me.”

Me: “I can’t.”

Mooji: “Try. Look for me.”

I closed my eyes and nothing. “I can’t find anything.”

Mooji: “And who is reporting that?”

Me: “I am.”

Mooji: “Remind me again, who is this I?”

Me:  “No one”

Mooji: “Too quick. You must have read that somewhere. I don’t accept it. I don’t accept any answers from your mind. Now look and take your time with it.”

And on and on it went like that. To say that this exchange was uncomfortable is an understatement. No answer worked. I kept looking and not finding and Mooji, God bless him, just kept at it. He was ruthless, slashing away at my mind. There was nowhere to hide. Whatever response I gave, was not it. He kept pressing me, asking me to peel back another layer to find what was witnessing each discovery. The pressure was unbearable.

Without warning something shifted. To say something happened isn’t entirely true because whatever it was, happened outside of time. My first thought was, “This has always been so.”

Next, I had an image of a Laura puppet crumpled up on the floor. As I gazed down on it, I saw the absurdity of ever believing that I was the character, Laura. There was no death and this whole life thing that I had been invested in was all a big ruse. No one had ever been born, lived, and then died. I couldn’t tell you who or what I was, but I was crystal clear on what I wasn’t.

Thanks to Mooji’s loving persistence, his refusal to quit, the bubble of my individual identity burst. I could no longer believe the story that the character, Laura, was who I was. Other than that, I couldn’t find myself. The “I” that I thought I was didn’t exist and never had. Once personal identification had been shattered, all that remained was the realization of what had always been so—awareness. I was the awareness in which all transient events, including the life of this Laura character, took place. How strange that I could ever have believed that I was a person! Not only that, the goal called self-realization never existed. It was merely a concept, an idea arising in the vast, empty oneness that I now knew myself as.

Life since that timeless moment has not been what I would call nirvana. Truckloads of conditioning, in the form of anger, sadness, crankiness, reactivity, and identification with the character Laura, have come up to be met by the spaciousness. The difference is the lovely, quiet joy that resides  most of the time. All in all, I wouldn’t change a single step on my journey. My heart is brimming with gratitude toward my family, friends, and spiritual teachers for the roles that they played in this cosmic discovery of no one home."

~ Laura Katleman-Prue is a graduate of the Theravision Institute of Transpersonal Pschology in Boston. She has been teaching meditation and self-inquiry since 2007 and has successfully counseled people about their eating issues, both individually and in Skinny Thinking Workshops. Skinny Thinking grew out of her desire to share the techniques that permanently healed her eating, weight, and body image issues.

Love was...

"When I was young,
Love was under the tree up on the field
Resting opposite my grand-ma’s house

Love was looking
At ant nests under stones
And brimming in the soup I liked to eat

Love was smiling
From the dog’s face opened wide
By its hanging tongue

I‘d find it bursting
Into butterflies sitting by the dozen
On a lilac in spring

Sometimes I wonder:
When exactly did love become a thing
Some thing between two: a me and a you?"

  

~ Annette Knopp is an Inner-Depth Counselor, Medicine Woman, and Shamanic Practitioner.

Novel

"When you read a novel, and you read about various characters, you may like some and not like others. Or when you watch a movie, think about your relationship with the characters. You might like them; you might not like them—but you’re not finding your sense of self in them. You’re not referencing your self-worth by the characters in a novel or when you turn on the TV. You just have your thoughts about them. But imagine if you turned on your TV or you read a novel and you actually completely derived your sense of being and your sense of self from one of the characters. Immediately your perspective is very different, isn’t it? Now your perspective has gone from something that’s very vast to something that’s very limited, seen only through the eyes of the character. Sadly, that’s how most human beings spend their lives. They have this little character in their mind called "me," and they’re actually viewing that “me” as personal when it’s not.

