The road to evil….

 December 27, 2015

The road to evil begins when someone commits to believing, without question, that they are inherently good.

Guest Blog by Ian Ralby: On Guest Blogging ….

 December 27, 2015

This is the fourth time I have had the opportunity to guest blog. In reflecting on the last three, I realized that I got something out of the exercise that transcended just “sharing” my own experience. Writing these blogs has forced me to practice at a deeper level. In the process of articulating my internal practice for others, I have had to test my own understanding of it. I am now convinced that moving beyond a passive familiarity with both the theory and the practice of “walking home” requires this form of reflection.

At school, I could read a poem a few times and memorize it. But that poem might as well have been in a language I did not speak; knowing the words did not correspond to knowing their meaning. Even when I obtained a superficial sense of what the poem was about, it remained a mere collection of words. Only when I took the time to engage the poem fully, breaking it down line by line, word by word, testing myself to ensure that there was no portion of the poem I did not grasp, did I begin the process of really understanding and owning that poem for myself. To this day, I can recite key portions of poems on which I performed such a close reading nearly two decades ago. Those poems started as Shakespeare’s or Shelley’s, but I felt connected to them once I engaged them.

This affinity for textual engagement has served me well as a lawyer. The practice of law requires intensely focused interpretation of words and actions alike. While a legal code with its seemingly infinite provisions appears daunting at first, it becomes increasingly manageable and ultimately comfortable after repeatedly wrestling with those provisions. Just reading it cover to cover, even a hundred times, would likely yield less value than working to understand the ins and outs of a few key provisions and how they apply in different circumstances. For example, I can explain, referencing article numbers, exactly how the statute for the Iraqi High Tribunal was supposed to function on paper and what went wrong in practice, even though it is at least seven years since I last looked at that statute. That statute, like the poems, took on new life for me as I deepened my relationship to it by wrestling with the text.

It’s easy to obtain a passive understanding of spiritual practice. It doesn’t take a huge effort to know some of the fundamentals. In a matter of days, one could memorize various tenets of major mystical traditions and even be able to retell some of the famous teaching stories. But none of that corresponds to experience. Just as it is easy to memorize a few words in a foreign language but have no idea how to put them together into a comprehensible sentence, knowing principles or stories does not translate into knowing how to live them.

In the process of guest blogging, I have learned a lot. Most importantly, I have learned what I did not understand. As I began to write about something I thought I knew well, I realized that I had a partial understanding of the subject, though I arrogantly had thought I was more advanced. In writing about “nirbija sadhana,” for example, I thought I could easily explain how it was that I perceived an analytical parallel between seedless samadhi and the need for seedless sadhana. But when I started to write about it, I discovered I was missing some of the pieces to be able to articulate what I meant. Indeed, I was missing some of the foundation. I had read the relevant texts dozens of times, and while I could certainly reference them, I had not sufficiently engaged with them to make them mine.

It strikes me that it’s possible to sit in Rohini’s classes, year after year, and develop a fairly sound passive familiarity with various texts, principles, concepts, and tools. But without rigorous engagement with the material, there is a great danger that the words of those texts, principles, concepts and tools remain just words. Guest blogging has certainly helped me to move from knowledge to understanding on a few different issues, but I have also begun to pursue such a transformation more privately, writing in a journal every day. So the point is not to guest blog, but to recognize that to really grog the practice and take ownership of it, we all have to engage with it as dedicated, disciplined learners.

Guilt-ridden….

 December 27, 2015

Guilt-ridden                 Guilt-free

Feeling                          Callous

People who numb….

 December 20, 2015

People who numb, who do not have the courage to feel, hurt other people the most.

Joyous

Despairing

Intoxicated

Grounded

When reflecting on a foursquare to paint, I begin with the top left quality, knowing that each component of the foursquare must not be conflated with the other three. Every quality has its own vibration that arises from within, becoming less subtle and more material. As the vibration manifests, letters express it, and a word is formed that truly represents the vibration.

Ideas about joy, especially in this time of year, are lively, fun, and upbeat. But as I meditated, I felt the vibration of the joy within us all as a steady, underlying hum. Joy is more quiet than we tend to believe.

So my gift to each of you is the separation of each of the vibrations in the form of a painting. Let yourself feel the difference between joyous and intoxicated; between despairing and grounded. How many times have we thought people were deep and grounded when in fact they were despairing, or thought they were despairing when in fact they were nonattached and grounded? How many times have we thought someone to be joyous when in fact they were intoxicated? Or discounted someone’s joyousness because we decided they were intoxicated?

Know all of the vibrations as they really are. Know that each is within you. Learn and practice, so that you can choose to be both joyous and grounded, and live in the Love of God.

With Joy and Love and best wishes for the season,

Rohini

Joyous….

 December 20, 2015

Joyous                      Despairing 

Intoxicated               Grounded  

The Road to Evil….

 December 15, 2015

Rohini explains, using the five afflictions of the Yoga Sutras, how a soul turns to evil.

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Lessons from My Mother….

 December 13, 2015

I could have learned to be just like my mother. Though as a child I did not want to be like her, we unconsciously pick up the qualities of our first caregivers and live them out even in our repulsions—and our repulsions can bind us even more than our attractions. If not for Baba I may have ended up as she did. He saved me from that fate. Though my mother met Baba and got shaktipat from him she never did anything to indicate that event had ever occurred.

For the last several years of her life, my mother lived in an assisted living facility. The aides and nurses where she lived were astonishing because they did not fight her. They allowed her to be “Anastasia”, a princess. And so my mother was as rude and mean to each of them as she had always been to me. As for me, I had reached an acceptance of “not counting” in her world. I was her dutiful daughter that was not to be acknowledged. And yet I continued to care for her every day to the end.

Why? Because Baba taught me service.

I continued to care for my mother because she is me and I have lessons to learn. If I were to fight her, I would be her. So I used the principles of Tai Chi Chuan with her. I wanted to know that if our interactions were taped I would be revealed as clean and clear. She did not understand or know how I live and for Whom I live. She scorned my life. If anything, I would rather have faced benign neglect than her derision for living a rather stupid life from her point of view. To her I was boring and trivial, while she was alive and charismatic. I did not compete or even disagree. When I called her every day for the last ten years of her life, I let her have it her way, and that left me at peace and able to be in relation with her without her attacking me and erasing my line. She didn’t know my line.

There was no love, care or respect from her because she just never knew or wanted those things. I knew that, and so did not look to her for them. Sun Tzu says know yourself, know your terrain and know whom you are playing with. I knew and was okay.

Many years ago in regard to another person I was accused of enabling when I knew I was serving the situation. My strategy changed when serving the situation came to be more about speaking up. I wanted to serve the situation and still call things what they were.

I only hope some of the people who took care of my mother were doing just that. Unfortunately, some aspired to be like my mother, or at the very least looked up to her.

I am sorry for those people. Baba taught me to see the Truth and not be deceived. To speak the truth and act appropriately. To speak the truth and not get angry. So I loved her not for how she was but for who she was in Truth. I loved, in her, God’s willingness to play such a part in order to teach us all. We just need not to forget who we truly are and walk down the street like Mohini looking for a man.

In this way I loved, cared for, and respected my mother. She was a great teacher for me. Where is she now? Hopefully laughing at the part she just played. More likely all ready to return, and to learn the kindness that she unwittingly taught others. When I saw her body, it was clear that she was refusing to leave it even though it was dead. I kissed her on the forehead and told her, “Go now and learn kindness”. She will learn. She has no choice. In the end, we all must learn to Love.

The greatest lesson I learned from my mother came in the form of the challenge she posed. Could I be kind and true around someone who was unkind, who didn’t love, who had hurt me and would continue to be hurtful? Thanks to Baba, I was able to meet that challenge. Thanks to my mother, I learned that kindness comes from within.

A life built….

 December 13, 2015

A life built around pleasure is likely to be far from pleasant.

Envious….

 December 13, 2015

  Envious                            Satisfied / at ease 

Motivated / ambitious        Inert / no passion / boring

The shrunken self….

 December 6, 2015

The shrunken self mistakes getting what it wants for the good life.

The Life of Anastasia….

 December 6, 2015

It’s customary to deliver a eulogy when someone dies. Though the word generally means “praise”, in the most literal sense it translates from the Greek as “good word”. Sharing my understanding of my mother’s life and the part she played in her little corner of the world stage is itself a “good word”, so I will offer this blog and the next as a kind of eulogy.

Everyone asks about how my mother died—not how she lived. Her death was easy. Death is easy. It is life that is so difficult. We have choices with each. Her life was long. Her death was swift. Her life was full of pleasure, but it was far from pleasant. It was full of fight and defiance to the end. She was active, and no one saw her leaving anytime soon, but she surprised everyone. Although she persisted in being combative and full of energy, her death was inevitable and quiet. Only in the last moment of life did her body relax.

My mother’s nickname among the caregiving staff at her assisted living facility was Anastasia. The nickname was their gently mocking acknowledgement of her colossal sense of entitlement. She loved being called Anastasia, because she saw herself as royalty.

Regal

Servile

Tyrant

Dutiful

Smiling and lively with people she hardly knew—or with men—she would tell people she loved life. She would say she wanted to have fun, to be active, and to go places. But she was always complaining of being bored, having nothing to do. I called her every day for the last decade of her life and always heard that same lament. Rarely was there any contentment.

Nevertheless, my mother thought of herself to the end as young and beautiful. She was the most beautiful woman in the room. She was the most fun. The most attractive. The most independent. The most free. And the most thin. And yet she required so much care. Because of her own idea of herself as a completely independent person, she had no appreciation for her dedicated caregivers. She was consistent and never strayed from the course. To the very end she complained. Complained of quiet. Complained when she felt she was forced to do something she did not want to, like allowing herself to be cleaned.

She identified as a victim so she could be entitled. She had to make others into tyrants so she could be deserving. She believed no one ever did anything for her, so she never acknowledged others’ care. She never felt any need to say thank you.

But “Anastasia” was also a term of endearment. Just as my mother’s caregivers named her after a princess, in their own minds they transmuted her vices into virtues. They saw her as alive and the residents who were compliant as dead. With my mother, at least they were never bored.

They described her as expressive, unique, colorful, eccentric, strong-willed, willing to say what was on her mind, free. People thought her anger meant she was her own person. But as I listened and they grew more comfortable, I heard my mother described as crass, aggressive, mean, cruel, combative, having no filter. Her weapons were depression, lashing out, insults, and disdain.

The shrunken self mistakes getting what it wants for the good life. When everyone agrees and indulges that desire, we have made a tyrant. Others both envy that individual and enable it. My mother’s mantra was “I want to do what I want to do when I want to do it. Why do I have to do what others want me to do?”

Through those eyes, she judged everyone. In July for her birthday, as we did every year, we spent time with my mother. One afternoon we sat outside her assisted living facility and she spoke about her life. She couldn’t recall having any friends. She told mostly scornful stories of her parents and of the men she had known. Men were of two kinds: strong or weak. Women were of two kinds: warm or cold. She had always conveyed that she considered me cold. She believed that she knew how the world really is. She thought of herself as wise.

So my mother was not going to learn from the world. She defiantly maintained her worldview and refused to grow. She knew the world was about pleasure. She lived out the Seven Deadly Sins—sloth, envy, pride, gluttony, avarice, wrath, and lust—and thought they were worldly ideals, the good life.

Slothful

Productive / hardworking

Completely free

Burdened / exhausted

Prideful / vain

Humble

Great self-worth / great identity

Anonymous / self-loathing

Envious

Satisfied / at ease

Motivated / ambitious

Inert / no passion /boring

Wrathful

At peace / accepting

Just / right

Doormat / compliant

Gluttonous

Ascetic / disciplined

Full of Life / lively / enjoying

Starving / self-mortifying

Avaricious

Generous

Eager

Dissipated

Lustful

Chaste

Passionate

Cold / frigid

Life in the body is life in the world. We cannot escape the world. From the standpoint of the Yoga Sūtras the world is here for our experience and liberation. We are always having experiences; it is how we understand them and what we do with them that will decide whether we will just continue to experience or whether we are moving towards liberation. We all experience; what we call our experiences is so important.

If we are not clearsighted but instead color our experiences with wrong understanding, then we will keep going further down the road away from liberation—the road my mother chose and modeled. Let her serve as a cautionary example for all of us.

Regal….

 December 6, 2015

Regal              Servile

Tyrant             Dutiful

Thankfulness….

 November 29, 2015

In America we celebrate Thanksgiving. In this day and age we may be finding it difficult to say and be Thankful. The world is having a rather rough go of it. We are being challenged everywhere we turn.

Thank you God. Thank you Baba for showing me that God is everywhere and God’s action is always Love. Therefore each test we are facing is for our good.

What good can come from this nightmare we are facing? We must ask that question over and over again. If we keep digging into the next answer that arises and not resting on the simplest and most superficial, we will find ourselves with an answer we never expected. The challenge is an opportunity, a tough opportunity, in which God and His Love are embedded in every fiber.

In my Saturday scripture class, we are presently reading the Bhagavadgītā. The scripture tells of the dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna on the nature of Reality. This dialogue takes place on the battlefield just before a great battle is about to occur between Arjuna and his relatives. Forgetting his path and not understanding the Truth of Reality, Arjuna loses heart and wishes not to fight.

We are Arjuna. How many times have we decided we “knew better” so that we could avoid action, right action? How many times have we bemoaned our fate instead of thanking God for providing the opportunity to get closer to who we truly are? We should be so thankful, and yet we will deny God.

“Perceiving that I was submerged in the flood of the great illusion, Thou, Hari,

didst indeed plunge into it and rescue me.

There is none other beside Thee in the whole world; but see our fate, that we

imagined ourselves existing [apart from Thee].

Filled with pride in my personality I thought that I was Arjuna in this world and

said that the Kauravas were my relatives.

In addition to that, I had the evil dream that I would kill them and then what

should I do? But the Lord wakened me from my sleep….

I, being no one, thought I was a person and called those my relatives who in

reality did not exist. Thou hast saved me from this great madness.” (Jnāneshvari XI.49-59)

We have all been through trials appropriate to our path. Most people do not know what each of us has been through. Hopefully we do not advertise or wear on our sleeve what has occurred. Hopefully we have learned so that we can be and are thankful for all that we have faced. And we have the clear vision to see that whatever God does He does for good. Hopefully we have learned that the nightmare was only a dream in which the individual, not who we truly are, acted its part.

“O Śiva, you have produced a three-world drama which has in its interior Māyā as the source of all the existents. You have presented the introductory portion of the drama. Where is the creative artist other than yourself who can bring about its conclusion?” (Stavacintāmaṇi 59)

If we know that God is both the producer and the soul (haha) actor of the entire play, then we will be thankful all the time, like the man in Meister Eckhart’s sermon who never had a bad day:

“You wished me good day. I never had a bad day; for if I am hungry I praise God; if it freezes, hails, snows, rains, if the weather is fair or foul, still I praise God; am I wretched and despised, I praise God, and so I have never had an evil day. You wished that God would send me luck. But I never had ill luck, for I know how to live with God, and I know that what He does is best; and what God gives me or ordains for me, be it good or ill, I take it cheerfully from God as the best that can be, and so I have never had ill luck. You wished that God would make me happy. I was never unhappy; for my only desire is to live in God’s will, and I have so entirely yielded my will to God’s, that what God wills, I will.” (qtd. in Underhill, Mysticism, 209)

Spiritual practice is about arriving at true Thankfulness at every moment of every day.

If we keep digging….

 November 29, 2015

If we keep digging into the next answer that arises and not resting on the simplest and most superficial, we will find ourselves with an answer we never expected.

Thankful….

 November 29, 2015

Thankful                                Ungrateful

Obsequious / Fawning          Own person

Living Humility….

 November 22, 2015

Everyone agrees that humility is a virtue. But no one really wants it. We all either redefine and belittle it as a kind of lightweight modesty or deride it as belonging to losers. True humility, though, requires great courage, because it consists in surrendering our separateness completely to God.

In your life, if God is the doer, then you are world class. Everyone wants to think of themselves and to be seen as a big deal one way or another. The shrunken individual is so determined to be bigger than it truly is. It wants to shrink everyone smaller than its size.

Baba used to tell a story of the mathematician Ram Tirtha. One day, Tirtha drew a horizontal line on the chalkboard and said to his students, “How do you make this line shorter without touching it?” When no one could answer, he drew a longer line underneath the first and said, “Instead of erasing another’s line, we should make our own line longer.”

The only true way to make your own line longer is to realign yourself with God. Then, and only then, can the shrunken self be put in its place. I don’t care if a person is a “nobody”, or not “world class” in some generally accepted way. Anyone’s line is world class when they allow God to draw it. Think of the Desert Fathers: their lives were stripped to utter simplicity, and yet truly world class. They were humble and harmonious because the Desert Fathers were working to surrender to God.

Yet precious few people genuinely want to commit and contribute in this way. People remain selfish and prideful; their real priority is holding onto their idea of their lives. Baba used to say, “What are you so proud of?” When we are so prideful, there is no real care for others—no one else exists for us except to support our narrative.

When we pridefully hold onto our identification with the shrunken self, we cannot empathize. Empathy is actually feeling what others feel—not imagining it or resonating with it, but genuinely feeling it. If we resonate with someone’s feelings, we are only feeling our own vibration, not theirs. To empathize we turn inward and humbly let go of our individuality, being willingly empty so as to literally feel what others feel. It has nothing to do with our individuality, so there is nothing to be proud of. When we are in the groundwater instead of isolated in our separateness, we empathize and contribute to the greater good of the world from the small to the large, from the simple to the grand.

What we bring to the table of life reveals where we are in relation to God. God is everywhere—not just in some places, not just in some activities. God should always be the doer, and we should not interfere, believing we are of equal status. Our job is to practice, listen, and then implement appropriately. We have to let our vehicles operate literally the way God wants them to.

The sages of all traditions tell us this:

In brief, do everything as though in the presence of God and so, in whatever you do, you need never allow your conscience to wound and denounce you, for not having done your work well.

(St. Symeon, Philokalia p. 156)

When the Son of Heaven is enthroned

And the Three Ministries installed,

Presenting jade discs

And four-horse chariots

Cannot compare to sitting still

And offering the Tao.

(Tao Te Ching, trans. Addiss and Lombardo, verse 62)

If we were able to forget our own existence, we would find Him who is the source of our existence and at the same time we would see that we do not exist at all.

(The Letters of Shaykh ad-Darqawi, trans. Lings, p. 18)

Achieving true humility is hard work. But when we are humble, our action is then accomplished and informed by Love. We empathize, listen for right direction, and then proceed, all the while having given up the fruits of our labor. Service and non-action are one and the same when we surrender to God. We are then always acting and serving from a place of non-attachment, where there is no separateness, no individuality.

It isn’t as though I live a spectacular life. I live a simple life, but God is here. I am not asking you to change what you do, whether privately or professionally. I am asking you to let God be the one running your life. Don’t change your life; just humbly change who runs your life.

Service and non-action are one….

 November 22, 2015

Service and non-action are one and the same when we surrender to God. We are then always acting and serving from a place of non-attachment, where there is no separateness, no individuality.

Resilient….

 November 22, 2015

  Resilient                     Brittle 

Won’t go away             Delicate  

If you want….

 November 15, 2015

If you want to do outreach, go in.

The Delusion of Ownership as Love….

 November 15, 2015

Ownership is called love.

Therefore, objectifying is love.

Therefore, love is essentially pornographic.

Therefore, power is love.

Love is therefore the pleasure of possession and control.

To own and feel the pleasure of ownership is to love.

To be owned is to be loved.

Therefore, the beloved’s obligation is to be always willing to be an object, to have no say, to be compliant, so as to be always loved.

The owner/lover’s responsibility is to make all the decisions and keep the beloved object safe.

If that is true, then I am perfectly happy not to be loved.

Owned (Possessed and controlled)

Free (Able to be and express self)

Cared for (Supported and respected)

Unloved (Unacknowledged and unsupported for who and how you are)

Many people do not even consider what “cared for” and “free” look like. People tend to conflate “cared for” with “owned” and “free” with “unloved”. So if we are owned, then we will be cared for. And if we are free, we will be unloved. Within this system, the only way to be “loved” is to be owned and never free.

The shrunken self is made up of dichotomies, and therefore it is made up of dialectic. One voice in our mind says “I own you”, and another says “I am owned”. We delude ourselves into thinking that one of the voices in this particular dialectic is who we are, we don’t question who the other voice is. We believe they are two different speakers, but really there is only one. Confined within this dialogue, we selfishly sleepwalk through life.

The shrunken self, which is a vastly diminished manifestation of God, has all the qualities and activities of God, but in a shrunken form. In truth, God possesses all through Love; the shrunken self owns and calls that ownership care. God liberates us through grace; the shrunken self thinks it liberates us through individuation and spurs us to individuate—which separates us further from who we truly are. We become small and petty, thinking we are free when in fact we are unloved in the world and unloved by ourselves. False identity individuates us. To recover our true nature, we have to give up our identification with that individuality.

God Loves, we own. God liberates, we abandon.

Owns

Liberates

Loves

Abandons

We are to live our little lives knowing that God is everywhere in them. It is not our lives that are great; it is God enlivening our lives that makes them and us great. Our mission is that Love is to inform everything we are and do. Then, and only then, will our lives be genuinely full and vital.

Owns….

 November 15, 2015

  Owns                Liberates 

  Loves               Abandons  

When you mess up….

 November 8, 2015

When you mess up, it is an opening. You have to take it and walk through the door.

Fulfilling the Mission….

 November 8, 2015

In order to fulfill a mission, we have to know the mission. We mustn’t fool ourselves or others with a misguided sense of mission. And if we are going to take on a mission, we must be willing to see it through. If at some point we decide to abandon the mission, we must also be responsible for that decision. Again, we must not fool ourselves.

In an elite military force, the mission will take precedence over the individual. Every member of that force must accept this principle; had they not accepted it, they wouldn’t have made it through the necessary training. Individual cares and desires are left out of the equation; everyone has to have signed on to this code and proven it in the selection process. If they then care about other soldiers more than the mission, they may be seen as good or nice human beings, but they will have failed in their purpose. They would then not be fit for the force, because they could not be trusted to fulfill the mission.

In spiritual practice, the same principle applies. If the individual is encouraged to thrive, then no one grows, no one changes, the mission fails, and the shrunken self is alive and well. We will not get to who we really are. Instead of letting go of wrong identification with the individual and being who we are—Love—the mission will become the propping up of that very individual, the perpetuation of separateness.