The “me” is very impersonal, not meaning cold or distant, but just meaning without inherent self nature, in the same way that when you read a book, the characters are without self nature. They actually don’t exist outside of your imagination. They don’t even exist in the book, because the book is just words. And without someone reading the words and bringing it all alive within imagination, nothing even exists on the printed page. It’s all within the reader, all the life. When the Buddha talked about the realization of no-self, he was talking about the self that’s an image in the mind being completely seen through. And when there is no image of self, experience has nothing to bounce off of. Everything just is as it is, because there's no secondary interpretation. The one that’s interpreting is the one that’s in pain. And that’s the one who suffers. That’s the one who causes others to suffer.

The false self, the self that’s an image in the mind, uses every experience to measure itself: “How am I in relationship to what’s happening? Am I wise? Am I stupid? Am I clumsy? Am I courageous? Am I enlightened about this?” That’s the movement of consciousness reflecting on an image of itself that doesn’t actually exist. It’s always measuring each and every experience, and then believing in the interpretation of the experience rather than seeing “Everything just is.”

Everything actually just is. From the perspective of consciousness, even resistance just is. And if you resist resistance, that’s just what is. You can’t get away from it. You start to see that the only thing that goes into resistance, a story, or an interpretation of what is—whatever it is—is this mind-created persona. It's like a character in a novel. When you read a novel, every character has a point of view. It has beliefs. It has opinions. There’s something that makes it distinct from other characters. Our persona is literally this mind-created character that’s always making itself distinct. So it always needs to evaluate everything against its preconceived idea.

There’s another vantage point. The other vantage point is not only outside the character, it's also inside the character. It’s the ultimate vantage point that’s outside, and it’s also playing all the parts from the inside. That’s basically what it means to really wake up: we’re waking up from the character. You don’t have to destroy the character called “me” to wake up from it. In fact, trying to destroy the character makes it very hard to wake up. Because what’s trying to destroy the character? The character. What’s judging the character? The character. So you leave the character alone. The character called you, just leave it alone. Then it’s much easier for the awakening out of that perspective to happen.

You don’t lose the character; you just gain the whole novel of life. It’s not like you lose anything. You just gain the whole book. You gain the whole universe. As Buddha would say, “Lose yourself, gain the universe.” It’s not a bad deal. Or Dogen: “To know yourself is to forget yourself, and to forget yourself is to be enlightened by the 10,000 things,” which means to see yourself everywhere. Wake up from your character, and then you see your self nature in all characters—not just one, but all of them. So we don’t lose anything. We gain all characters. We just lose the fixation, that’s all."

© 2005 Adyashanti

Feminine

“The feminine is the matrix of creation. This truth is something profound and elemental, and every woman knows it in the cells of her body, in her instinctual depths. Out of the substance of her very being life comes forth… Our culture’s focus on a disembodied, transcendent God has left women bereft, denying them the sacredness of this simple mystery of divine love…

Because humanity has a central function in the whole of creation, what we deny to ourself we deny to all of life. In denying the feminine her sacred power and purpose we have impoverished life in ways we do not understand. We have denied life its sacred source of meaning and divine purpose, which was understood by the ancient priestesses…

... the first step is to acknowledge that the world is a spiritual being, just as you acknowledge for yourself that you are a spiritual being. And the next is to recognize the mysterious relationship between the individual and the world, known traditionally as microcosm and macrocosm, in which every human being is the microcosm of the whole…

... we have a problem now. The world is dying. It is not supposed to be like this. I am convinced that human beings are not meant to sit looking at a flickering screen ten hours a day pressing buttons. Human beings are so extraordinary! They are full of light; they have this divine intelligence. They are meant to live in a sacred way, not spend their life looking at a flickering television or computer screen. That is not what we were created for.