If we are not in line with the true mission, then either we must realize that and excuse ourselves, or the leader/teacher needs to inform us so we have the opportunity to either commit to the mission or leave. It is okay if we leave, it is okay if we stay. We need to call everything what it is, not what we may prefer to call it. After all, no one does anything because they think it is bad; they rationalize it as good.

For instance, I may think I am fighting or standing up for myself appropriately when in fact I am being selfish. I may think I am fighting for others and being a team player when in fact I am being a doormat. If I operate this way, I will not be able to fulfill the mission appropriately. Instead, I will be pursuing my own, hidden mission of individual self-preservation.

Here is a foursquare that allows us to work with this dynamic:

Fight for self / Self care

Doormat

Selfish

Fight for others / Selfless

In spiritual practice, many people abandon the real mission out of fear. The Zen Master Nan Huai-Chin addresses this issue in his commentary on the Diamond Sūtra:

Are there actually people who have fright, terror or dread over these teachings? Among practicing cultivators one will see this. In their practice, many people are seeking the alambana [foundation] of emptiness but when this alambana actually appears, they take fright or are terrified. People say they are scared out of their wits and sweat bullets because they’ve “disappeared.” I say to them, Aren’t we seeking to be selfless? How can you be frightened? Wisdom needs strength behind it.

At times, our strength may free us to abandon an inappropriate mission. Many years ago someone told me they were not a quitter. What I then said was to imagine that it is 1935 and you are a member of Hitler’s Youth. You have now seen what the mission is, how destructive it is, but you are not a quitter. The truth is you should quit, but because of your idea of yourself you will not quit. You are in fact selfish in the maintenance of your individual identity.

So we all have to face up to the mission we are actually on. If we are on a secret mission to preserve our separateness or specialness, we have to recognize and own that. Otherwise, we will defer joining the true mission of Love and Liberation. But join it we will, sooner or later—because Love is our True Nature.

Owned….

 November 8, 2015

Owned                    Free

Cared for                Unloved

If the goal is….

 November 1, 2015

If the goal is to preserve the individual, the real mission fails.

On Board with the Mission….

 November 1, 2015

What is the mission? This question is rarely asked, yet it is assumed we are all on board with the mission. We assume we are all on the same mission. In the Absolute sense, we are, but from relative reality, most of the time we are not.

Our sense of how to function on a mission arises from our understanding of community, groups, and teams, which ultimately comes from our family of origin. We will relate in groups based on that understanding. That can be a good thing or not. How each of us approaches a mission hinges on that understanding; when our response to a group environment is dictated by our family of origin, we may contribute appropriately, or we may stray from or even undermine the mission. This will not be a good thing for the team.

How many times as a young student were you in a group project? The mission was clear: one person does all the work and everyone else sits back. They get the grade the one person accomplished, and everyone is on the same page—even the teacher. Mission accomplished. I was that one person, and always wondered what the mission was for the other kids. They seemed so sure of how it worked and were willing to have it the way it was.

Teachers themselves lose sight of their true mission. How many teachers want to be liked rather than to teach their subject? And the outcome is always the same: students learn nothing and resent the teacher. It is the same with parenting. Parents who strive to have only “positive” experiences with their children will ultimately reap resentment.

When there is a clear mission and every individual involved is on board with that mission, it can be accomplished.

But when every individual has his own mission, the team or community will not be able to work together effectively no matter how clear the overall mission might be. The truth is, every individual has his own mission—preserving himself. If the goal is to preserve the individual, the real mission fails. No matter how much you may think everyone is together, the dialectic of selfish/doormat prevails. The leader who wants to be liked will be selfish and miss the mission. And when there are team members who have their own missions which go against the leader, the one in charge feels like a doormat: not only is he trying to fulfill the mission; he is also trying to keep the ones not on board “happy and ok”. Sometimes we just have to let others go.

We have to agree with the mission not just superficially, but in the very core of our being. All our vehicles must be in line with the mission: our intellects, our emotions, our personalities, our bodies, our senses, our minds and our hearts. This means letting go of our individuality, so we can discern where real community lies and contribute appropriately.

Prop up others….

 November 1, 2015

Prop up others                         Dismiss others

Create a false reality               Accept reality

Guest Blog by Ian Ralby: Nirbīja Sādhana….

 October 25, 2015

I have always known, conceptually at least, that spiritual practice has to be a constant and consistent endeavor. Rohini has said it thousands of times: to make any progress, you have to practice no matter what you are doing, whether teaching a class, riding a bike or cleaning a toilet. But somehow I am only just now discovering that I twisted that truism to mean that I need to be focused on doing something in order to practice. In other words, I need to be teaching a class, riding a bike or cleaning a toilet to practice. In the absence of such activity, I stop practicing altogether.

Over the years, I have worked hard to make sure that when doing things—particularly things I deem important—I redirect my will to the center of my chest and bore in. I have become increasingly comfortable with simultaneously looking in and looking out at the world while engaged in “meaningful” activity. And when I have a deadline or something specific to accomplish, using my will to practice is not as hard as it once was.

But in the absence of purposeful activity, I lose all will, discipline and commitment.

My professional work ebbs and flows; long stretches of nonstop activity can be followed by periods of idleness. A few weeks ago, I ended a six-week stretch of constant travel and hard work. Facing a spell of inactivity, I was forced to recognize that the break from work coincided with an abandonment of spiritual practice. For me, spiritual practice had become not an end in itself, but a means to the end of doing my work better. That was a wrong turn.

Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras distinguishes between sabīja samādhi and nirbīja samādhi. Whereas the first is absorption with a seed—an object of absorption—the latter is seedless. Nirbīja samādhi, limitless and unconstrained absorption in the Absolute, is the goal.

One might say, therefore, that what I have been doing is sabīja sādhana—spiritual practice with a seed. In other words, to engage in sādhana, I need an external focal point. Only now am I realizing how much I need to work toward a sort of nirbīja sādhana, so that, regardless of whether I have an external task at hand, I am constantly and consistently practicing.

Rohini has always taught me that there is a difference between knowing how something is done and knowing how to do it. It strikes me that this notion of seeded versus seedless spiritual practice is the sort of lesson one can only encounter when actually engaging in spiritual practice. From an intellectual standpoint, I have always “known” that spiritual practice should be persistent and uninterrupted. But only recently, when I have stopped being consumed with external activities, have I discovered how imperfectly I understood that principle.

Seeing that I have not been practicing all the time is a fairly fundamental realization. I have been constantly and consistently misconstruing the very notion of constant and consistent practice. Recognizing that error now also makes me ask the uncomfortable question: what other simple and fundamental truths have I thought I understood, but actually twisted in a small-self-serving way?

Last week, I took advantage of an open floor in a Saturday class to ask some questions that had been confounding me. What ensued was a helpful discussion, exploring a foursquare that dates back to my childhood. If I had proceeded from class into a highly structured schedule throughout the ensuing few days, I would have managed to work into my schedule some time to work on that foursquare. But in the absence of such seeds, I defaulted to operating within that foursquare and stopped practicing when I walked out of class. That sort of selective practice is sabīja sādhana at its worst.

We live in a society that values expertise less and less. We are encouraged to think we have “learned” something when we have only gained a passing familiarity with it. When it comes to life lessons and spiritual practice, however, the moment we think we know something is the moment we should be concerned about how little we know. I have the credentials to prove that I am, in relative terms, an intelligent person, but despite years spent thinking I understood the statement, “Spiritual practice must be constant and consistent,” I am now able to see that I had no clue what that really means.

I share these reflections recognizing that I have a long way to go to get where I thought I was. And I encourage others to join me in taking a second look at what we “know” about spiritual practice. We may think we know how it is done, but do we really know how to do it?

If you want to be a human being….

 October 25, 2015

If you want to be a human being, you have to be willing to let go of your individuality.

Bitter….

 October 25, 2015

  Bitter                       Content

 Clearsighted             Oblivious  

Liberation….

 October 18, 2015

Liberation is utterly different from what most people imagine it to be. Baba always made clear that liberation is not for the individual. He always stressed that the individual cannot be liberated, and that the only way to liberation is to give up our attachment to and wrong identification with any separate identity. I specifically went to Baba because that was what he taught. And what he taught was not ideas. An intellectual grasp of non-duality is all very well, but to know and inhabit that Reality requires a long and arduous grinding down of the individual identity that must be given up. There are plenty of spiritual seekers who believe they can advance toward liberation without doing that painstaking work; they get nowhere, except in their heads.

This process of grinding down the separate self begins with knowing how that individual identity operates. The techniques for this work that I pass on—other than the foursquare, which I created—are all time-honored internal practices that Baba taught. Whether we call it śāmbhavopāya or St. Symeon’s third level of attention and prayer, boring continuously inward toward the Heart is the one crucial practice. It makes no difference where we are on the path; until we reach liberation, that is the practice that matters. It uses the will. If we are not doing this, nothing else we do will get us anywhere; we will only have an “enlightened” small self. The one doing sādhana is not the one who will endure.

The truth that all individuality, all separateness, must be let go, the reality that there is no such thing as a liberated individual, was always evident in Baba’s teaching. But here are a few passages:

When the Shakti of the Self contracts, She is known as a limited individual, subject to innumerable births and deaths. She remains a transmigratory soul as long as She is contracted, but once She expands, She becomes Paramashiva. (Secret of the Siddhas 179).

Bondage and liberation exist only when there is division. The ideas of bondage, liberation, and so on, apply only to a person who, because of māyā, does not understand his true nature and is afraid. (Secret of the Siddhas, 204-5)

“I can do nothing;

it is the universal Self who does all.”

This is sublime teaching.

“I will accomplish this work;

I have already done it.”

This is total ignorance and pride. (Reflections of the Self, 109)

He regards this world not as matter

but as the embodiment of Consciousness.

For him there is no Maya, no body;

whatever exists is Shiva. (Reflections of the Self, 201)

Though a clear and subtle intellect is essential for practice, this Reality can’t be taught intellectually; then it will only be an idea. When I used to stand alone with Baba by the back stair, he taught me wordlessly, through the Great Silence.

What Baba taught me by the back stair is the work of “boring in”. It is the core of the practice, and it rests at the heart of all mystical traditions. We should take it almost literally—the only difference being that we’re not using a drill, we’re using the will to redirect consciousness back into the Heart, through all the bodies. As we practice, our understanding and experience will grow clearer and more subtle. This practice is simple—and very difficult. But it is the practice; anything that doesn’t center on this right effort of the will is off the point. Anyone who claims that this isn’t the heart of all spiritual practice has no real awareness of thousands of years of teaching and lineage and scripture, in all real traditions.

As we proceed in our practice, we will have an ever-shifting understanding of liberation. The less of our separate, shrunken selves there is to “understand” liberation, the closer we will come to the Real thing.

An intellectual grasp….

 October 18, 2015

An intellectual grasp of non-duality is all very well, but to know and inhabit that Reality requires a long and arduous grinding down of the individual identity.

Self-sufficient…

 October 18, 2015

Self-sufficient                     Incapable 

Isolated                              Open to Help  

The real hero is the one….

 October 11, 2015

The real hero is the one who acts with ease and accomplishes life without creating fake mountains to climb. We do not look heroic attacking what is not real.

Climbing the False Mountain….

 October 11, 2015

Self-esteem is nothing more than the small self’s opinion of itself. It is a tale told by an idiot. Any education that prioritizes self-esteem is a course in unreality; it leads the student on a needless journey across an imaginary landscape of illusory meadows and false mountains.

When we fixate on self-esteem, we fall prey to the delusion that accomplishment only comes in one of two ways: either effortlessly or through dramatic struggle. Either your minimal effort and work are automatically sufficient, or only an achievement that comes after great struggle will earn you praise and love. So we have to either be careless or put on a display of strength in order to earn or get love. We are too good to work, or we overcome and triumph. We stroll through a meadow, or we scale a massive peak.

It is easy to recognize the game of someone whose self-esteem is based on refusing to test themselves. It is much harder to discern when someone is playing the self-esteem game by turning what should simply be hard work into a dramatic struggle designed to make them look heroic.

The notion that self-esteem is born only of dramatic struggle encourages a desire to fail at first, even if the task is easy, just to make the accomplishment appear heroic. If it is easy, we need to make it difficult and have things go wrong so that we can fail, and then snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. When skill and capability are already in place to complete an undertaking, we must either remove tools or add increased burdens in order to make it worthwhile. A worthless task becomes invaluable when completed through struggle, while an invaluable task is worthless if completed with ease.

So we believe we have to struggle. If we are not struggling, then we are not doing. We create a challenge in order to consider ourselves heroes when we overcome that challenge. The truth is, in most situations there is no need of the challenge, and the real hero is the one who acts with ease and accomplishes life without creating fake mountains to climb. We do not look heroic attacking what is not real.

Applying this to sādhana is easy. Good practice is not a fight. It is not denial or pretending; it is surrender to and acceptance of what truly Is. Misery does not make us spiritual. Overcoming a false challenge does not attain us anything.

We must not delude ourselves that sādhana has to be a struggle. That is part of why the Guru is so crucial to our practice: the Guru reveals our delusions, including the mistaken conviction that spiritual practice is inseparable from suffering. On the contrary, spiritual practice frees us from suffering. The Guru shines the light to bring us joy, not to make us struggle.

Compassionate….

 October 11, 2015

  Compassionate               Hardhearted

 Bleeding Heart                Dispassionate  

True Guru….

 October 4, 2015

Baba left his body 33 years ago, on October 2nd, 1982. At the time, I was seven months pregnant with Ian, my first son. Ganeshpuri had been swirling with conflict and controversy. Because of my pregnancy and my job as librarian of Baba’s closed library, I did not have much contact with all that was being said. Also, people tended to shy away from me. I, too, had been a controversy and was not much liked. Never was the popular kid.

I stuck to what I knew. Baba had always been unfailingly true for me. Did I deny the rumors? No. Neither did I embrace them and act on them. All I had was my facts. Could Baba have done something wrong? Of course he could have. Had he? Yes, according to a lot of people. Did that change my relationship with him? No. I had lived and seen too much to change my relationship with Baba.

So for some, I am the disciple of a bad True Guru. I cannot defend Baba, nor do I need to. Dada Yende, another close disciple of Baba, defended him one day in the courtyard so many years ago. Still, people were hurt. People were offended. People felt betrayed. I did not—not because I was insensitive to their pain, but because I didn’t presume anything anymore. So many things I had been so sure of had turned out not to be the way I thought they were.

Using all kinds of approaches to label what Baba did or did not do does not resolve the pain felt by many people. For this I am sorry. The problem for me is that in all my years working closely with Baba, I never saw him be malicious, cruel or abusive. I know there are people who will say his actions were abusive, and that I am being blind. Baba was a True Guru who did things that left people feeling damaged and betrayed, and he remains my Guru.

Recently someone looked up Baba on the internet and found all the stuff about the scandal. It followed for this person that because people said Baba had done wrong, I must be wrong. To avoid facing similar criticism, many of my Guru brothers and sisters have erased Baba out of their personal narratives. I have been shocked to see people I know who got so much from Baba now deny they ever knew him. Unwilling to face and wrestle with all that had come forth, they threw everything out. Baba was a True Guru who did things that left people feeling damaged and betrayed, and he remains my Guru.

Do I condone what he did? The truth is I do not know what he did; I only heard what he did, in some cases directly from people involved. I have written about my one encounter with anything of this sort (“Respecting Lineage”); I took it to be a test and answered “no” by my actions. Baba never then shunned me or treated me with anything other than respect and Love. But in many people’s imaginations Baba has been defined completely by one set of stories. Baba was a True Guru who did things that left people feeling damaged and betrayed, and he remains my Guru.

So today I will accept that Baba did everything that people say he did. Today I will not rationalize or give any scriptural or tantric explanation. Though I did not see any of it, I will not deny what people have said, and I am sorry they were hurt. As for me, I owe Baba everything, and I love him with all my Heart. I am so happy to be the disciple of Swami Muktananda. Baba was a True Guru who did things that left people feeling damaged and betrayed, and he remains my Guru.

I separate the man from the Guru and the teachings. But I loved both the man and the Guru. The man had all the complexity and karma that we have. I am sorry that, for some, the man let people down. He never let me down. For me there is no difference between Baba and the Guru. The Guru, His teachings and His inner practice cannot let any of us down. I pranam to my Guru, Swami Muktananda. Because of him and what he taught, I am where I am, and for that I am most grateful.

Baba, I Love you with all my Heart and wish you were physically here now. I miss your physical presence in the midst of my turbulent sādhana. Right now, I am in the midst of an intensive śakti change, and I would give anything to sit with you and receive your help and direction. I relied on you, and I still rely on you. You never fail me.

I know how hard it can be to understand how someone in Baba’s position might operate. I understand also how hard it must be for some people who feel damaged or betrayed, and I pray for their healing and resolution. But at the end of the day, my Baba is the Baba I knew and know, and in all my years with him I never saw him be abusive, coercive or anything other than full of Love.

When the time comes….

 October 4, 2015

When the time comes for people to give up their “goodness”, they stop doing spiritual practice.

Brave….

 October 4, 2015

  Brave                   Cowardly 

Foolhardy              Cautious  

Spiritual Practice Is Not a Drug….

 September 27, 2015

There is a big difference between doing drugs, basking in śakti, and spiritual practice. That should be obvious, but it’s not. With drugs there is no self-effort, and the result is a counterfeit experience. We are continuing the small self’s delusion; we are on the grid. If we are lucky, we wake up where we started and have a great memory. Around a teacher, if we simply bask in śakti, we are fooling ourselves, mistaking supersensory experience for spiritual attainment. When the teacher passes on the experience dries up. In true spiritual practice there is constant self-effort over time, which will open us to grace.

Spiritual practice brings us permanently to God and Love. We are then independent and free. Drugs bring us to dependency—on the drugs, and on a pusher. We can also treat śakti like a drug. The result is the same: we are never free. Depending on the drug, we either numb ourselves or delude ourselves into thinking all kinds of things.

The real issue is what people believe is the goal of spiritual practice.

If your goal is numbing, dissociating and having super, drug-like experiences, then you may as well just do drugs. The price is the same, and the lifestyle may be more indulgent for you. The small self gets to be “enlightened”, and you do not have to surrender anything. You have your idea of God, your idea of the world, your idea of everything. You will just need a good supplier of the drugs. Remember, you will be dependent on an outside substance—but not to worry, you are in charge of when you use it.

People who believe that dissociating, not feeling anything, and having śakti experiences is the goal—which is the same goal as the drug users—feel a little more arrogant because they actually worked enough to get an awakening. The problem is, they then allowed their small self to take ownership of their experiences. As a result, they believe they really are “enlightened”. They can then consider themselves graduated from the teacher and strike out on their own.

The problem with real spiritual practice is that we have to work. We can become the master only by surrendering to the Master: God. And though that sounds simple, it is anything but easy.

If God is what you really want, you will have to have a teacher. You will have to give up dissociating. You will have to give up your attachment to super-duper experiences. You will have to give up the one who wanted these experiences in the first place. Sorry, but that is the way it works. You will have to be awake. You will have to take off your blinders.

The way to true independence is to surrender our individuality, our separateness. The only one who is independent is God. When you say, “I do not want to be dependent on Rohini”, you are right. Neither do I. I want to be with God. People used to say, “You are dependent on Baba”. “Thank God I was” would be my answer. By surrendering to the Guru—who, by the way is not an individual—I was able to begin the process of dissolving myself, so that the Self could manifest clearly. In surrendering to Baba, I am freer and more independent than I ever was before meeting him.

The true teacher fosters this true independence. The true teacher wants the student to become a master. Drugs never do. Any drug encourages us to adore it and need it. Then, the small self is the master always, and we are dependent. The small self dopes us—I mean, dupes us—with dope.

So what about the teacher? Following a teacher can be like using drugs if that teacher encourages numbing and blindness. But if you have a teacher who is surrendered to God, then as long as you surrender, your life will get better and better.

Use drugs, and your life will get worse and worse. It will crumble, and the time under the influence will become your main focus. With spiritual practice your daily life and relationships come alive, and you are free to be you.

These foursquares reveal the misunderstandings of spiritual practice that can trip us up on the path, or take us completely away from it:

Committed to practice

Self-indulgent (paying attention to self)

Fanatical / obsessive

Self-restrained / measured (paying attention to self)

Dependent

Independent

Reliant

Arrogant (too arrogant to rely on anyone)

What it comes down to is that you should be reliant on the Guru, not dependent on Rohini. And you had better be reliant on the practice.

The problem with real spiritual practice….

 September 27, 2015

The problem with real spiritual practice is that we have to work. We can become the master only by surrendering to the Master: God. And though that sounds simple, it is anything but easy.

Dependent….

 September 27, 2015

Dependent                        Independent

Reliant                             Arrogant (too arrogant to rely on anyone)

Spiritual Practice Is Not a Drug….

 September 20, 2015

Rohini explains why spiritual practice should never be approached as anything like an intoxicant.

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Deprogramming….

 September 20, 2015

Recently I heard that someone who once studied with me had to be “deprogrammed” because he had a hard time understanding why he stopped studying. I do not know if this information is even true. It is not my bent to go on hearsay, but I want to address the topic of deprogramming because over the years it has come up in conversation.

At the time this situation would have occurred, the Saturday group class was working on accepting our hate so that we could be able to get rid of it. We cannot get rid of something we have not acknowledged we have. If I will not acknowledge that I am holding something, then I cannot drop it. This gives a whole new meaning to “getting rid of what you haven’t got”.

In this series of classes, people were wrestling with accepting that we all actually hate. This went on for weeks. Finally, I told everyone they had permission to hate. Some were relieved, some were confused, and a couple resisted. The ones resisting were “good”, so they could never accept that they hate. In the meantime, these people were definitely hating me.

Anyone who has studied with me can say that I am never one to hold onto a student, no matter who they are. You want to discontinue? Fine. And there will be no email or phone call asking you to come back. This is all up to the student. The only thing I cannot abide is willful negativity without any detachment or willingness to wrestle with that same negativity. You can be as willfully obtuse and negative as you like, just not in my class.

Along with his fellow students, this particular person was given an opportunity to distance himself from his experience of hate. Because he was unwilling to accept his own hate, the effort got to be futile. I offered the person the choice to stay or leave. If he left, he could return whenever he felt up to it. Silence. I then said there has to be a choice: “It is okay, you can do what you want”. Now this person tended to be passive, and not make choices but be at the mercy of the situation. Others made choices; he went along with them. In this situation I did not play his game; he had to decide what he wanted. So if he found me harsh, he now had a chance to take care of himself.