So you have to show up in your life and you have to show up in the life of the world. And the life of the world is not a shopping mall, not a computer-generated model. Just as you’re not a computer-generated model… You are a mixture of heaven and earth, an incarnation of a divine spark. And the relationship with the world is a relationship of microcosm to macrocosm, a spark that goes from your consciousness, from your heart, to the heart of the world… Something in you is woken up. And suddenly your whole life changes. There is this light, there is this hope, there is this sunshine in the eyes—it’s incredibly beautiful, the most precious moment. I know when it happened to me when I was 16, suddenly the whole world was there—as it had always been, but I had never seen it—full of light, full of beauty.

And all you have to do is to be present and to say “yes.” To be present in your life and in the life of the world, the life of the world as it belongs to the soul of the world. We have forgotten about Her for so long. But She is alive. She is here now. And She is waiting to wake up.”

~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, The Return of the Feminine & the World Soul.  Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is a Sheikh of the Naqshbandi Sufi Order. Born in London in 1953, he has followed the Naqshbandi Sufi path since he was 19. In 1991 he moved to Northern California and became the successor of Irina Tweedie.                                        
                                                
~ Anat Vaughan-Lee has followed the Naqshbandi Sufi path since 1973. For many years she has been working with groups and dream work in the Sufi tradition, which encourages the deep feminine way of inner listening. Recognizing the need and urgency of the moment for the re-emergence of the feminine, she compiled and edited the writings of her husband, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, on the subject of the sacred feminine, which has emerged as the book The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul.

Ramakien

"The Ramakien (literally "Glory of Rama") is Thailand's national epic, derived from the Hindu epic Ramayana. While the main story is identical to that of the Ramayana, many other aspects were transposed into a Thai context, such as the clothes, weapons, topography, and elements of nature, which are described as being Thai in style. Although Thailand is considered a Theravada Buddhist society, the Hindu mythology latent in the Ramakien serves to provide Thai legends with a creation myth, as well as representations of various spirits which complement beliefs derived from Thai animism." ~ Wikipedia

    

"Rama, the heir to the throne of Ayodhya, was sent into exile for 14 years by his stepmother.  His wife, Sita and brother Lakshman went with him into the deep forest.  Tosakan, the demon king of Longka (Sri Lanka), abducted Sita and carries her off to his island kingdom hoping to marry her.  The brothers pursued him.  Hanuman, the white monkey god, volunteers his service, together they won the alliance of two monkey kings, Sukrip and Chompupan, each with a powerful army.  They march south to the coast opposite Longka.  The monkey armies build a road of stone through the sea and lay siege to Longka.  Many victorious battles are waged against Tosakan’s demon armies.  Finally, Rama defeated Tosakan and killed him.  Rama then crowns his ally, Piphek (Tosakan’s banished brother) as King of Longka and returns with Sita to resume his rign in Ayodha."

These men in costumes performed in the Ramakien story at

The National Theatre of Thailand in Bangkok.

Katie

"...When you realize the truth, you realize that it’s no accomplishment. You haven’t done anything; the accomplishment is just the joy of being received by the very thing that you already are. It’s the mind being met by the mind, without opposition. It isn’t personal. The truth sets us free from any attachment to the concepts “self” and “other.” There are no humans; there is no mind; it’s all a dream. The practice of inquiry deletes everything, as long as mind believes that it exists even as mind. The projected world unravels first, and then mind, and any trace that even mind ever existed. That’s my world. When it’s over, it’s over.

The only thing you need to know about enlightenment is whether believing a particular thought is stressful or not. Does the thought hurt or doesn’t it? If it doesn’t, good: enjoy it. If it does hurt—if it causes any stress or uneasiness—question it, and enlighten yourself to that thought. Suffering is optional. It doesn’t have to last for years. It can get down to months, weeks, days, minutes, seconds. Eventually, when the same thoughts arise, the ones that used to make you suffer, you’re at ease with them. In fact, you’re lit; you walk down the street shining like a thousand-watt light bulb. When you think “I need my mother to love me,” you just laugh, because you’re enlightened to that thought, and the next one, and the next..."
- Byron Katie