He finally chose to leave, and walked out of the room and out to his car. I have not heard from him since. I guess he does not want to come back. That is his choice, and it is perfectly okay. So why the “deprogramming”? Deprogramming from what?

When I hear the term “deprogramming”, I think of groups where there is a closed system with closed rhetoric, closed communication with others and closed doors so you cannot leave. There is no real questioning, no voice for the members, no decisions made by members and no boundaries.

I know a group from which I needed to be deprogrammed: the family I was born into. The real process of growing up is a kind of deprogramming: we must become conscious of the preverbal belief system that has governed our life, and disentangle from it. Even when we rebel against family authority, we are just continuing our attachment to it, and keeping our anger is maintaining a repulsion relationship.

My time with Baba deprogrammed me. Baba taught me what Love is and how to relate with the world in all its aspects, including my family, as an adult human being. Most importantly, he deprogrammed me by showing me how to surrender the small self and return to our true nature. Spiritual practice is the only real deprogramming.

If I will not acknowledge….

 September 20, 2015

If I will not acknowledge that I am holding something, then I cannot drop it.

Wounded….

 September 20, 2015

  Wounded                  Cared for 

Educated                    Indulged  

An emotionally cathartic….

 September 13, 2015

An emotionally cathartic experience is not necessarily a spiritual experience.

No Escaping Teachers….

 September 13, 2015

When I was a little girl, my friends and I would play “school”. One of us would be the teacher and the others would play the students. We would switch roles so everyone got a chance to be the teacher. A fun game: everyone playing all the parts, and no one feeling less than or better than. Ah, the Lords’ Club.

We were never hindered by the low or high self-esteem that has since infiltrated into every aspect of our lives. Children were to learn from teachers; it was a good thing, and when we did well we went out of our way to acknowledge the teachers who helped us. That acknowledgement did not in any way diminish our accomplishment. We were taught, we learned, and we imbibed. We made the learning ours by taking it in and discovering our own ways of embodying and expressing it.

There were always a few students who were brought up to accomplish things only on their own. They believed that if they got help, they could not have any ownership over what they achieved. These few, though they may have had great teachers, “knew” that if they took in what a teacher taught and actually imbibed the knowledge, they could not take credit for whatever they did. Though surrounded by teachers, they were self-taught and even oppositional, so that they could not be accused of having taken any advice from anyone else. They succeeded solely on their own. Ultimately, they “won” by failing to learn.

Ironically, they learned this very refusal to take instruction from the most important teachers in their lives: their first caregivers, usually their parents. There is no escaping teachers.

Those of us who were willing to accept instruction found ourselves able to handle ever greater and deeper knowledge and a wider range of situations. We could actually apply the knowledge and ability we had gleaned from our teachers, and transfer our skills into all areas of our lives. And lo and behold, we could acknowledge the skills we had, because we were not running around trying to cover up where we got them.

There was no need for me and my fellow learners to hide our teachers. For thousands of years, teachers had been cherished and valuable, and for us they still were. We knew that without them we would be lost. We would be struggling with tasks we were so proud to be able to complete on our own—never realizing that those accomplishments were really elementary, and nothing to brag about.

A few years ago, I attended a graduation ceremony at a private high school. While students occupied the stage and gave self-congratulatory speeches, teachers went unacknowledged; they were not part of the ceremony—so completely disregarded that I could not even tell who they were. The ceremony catered entirely to the inflated self-esteem of the graduands.

With this sort of devaluing of teachers comes the destruction of future experts. The self-esteem of a child is so fragile because it has no true substance; it is just made up of a cluster of ideas. Adults tiptoe around these fragile egos, believing that is love, when if they truly loved their children they would equip them with skills for their lives. Instead, too many parents have backed down, leaving their children to education via video games, the entertainment industry and each other. Now, teachers have been encouraged to back down as well—and call it things like child-centered learning.

For my friends and me, child-centered learning would not have made sense. It would never have given us a chance in life. I at least knew that I knew little or nothing about life. I knew I was a child, and it was okay. Why would I want to collaborate with others in my same boat?

Thank God for my teachers. Thank God for every time they said, “No”. Thank God for when they said, “Do it again”. We were not allowed to become so ridiculously deluded, because no one tiptoed around our self-esteem.

My teachers all had teachers. They all came from lineages of one kind or another. At the supreme level, my Baba, Swami Muktananda, had Nityananda. Each was able to teach because he had been willing to seek out and accept instruction. We must be willing to do the same.

Mitigate….

 September 13, 2015

  Mitigate                  Reveal / shine light on

 Soften / lighten        Inflame  

We Are Always Choosing….

 September 6, 2015

We are always choosing. And by thinking we are not choosing, we are in fact choosing—choosing God or not, Love or not. By our very distractedness we are choosing. And if we occasionally think we choose God, we are fooling ourselves, just as when we exercise for ten minutes very intensely once a week, we can fool ourselves that we exercise enough. Somewhere in there we do know better.

By choosing God, I do not mean intellectually. Though the intellect is needed in the process of going to God, God is not a concept. Neither do I mean choosing emotionally, though the emotions are an important vehicle to be mastered and used. Nor do I mean physically, though our actions do aid us in the journey to God. In choosing, every vehicle has to be surrendered to God’s will, into God’s service, at all times. So we then choose to use our will to God’s purpose. We do this by resting in the Heart and letting God use us. We are then no longer the doer. God is the doer.

Our greatest sense of agency arises from choosing to surrender to God and letting God act through us. That is ultimate free will. But we have to be willing to let go of our identification with our “amazing” shrunken self. We are letting everything that is temporary be where it is, no big deal, with no attachment. When the small self stops thinking and choosing for itself, that is when there is a chance for God to take charge.

The belief that in order to make it in the world we cannot make it with God, and that in order to make it with God we can’t make it in the world, sets up a false dichotomy. There is no place where God is not. Therefore God is everywhere, on every level, no matter how deep or superficial. Whether we are aware of it or not, God is there in every moment and provides a lesson that when learned will bring us closer to Home. We have choice whether to learn the lesson or not. We choose.

If we are committed to being “good”, we cannot accept the misguided choices we have made. I hate mistakes, but am always thankful for them later, when I have learned so much from them. There is grace even in our errors and our crimes. We can’t let go of “righteousness” and become human until we recognize and accept our mistakes and learn our lessons. If we want grace, we have to own our past choices—not as an intellectual recognition, but as an experience.

Radhakrishnan, commenting on verse II.4.4 of Bṛhadaranyāka Upanishad, makes the difference clear: “It is said that some people are clever only at expounding, while others have the ability to practice what they learn. The hand carries the food to the mouth but only the tongue knows the flavors.” When people preach the Truth as a concept only, it can be interpreted as positive affirmations instead of choosing the Truth. The problem with “positive thinking” is that we are not just “thinking positive”, but actively trying to avoid something we perceive in ourselves to be “negative”. As a result of that choice, we will end up manifesting the very thing we wish to reject. What we run from, we run into.

Choose wisely. Because whether we realize it or not, at every moment we are making a choice.

The problem with “positive thinking”….

 September 6, 2015

The problem with “positive thinking” is that we are not just “thinking positive”, but actively trying to avoid something we perceive in ourselves to be “negative”.

Willingness to lose….

 September 6, 2015

  Willingness to lose              Win at all costs   

 Weak                                      Strong  

A Shaktipat experience….

 August 30, 2015

A Shaktipat experience is meant to shock the small self. When we make it into a concept, we render it impotent.

Melancholy….

 August 30, 2015

  Melancholy                    Content 

Conscious                        Oblivious

L&Q(8-22-15) PTSD….

 August 23, 2015

Rohini explains the often misunderstood opportunity presented by a shock to our system.

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We couldn’t just have one hummingbird. Elvis in his quiet imperial stance was not enough. We wanted more Elvises. The Guru grants what the Heart desires. We now have seven hummingbirds dancing off and on the deck, causing mischief and chaos.

Going out on the deck in the summer morning light and coolness to have a quiet breakfast has been our ritual. Lately we have been sharing our time with a few hummingbirds eating their endless series of meals. But today was filled with the chaos of seven hummingbirds clearly relating with each other—and showing no cooperation.

The seven daredevil, dive-bombing hummingbirds are more interested in attacking each other and whipping around than in serenely drinking nectar and quietly soaking in the day. They weave in and out, coming close to us, paying us no mind because they have important work to do: preventing any other hummingbird from going to a feeder. If a hummingbird gets the chance to drink, unbeknownst to him he is about to be crashed into by another. They plow into each other and pursue each other at ridiculous speeds.

Now we are reaching the end of summer. It soon will be time to fly south. These birds need to be eating and conserving their energy for a rather long journey. But that strategy would require consciousness. They would have to be aware. It appears that they are aware of each other. Are they, or is this just a focus born of instinct? Cooperation and coordination at the feeder would be so easy; there is plenty of nectar for all. And yet this does not occur. Ants coordinate and cooperate. Why don’t these birds?

We tend to give animals too much credit. Life force is running through them. They have feelings, some of them. They form ties, some of them. But is this just the nature of the particular animal? Each having certain capacities? And when nurtured, those capacities shine forth? As humans, we have a gift and a curse: thinking. It will separate us from the rest of the world and bring us together with it. The Consciousness that feeds us brings us to an awareness of choice. We have options.

I am not so sure our hummingbird friends have options. Last summer, Elvis was such a monk, or rather an ascetic. But now, in community, the hummingbirds demonstrate individuality and warring just for warring, with no viable reason other than instinct.

I feel so lucky to have a human birth because I do have choice. I can consciously choose the Love running through every fiber of the world. I could, but do not have to, reject that which is Real and True. The hummingbirds have no choice. And though they look free and fun and amazing as they veer around and bang into each other, they can’t help themselves. We can.

It is easy to….

 August 23, 2015

It is easy to say “I accept this”. But who is doing the accepting?

Natural….

 August 23, 2015

  Natural                    Artificial 

Unconscious              Highly evolved  

What the small self….

 August 16, 2015

What the small self calls love is really only power and pleasure

Guest Blog by Stacey Lambrow: Finding My Life….

 August 16, 2015

If I had chosen to live my idea of a normal life I would be uneducated, unemployed, and entirely dependent on a man who hates me. I would be living a miserable life. Since I chose to listen to, and learn from, Rohini, I have a great career working for one of the world’s leading rare book, manuscript, and 19th-century photography dealers. Because of Rohini, I now love my work, and love my life.

When I met Rohini, I did not speak, eat, or work. I barely existed. I could not feel anything but occasional, though severe, pangs of anxiety quelled with cigarettes and endless walking.

Back then, my job as the owner’s daughter at a shipping container company was to check truck drivers in and out at the entrance gate of the facility. I would record what container and chassis came in and what container and chassis went out. When I showed up to do the job, I would tell the machine operators—Big Mike, Little Mike, Bud, Pat, and Jeff—over the CB what shipping container the truck driver was picking up. Once the box was loaded, I would sign the truck driver out. I did this from a filthy, smoke-filled trailer. The inside walls were covered with Penthouse centerfolds, fly tape, and a thick black grime. It was a loud, hazardous place with heavy machinery, trucks, and periodic brawls. I was the only woman working with the “yard dogs” at the gate. But I thought of myself as tough enough.

I had stopped going to school when I was 12, and officially dropped out at 16. I saw myself as strong and self-reliant, not ignorant and dependent. A friend of mine, Bear, would say, “I would never let my daughter work here.” Now I understand what he was saying, but back then I thought I was tougher than most daughters. I never considered there was nowhere else for me to go, that I was only there because my father knew I was too unskilled and undisciplined to get a job. I did not realize that the guys working at my father’s company put up with me because they had to; I was the owner’s daughter.

Rohini taught me the internal practice. She helped me go into my Heart and still so that I could see reality. She saw to it that I confronted the prison I had built for myself, that I acknowledged how I chose to cripple myself. Accepting what Rohini showed me was brutal. To say my life was turned upside down, or capsized, when Rohini showed me the Truth feels like a massive understatement. I had no idea who I was. But I did know that as I faced the truth, I was more authentic than I had ever been in my life.

Throughout this awakening, Rohini showed me Love. She generously supported me. I went to college, earning a Bachelor’s degree in English. This was something I had never dreamed I could do. Because of school, I started to develop my own interests, and I went on to earn a Master’s degree in Liberal Arts. Rohini guided me towards true independence. She helped me learn tangible skills that made me hirable. Rohini taught me to have something to offer the world. She told me to get a job at the business where I still work today. I fought her. I did not want to work. A big piece of me was still attached to being taken care of by a husband, or by my father, but eventually I surrendered and did what Rohini told me to do.

With persistence, I got the job. At first, I packed up boxes and did simple tasks a few days a week. I also transported important and valuable books. One of my big life lessons showed up as I was transporting priceless American historical artifacts to an Ivy League University. Lincoln will always be powerful symbol for me.

Of course, I am still learning from that lesson and many others. I now work closely with some of the greatest collections of 19th-century photography in the world, and books and manuscripts that will only reside in the custody of top institutions and elite private collections. Because of my work, I travel throughout America and Europe meeting with museum curators and leading experts in my field. The person I was when I met my Guru did not have the capacity to dream of the life I am living today.

The lessons Rohini teaches are hard, but learning them always leads to an expansion, and a deeper and fuller experience of Love.

Thank you, Rohini, for guiding me to the Heart, and showing me Love.

Love….

 August 16, 2015

Love                 Hate 

Promiscuous     Focused  

Love Is Off the Grid….

 August 9, 2015

Until we have experienced our true Self and indisputably know we are not our small self, we do not have an opportunity to embody real Love. Even then we will have to be vigilant not to “forget” and return to our “normal” life. Knowing the difference between who we are and the small self allows us to choose; we can choose Love rather than just have fleeting glimpses of it, believing that is all there can be. Love is off the grid. It is beyond the dichotomies, beyond the foursquares which make up the grid. Love emanates from the playing field of the Heart. If we are clear and conscious, Love will inform all we do. Love will be the expression of who we are.

Until we are committed to Love, power and pleasure will be directing us in all we do. We won’t think this to be true because we will use the word “love” many times to describe feelings and actions that in fact have different signifiers. Love is reserved for the experience that is beyond signification, beyond thought and emotion; Love is Universal Subjective Being. With Love, we experience the unity in the diversity of the world. With Love there is All for All. With Love, there are no weapons; it requires us to give up our weapons. With Love, relating would have qualities such as these:

Willingness to lose

Agency

Appropriate care

Harmony

Resolution

Wholeness

Stillness

Nonattachment

Transparency

Safety

Generosity

Want best for all

Respect

Joy

Unity in diversity

Compassion

Empathy

Independence

What the small self calls love is really only power and pleasure. In ordinary relationships, power and pleasure will be present in different proportions. A certain relationship could be comprised of 70% power and 30% pleasure. Depending on the people involved, this will or will not be sustainable. From what we have observed we will say “they have a great relationship”, only to find out a short time later they have split up. We will need to examine what we believed was at the core of that relationship, what was actually there, and what qualities were being used to express that core.

Power / pleasure is on the grid. The love that people generally settle for is the emotion that is the opposite of hate. Remember, real Love is completely off the grid. Our small self, the grid, has to lose if we want the opportunity to Love.

At the beginning of a relationship, often it will be as if a portal has opened to a new dimension and Love is everywhere. Because we are not conscious, we are unable to maintain it. Either gradually or abruptly the access is shut, and what had appeared as universal and all-pervasive has now shrunk and is stuffed into the constricted life of the small self. We do not know how to open it again. We are left with memories that we cling to, and we accept the realities of life. The survival skills and qualities that we have developed are again operational, and an old life we had thought was over resurfaces yet again.

We are on the grid. We will take care of ourselves using anything to gain or maintain power and pleasure, hoping those around us will support our choices. Every action—even the slightest—will be infused with power if that is what motivates us. The small self calls power and pleasure love. Real Love will be seen as superficial and lacking because it is not invested in power.

The qualities of power will unconsciously answer these questions: what weapon do I use, and how do I leverage using it? Below are some obvious components of power:

Judging

Superficializing

Withholding

Crushing

Wearing down

Putting down

Wounded/wounding

Playing the victim

Acting superior

Healer/enabler

Guilt tripping

“Conering”

Controlling

Cornering

Dismissive

Flattering/ingratiating

No agency

Controlling Info

No responsibility

Blaming

Being blameless

Being needed

Needy

Being ill

Overcompensating

Self-marketing

Isolating / protecting

Standoffishness

Colonizing space

Withdrawal

“Sneakretive”

Fuming

Winning

Obtuseness

Seducing

Undermining

Keeping secrets

Lying / deceiving

Diverting

Being annoying

The qualities of pleasure—which complements power—will unconsciously answer one question: how can I feel good?

Indulging

Numbing

Gluttony

Lust

Greed

Chasing beauty

Vanity

Appetites

Coddling

Mmmmmmmm…

Fulfill sense desires

Lost in others

Self pitying

Guilt tripping

Wallowing

Worrying

Processing

Sleeping

Exercising

Shopping

Complaining

Commiserating

Unlike power and pleasure, Love does not go under any disguises. If our eyes are open, it is always apparent. But we will only see it clearly and live it fully if we choose to surrender to who we truly are.

Until we are….

 August 9, 2015

Until we are committed to Love, power and pleasure will be directing us in all we do.

Cave in /worn down….

 August 9, 2015

  Cave in / worn down                   Steadfast / strong 

Soft / generous                               Hard / callous  

Guru Pūrnimā….

 August 2, 2015

The Guru’s moon. While Baba was in his body, Guru Pūrnimā, the full moon in July, was celebrated with thousands of people paying their respects to Baba. At this time of year, Ganeshpuri experiences the monsoon. We would hear the rain coming and run under the overhangs on the buildings. The weather may have been brutal, but it did not stop anyone from having the opportunity to pranam to Baba.

Now that Baba is no longer in his body, Guru Pūrnimā is not only about remembering the times we were with Baba. This is a time to revitalize our sādhana. This is a time to sharpen our awareness that Baba is alive and in everyone. This is a time to examine whether Baba is in every room of our houses.

The more I practice, the more I experience that Baba is alive. When I say practice, I do not mean the regular chanting and puja we performed in the ashram. Practice, for me, can be and is performed wherever I am; practice is internal. After Baba took mahasamadhi, I waited until Ian was born in Bombay and for him to get strong enough to travel to return to America. Once back in the States, I found myself in an environment that did not encourage or support any of the culture we had been immersed in all those years with Baba.

Whatever God does, He does for good. Baba was always pushing me to learn not to entangle internal practice with outside action. He was always teaching me not to attach my vehicles to the practice. Being in a place that did not accept the outer expressions of sādhana encouraged me to hone my inner practice. No matter what I was doing or saying, I worked to practice.

So as the Guru Pūrnimās passed, Baba became more and more alive for me. He is still here for all of us. He has not left. In the last fifteen years I have been able once again to openly acknowledge my Guru, Swami Muktānanda. Baba does not need me to praise him; this is for me. Acknowledging the one that gave me life and showed me the way back to God is for every disciple. Baba modeled that for us.

Baba always gave credit to his Guru, Nityānanda. We are to do the same; we are to honor our Guru. Focusing on who gave us the most important gift helps us from losing that very gift. The small self wants to take ownership of what each of us has received. When that happens, the gift is made shallow and empty: what Baba gave us becomes a shrunken memory rather than a vital truth.

With this Guru Pūrnimā let us share with each other the Truth that Baba shared and continues to share. God dwells with us as us. God dwells within the Heart. We are to rest there and emanate from there. There is no better tribute to the Guru than to imbibe and manifest what he taught. Baba loved each of us; we were to be ourselves. We are to continue to remove the obstacle of wrong understanding, of wrong identification with the small self, so that we truly live how our Guru wants us to live: in God, in Guru, as Love.

Focusing on who gave….

 August 2, 2015

Focusing on who gave us the most important gift helps us from losing that very gift. The small self wants to take ownership of what each of us has received. When that happens, the gift is made shallow and empty: what Baba gave us becomes a shrunken memory rather than a vital truth.

Righteously indignant….

 August 2, 2015

  Righteously indignant                      Nonattached 

Morally discerning                            Morally oblivious  

Guest Blog by David Soud: Power and Hate….

 July 26, 2015

Rohini’s last three blogs have all addressed the same dialectic: Love v. power. It seems simple enough, especially when Rohini lays out the ways in which we confuse the two. But one thing that has stuck with me about these blogs is that “Love v. power” is actually much more true, much more accurate, than “Love v. hate.” Because one way that we refuse to acknowledge our own hate, both as individuals and as a society, is by misconceiving it.

Not long ago, I listened as an elderly woman delivered a seemingly dispassionate inventory of people who had figured importantly in her life. It was a litany of hate, couched in terms of those who were “strong” and those who were “weak.” It never entered her mind to consider anyone else’s kindness, or generosity, or decency, or faith. Power trumped every other value. The woman reminded me of the Nuremberg trials, in which some of the Nazi war criminals set forth a similar vision of life with the same matter-of-fact sense of certitude. No fiery denunciations, no glacial lack of feeling—just a fixation on power, wherever one might believe it to lie. And, as Rohini has pointed out, Love may be the ground of all that exists and the greatest power there is, but power as the small self conceives it is the negation of Love.

Where does that leave hate? Especially since the Holocaust, psychologists and social scientists and cultural theorists of all kinds have provided countless definitions for and explanations of hate. Most of those approaches view hate as some form of projection.

But all such models get hate wrong. They construe it as a consequence of something else, even if that something else is a fixation on power. In that calculus, if you are drawn to power, then you end up hating, and hate is evident in your actions. But what I realized after reflecting on that woman’s remarks is that looking for hate in any sort of outward manifestation is looking in the wrong place. Because hate is nothing more and nothing less than the choice to see the world in terms of power relations rather than in Love.

And so all our customary remedies for hate are too little, too late. Hate has to be seen not merely in moral or psychological terms but as a spiritual orientation. Love moves all things toward fullness, toward resolution, toward God. But the small self twists that inward motion toward fullness into a desire for power. And the only kinds of power available to the small self are those that mean separateness, involution, forgetfulness of the Real. So, at its core, the business of the small self is hate, and every small self is murderous.

One other contemporary writer to grasp Rohini’s point here is René Girard. For Girard, a social order of individuals (read: small selves) is locked in an endlessly imitative and competitive pursuit of desires. Everything is seen in terms of power relations. To prevent this battle royal of mimetic desire from escalating into violent anarchy, a scapegoat is chosen as a way to redirect and focus all that hate and violence. When the scapegoat is killed, the violence is temporarily purged. The social order is therefore founded on murder. For Girard, a Christian, Christ’s self-sacrifice on the Cross exposed the hate at the heart of the social order, and showed us the only way to transcend it: by absolute surrender to Love. There is no other way.

What Girard doesn’t tell us is how we can go about surrendering to Love. For that, we have to do the hard work of anatomizing and dismembering the small self. And we can’t do that without the expert guidance of spiritual teachers like Rohini.

We all want to see hate from the wrong side. We want to see it as an emotion, or a set of behaviors. We want to see spectacular manifestations of hate, which reinforce our superficial, self-absolving view of it. But the truth is that at each moment we must choose between Love and power, and every time we choose to see life in terms of power, we are already practicing hate. The rest is just knock-on effects. And until we get this—not intellectually, but experientially—we will continue to twist and desiccate and make unrecognizable the Love that is our true nature, and our birthright.

No one ever wants….

 July 26, 2015

No one ever wants what they actually need.

Wounded….

 July 26, 2015

  Wounded               Healed / whole 

Cared for                 Ignored  

In order to heal….

 July 19, 2015

In order to heal, the wounded self has to sacrifice its woundedness. It has to give up being wounded, to throw down its weapon. It has to truly want to be whole. The only way is to give up both being healed and being wounded.

The Power of Woundedness….

 July 19, 2015

We are becoming a world of wounded people. In the United States alone, there is an entire complex of industries, helping professions, and self-help promoters that profit from encouraging us to identify with woundedness. The words “health” and “wholeness” are thrown around, but the actual focus is on woundedness. This “healing” industry preserves our wounds; it feeds off our wounds and disregards our souls. In truth, we have a choice: we can heal our wounds or lick our wounds. The small self prefers to lick its wounds.

A person wed to this form of self-centeredness has a wound that he does not want to heal. It is his tool to manipulate others. There is no way the wound can be healed because he does not want to heal. His power and control are based on the wound. If he were healed, he would lose power. He may speak of “love”, but for him love is power; real Love does not enter into his calculations. He therefore looks for someone who would like to play the healer and then tortures them. He toys with the idea of being healed but will never allow it to happen. That is why, when he encounters someone who truly Loves, he will fight them.

When love shows up, this person presents the wound, and the would-be healer reads the wound as a wound and not a weapon. The healer will assume that the wounded of course wants to be healed. The wounded one will say he does and feed the lover with words like “I want to change”, “I will do anything”, “I am trying”, and “I don’t know how”. But the truth is they are roping in the sucker. They have no intention of getting rid of the wound. The sucker’s role is to be always willing to take the blame for the lack of healing.

In moments when the wound seems to be healing, we all are thrilled for the wounded person, believing that they, too, are thrilled. They do not see it the same way. In their eyes, they have lost their power and are determined to get life back to their “normal”. Right around the corner from that wonderful moment is the lash that puts all back to their right order. They win. That is all there is: winning. The lover, the enemy, has lost yet again.

Having injured those who love him, the wounded yet again resorts to the leverage of woundedness. He cries, “But can’t you see how bad I feel? I am wounded more than anyone”. His hurt trumps any consideration of what he’s done to others. The healers accept this, and feel bad for the wounded one. And so the dance continues. The wounded self’s belief is that if he is healed, he will then be ignored. The healers get to feel virtuous in their forbearance. They also feel they could have done more.

The wounded manipulator has to make the choice to be healthy and give up power. Either we wake up or the story never changes. Saying that we’re all flawed and apologizing for every injury resolves nothing—it is a cop-out. Only through accountability to ourselves and others does anything change.

In order to heal, the wounded self has to sacrifice its woundedness. It has to give up being wounded, to throw down its weapon. It has to truly want to be whole. The only way is to get off the grid completely.

Here are two foursquares that will help move us toward resolution:

Wounded

Healed / whole

Cared for

Ignored

Wounded

Healed / whole

Powerful / winner

No leverage / loser

By definition, the small self cannot be whole. The “whole” small self is still shrunken. We have to keep removing every obstacle that blocks us from our True nature, which is Love.

Wounded….

 July 19, 2015

  Wounded                             Healed / whole 

Powerful / winner                 No leverage / loser  

Power Hungry, Powerful….

 July 12, 2015

When the motivation is Love with no twists and turns, then everyone is Loved. Then every action is for everyone’s good.

When we can tell the difference between Love and power, we can see that the Guru actually wants us not just to love, but to be Love. But as long as we are attached to and identified with the small self and resistant to Love, the true Guru will look the same as the false. We can’t see the difference because we cannot discern motivation.

The true Guru asks you to side against your wrong understanding and become true to yourself. That means you have to disregard your “normal”. “Normal” actions, “normal” relations, and “normal” motivations all have to be left behind. There has to be a completely new way of approaching everything in the world. When we approach the world in the same way the Guru does, everything is being approached from Love. Love opens us up to new solutions and resolutions, and expands our awareness, which is filled with possibilities. Truth expands and brings the possibility of joy for all. This will not be the case for people wed to their shrunken selves. They will be too busy pursuing power and calling it something else, such as “love” or “good”. The irony of power is that it brings shrunkenness and misery, not the greatness it seems to promise.

For all of us, we have to be willing to lose: to lose to the Truth, to Love, to the Guru, to God, to the Self. When we lose in this way, we actually win, and so do the people around us. When we lose in this way, we love and are loved. When we “win”, we create hurt, alienation, agitation, separateness, emptiness, irritation, superficiality, anger and hate. Others are hurt because our motivation is not resolution, it is unwittingly destruction.

The small self and you cannot coexist in harmony. The small self only brings misery; when you are identified with the small self, your idea of harmony is then misery. For you to be in harmony with God, with Love, you have to give up your attachment and commitment to the small self. For this work, you need the guidance of the Guru; the Guru shines a light on our delusions and attachments, and leads us to accept and transcend them.

When the Guru frees us, our lives will be turned upside down; because the Guru’s motivation is Love, the outcome is always freeing, whether or not the disciple sees it at first. Life will be better for the person, not more miserable. Externally, the situation may remain difficult, but the experience of those difficulties, and the reasons for them, change. However uncomfortable they may continue to be, these difficulties now serve to show us our remaining attachments and motivations, so we are now able to see that there are lessons to be learned. Through them, life is teaching us for our own good.

The Guru frees us to live a life filled with the many textures and layers available to all of us. We look at a scene and see the fullness and Love rather than the most superficial and empty elements. The hurt dissolves. We are Lovers, Loving the Real and knowing reality.

Too often, complaining….

 July 12, 2015

Too often, complaining is caring and connecting. That’s how we share. So if everything is harmonious, we’re no longer connected.

Disregarded….

 July 12, 2015

  Disregarded                          Appreciated 

Kept honest                             Fawned upon  

Love and Independence….

 July 5, 2015

Rohini explains true independence and its relation to Love.

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Love and Independence….

 July 5, 2015

The Guru brings us independence from the tyranny of the small self. Independence means that we know who we are and know we are not the small self. We are freed from the constructs that have kept us locked in the smallness of an idea. We are now free to act and relate with the world without being identified with any of it. The Guru opens our eyes to the truth of our wrong understanding. The Guru shines a light so that we can move forward toward God. To receive what the Guru has for us, we must be willing to accept and own what we have chosen. We have to accept that though we thought we had chosen Love, we had not.

In the Absolute, all is Love, no matter what. In relative reality, Love gets twisted. Hate is Love in a twisted form. Hate is not and cannot be its own thing.

To get to know Love, we must first be able to distinguish all the gradations of love. We must know the whole spectrum of Love. From there, we must clearly choose Love and not twisted love.

Most people can’t discern between power and Love. They confuse the two because they live in their heads and therefore cannot discern. Adoration, which comes from the same motivation as power, is mistaken for Love. But indulging the small self is not Love. Because we are trained not to listen to our real experience, we can be manipulated and not notice it. We will call someone or some action “loving”, when it is actually “loving” the ego only.

When we are “loving” our action is based on:

Enabling the other’s ego

Indulging the other’s ego

Deceiving the other’s ego

Our reasoning will then be based on:

Blindness

Denial

Mitigation

Having power as our motivation skews everything away from Love. We adjust our labels to accommodate our behavior. Then everything is “in harmony” and “makes total sense” – so nothing needs to change. Our self-indulgent behavior is a constant that controls our lives and prevents us from experiencing the freedom within. We persuade ourselves that our ego’s ability to adapt everything to its purposes is the virtue of mental flexibility.

Love is then seen as just about power. Everyone does for themselves and steps on others. It is about ego management:

1. How we relate with others.

Police others’ egos and motives. Don’t feed someone else’s ego or power. No swelled heads here. Make sure no one is too big for their britches. Then we think, “If this is what the Guru does and this is what I do, then I am a guru”.

2. How we relate with ourselves.

Take care of yourself. Take what you need and look after yourself (take care of yourself and don’t feed someone else’s ego). Indulge yourself.

3. How others are to relate with us.

Gratification. Adoration. Niceness. Enabling. Propping your ego. Your ego should be propped up.

Indulging the small self is not Love. The small self will not indulge others at expense of its own care. If I give you what you ask for, I am supporting and validating your ego. If you give the other person what they actually ask for, you will be indulging their ego. So if you are to be “loving”, and because you believe you are “loving”, you will do everything not to fulfill a person’s sincere request.

If I operate according to this system, then I know that the only way I get my needs met is if I sneak. I also expect others to fulfill my needs; they have to “know” what I need. And then I get angry when they don’t, and then don’t meet my needs.

To love yourself is to seek what is truly best for yourself. But a “good” fake guru encourages you to side against yourself in favor of them. Everyone sides against themselves in favor of the other person. That’s called “surrender”, but it’s actually enslavement. This is one way we get to maintain our small self.

For people who think power is Love, spiritual practice is punishment.

Instead of practicing, these people want the Guru to bail them out, to fix them and make their problems go away. But they know better than to feed the Guru’s ego. They do not realize the Guru does not need ego strokes. Giving and showing appreciation to the teacher is for the student’s benefit. It is an opportunity to express real Love. The lover learns how to Love by having someone to love.

When power is the mistaken goal, the one who initiates is the loser. So the disciple who goes to the Guru and appreciates the Guru is a loser. The Guru has to go to the people, if the Guru is to be seen as “loving”. The Guru Loves, and so sees through this game and does not play it.

The true Lover is beyond power, beyond winning and losing. Everyone has to be willing to be a loser in order to win.

In the Absolute….

 July 5, 2015

In the Absolute, all is Love, no matter what. In relative reality, Love gets twisted. Hate is Love in a twisted form. Hate is not and cannot be its own thing.

Whiny….

 July 5, 2015

  Whiny                                   Faces truth 

Feeling one’s pain                   Belittling one’s feelings  

Love: the True and the False….

 June 28, 2015

Baba used to say “Thank God for false gurus.” Why? Because they serve as foils by which we can recognize the true. I never questioned this. Baba had me take care of the false gurus that came to see him. He taught me to discern the difference between these false guides and Baba. These people had trappings, disciples, protocols, rituals, all of which meant little or nothing. Most of them also had shakti, energy that emanated from their bodies. People get swayed by the energy they feel coming from a guru. Clearly, since all these people had shakti, the energy does not make the teacher real. Of course, Baba had and has tremendous shakti, but he taught me that shakti does not make a Guru.

What made the difference between these people and Baba was Love. They all had power and lacked Love. There was never a sense that they wanted what was best for their followers. So what is really clear to me now is that false gurus are the counterfeits that show us what is truly real—if we have the discernment and discrimination to see. We have to know the difference between what is false and what is real.

Ignorance is what causes us not to be able to tell the difference between the true and the false. Ignorance, according to Patanjali’s Yoga Sūtras, is taking the false to be Real, the temporary to be permanent, the impure to be pure, the non-self to be the Self. Once we are ignorant, we then lose our subject in the object we have mistaken to be real. From there, we are attracted to actions and lifestyles based on our false self. We are repulsed by all that does not agree with who we think we are. And finally we cling to this false life and fear we will die if we lose it.

There is a difference between what people say and where they are internally. When we try to forgive someone for having wronged us before we have reached a place where we are truly able to forgive, we actually prevent resolution. We perpetuate disharmony between people. Denial or resignation is not love of ourselves or others. If our actions do not head toward resolution, we are not going toward Love.

Power is not love; however, Love is the most powerful force there is. Ultimately Love will prevail. Pleasure is not love; however, Love is bliss. We have to wake up and discern the difference between Love and hate, between the real and the false, between resolution and destruction.

If we do not discern clearly, we will be blindsided. Unfortunately most people’s idea of sādhana is to be blissfully unconscious. Blissful ignorance will bring destruction and will be repelled by real Love. Love is uncomfortable for people who are attached to hate. They will misread the situation.

Because Love goes to resolution and dissolves hate, it can be seen as destructive by those who hate. Recently in Charleston, South Carolina in the United States, a young man went into a church and sat in on their Bible study. “After joining them for some period of time, he obviously became very aggressive and violent,” said Sylvia Johnson, a relative of a victim. In the midst of Love, this young man felt hate. Hate moves to destruction. He then opened fire and killed nine people.

Love always goes to resolution, but we have to discern what true resolution is. Enabling does not resolve; it is not Love. Enabling encourages destruction.

Baba said: “If someone asks me, why did man take birth? Then I will say, only for the sake of love….Supreme Bliss pervades everywhere, but man is not aware of this, and that is why instead of having love he has the opposite of love, and that is agitation and anxiety. Instead of experiencing love, he experiences sadness. But he experiences sadness only because he doesn’t recognize the true love inside himself.” Love brings us to real security. Outer security can be taken away easily, but inner security is always there to bring solace.

What Baba is really pointing out is that Love is our true nature. In verse II.4.5 of the Brihad-āranyaka Upanishad Yājñavalkya explains to his wife Maitreyī the reality of the Self. “Verily, not for the sake of all is all dear but all is dear for the sake of the Self. Verily, Maitreyī, it is the Self that should be seen, heard of, reflected on and meditated upon. Verily, by the seeing of, by the hearing of, by the thinking of, by the understanding of the Self, all this is known.” True resolution ultimately brings us to the Self of All.

In our daily life resolution is working so that everyone is in harmony, loved, and headed toward what is truly best for each person. If we are not working from and for Love, then the outcome is hurt, alienation, agitation, separateness, emptiness, irritation, shallowness, superficiality, anger and hate. These will be the true goal, though we may say our intention was love. We are then not willing to see the true from the false. We have to want to Love so that we can resolve ourselves. We resolve ourselves through Love.

If we want to love, we first must be opened to Love by a moment of Grace. Then we have to confess—to own and accept—that we actually do not love, and do not know what Love is, because our “normal” has nothing to do with real Love. We have to discern Love from the false. Whatever we have called “love,” we must call what it truly is. Then we must reap the past and earn the present, so that we can Love.

Love smashes….

 June 28, 2015

Love smashes the ego.

Goody two-shoes….

 June 28, 2015

Goody two-shoes                    Free / spontaneous / fun 

Self-contained                         Wild / fun at others’ expense  

The Risk of Love….

 June 21, 2015

“If you don’t love, you’re dead. If you do, they’ll kill you.” -Herbert McCabe

Love is everyone’s goal whether they know it or not. Love comes with a risk because until we actively choose this goal we will be only moving toward twisted love which is always tainted with hate. The people who Love are willing to Love no matter what.

So who are these people who embody Love? Swami Muktananda was one of those people. He Loved and everything that manifested out of him was Love. There were no twists and turns. Just Love coming through and manifesting as Love. Wild, uncanny, spontaneous, and always clean.

This is what I witnessed. Some people may say I was, and am, blind; I am okay with being called blind. In all my years Baba never let me down. Even today I feel his guidance through the mundane and the sublime. Life around a great being does not always make sense. Reason was so off the point. I went to Baba as a well educated person, a person trained and disciplined. I went to Baba for the internal practice. I was not looking for another external structure. He gave me everything I asked. I am so grateful.

Love is not reasonable; it is True. Love fulfills everything so the person who embodies Love is always fulfilling every moment, every event, every situation. We in our ignorance only see the superficial and miss the underlying purpose. Love is always moving to resolution, to harmony, to God.

Baba was always moving us to being resolved within ourselves by being our Self. That meant that events and actions had to occur that were not nice in order to illuminate what was in each of us. Baba, because of who he was, was always willing to play and orchestrate the lila that would shine that light on our delusion, so even we could see it and then choose to go with Baba and let the obstacle to Love go.

Baba left his body in October 1982. He has never left me. The Guru loves his disciples, and the bond is strong. The disciple may leave, but if he were to turn around the Guru would be there. Baba wanted what was best for each of us. There were people who did not always agree with him. They wanted their individuality to shine. For them, Baba was power, not Love. From the head, love is power.

If you love—if you have love—people who don’t want love will see you as possessing some kind of power, and they will want to take it from you. When they realize they can’t take it, they will try to crush or humiliate you to restore their sense of their own power.

The small self is always looking to recruit allies in its war against Love. If someone doesn’t buy its con, the small self will only see that person as having been suckered by some other con. In other words, people will see me as weak, and conned by Baba. But there is a problem with that line of reasoning: Baba Loved. People say, “But Baba told different people different things”. That was how Baba expressed Love for each person, to bring to light what each person needed to see. What was in each of us that would cause us not to see his Love? Hate.

Baba was always moving us toward resolution; his Love used whatever device was needed. And depending on where the person was, Baba was subtle or really blunt. The hate and the twisted love inform each of us until they are resolved back to God. Baba was and is always shining the light on our separateness, so that we see it for what it is: selfish individuality. Then he is there with us, encouraging us to choose life instead of death, to surrender to Love instead of hate.

Most people’s idea….

 June 21, 2015

Most people’s idea of sadhana is to be blissfully unconscious.

Arrogantly ignorant….

 June 21, 2015

  Arrogantly ignorant                         Humble learner 

Stand your ground                            Impressionable  

Guest Blog by Ian Ralby: Living in the Zone….

 June 14, 2015

For ten years, I was a competitive springboard diver. In fact, it was competition that got me into diving, rather than a desire to be a diver. When I was little, I used to compete all the time – even when my fellow competitors didn’t know they were in a race. “I win,” I would declare to my rather confused and understandably annoyed younger brother. I had finished making my bed or tying my shoes or getting dressed before he had, never having bothered to tell him we were competing.

By the time I was nine, this deceitful form of competition had become so prevalent that my mother gave me an ultimatum. I had until the end of that particular day to decide what sport I was going to take up, and I had to take it up as competitively as possible. We had just joined a pool, so that afternoon I joined both the swim team and the diving team. While swimming failed to catch my passion, my seemingly innate desire to fly meant that I fell in love with the strange sport that required me to throw myself off a fiberglass board and complete various tricks before trying to enter the water without making a splash. Not only did I love my initial experience of diving; I showed some promise, winning a state title my rookie summer. I was hooked.

Within a year, I had qualified for the East Coast Championships in my age group. This first major competition, which took place in Moultrie, Georgia, (and which thankfully excused me from playing a tree with one line in my school’s production of Robin Hood) was the first of many long journeys I would take for the sport. It was also where I established myself as a typical head case. After all the hype, all the prep, all the expense and all the driving, I dove the worst I probably ever had and finished dead last. And so diving began to transition for me from being a fun activity in which I could productively channel my competitiveness to being a forum in which I could work out and hopefully learn all sorts of broader life lessons. It also became the forum in which I began to work with my mother most directly.

When I was little, my mother was my mommy – she loved me and cared for me, and in return I loved her dearly. But diving provided the fulcrum by which she turned into my coach and my teacher. With a background in dance, Tai Chi Chuan, Alexander Technique and biomechanics, she quickly picked up the more technical and physical aspects of diving. Before long, she was a certified coach with USA Diving, working not just with me, but the Olympic Diving Team at the International Swimming Hall of Fame. What people – particularly the likes of seven-time head Olympic Coach Ron O’Brien and other major figures in the sport – quickly recognized, however, was that she was able to coach divers on more than just the technical and physical aspects of the sport. Her years as a disciple of Swami Muktananda had given her the ability to help others redirect themselves internally. Fiercely committed to being a head case, I proved a terrible advertisement for her abilities which, notwithstanding my own intransigence, nevertheless shone through.

And while I was always battling the mental aspects of the sport, I did have some success. I accumulated state titles, performed reasonably well from time to time at Junior Olympic meets and became well known in the mid-Atlantic, albeit as a hit-or-miss diver. My mother’s instructions – perhaps un-motherly given the normal concerns parents have with their children throwing themselves off diving boards – were actually quite simple. Let go of my thoughts and fears, use my will to put my attention in the center of my chest at the core of my being and just dive. Yet I resisted. Fiercely.

Immortalized on film was an incident which epitomized my self-sabotaging form of rebellion. After several instances of my trademark balking – starting the approach for a dive but stopping short of leaving the board – I was standing, poised to do a dive well within my ability. Each time I balked, my mother had said “Get out of your head.” And I rebelliously refused. Finally, she said – and it is audible on the film – “Stay in your head,” and I instantly did the dive. In retrospect, I honestly can’t believe how patient she was with me given how annoying I was.

When I was thirteen, I had an experience that I have revisited countless times and will revisit for the rest of my life. At a meet in Pittsburgh at which qualification for Nationals was at stake, for whatever reason I finally followed my mother’s instructions. I let go of everything, used my will to put my attention in the center of my chest at the core of my being, and just dove. For the first time, I found myself in “the zone.” Sportsmen often talk about this place where activity is effortless, consciousness is expanded, time is slow, and everything is both blissful and calm. I was in the zone for not just one dive, but the whole meet. And every coach came up to my mother and asked what she had done, as I dove better than I ever had and qualified with a high place for Nationals.

It was great, and wonderful. And I hated it. I had lost control. I could hardly remember any of my dives; only the experience of calm and bliss. My mind could not stand it. It had been ignored and shut down through that entire meet and it was determined to regain its authority. Sadly, it did so with a vengeance at Nationals and it was years before I experienced the zone to that degree again.

Diving was never really about diving for me. For all the conference titles, accolades and failures, the real purpose of diving was to teach me about life. Years later, I had a second sporting career playing lacrosse – a violent, full-contact field sport that could not be more different from diving. By the time I took up lacrosse, I had learned a lot more from my mother about what I had experienced in Pittsburgh more than ten years prior. So getting in the zone for lacrosse was far less elusive for me than it was for diving. And while my lacrosse days ended with a serious shoulder injury five years ago and no sport has taken its place, I actually find the zone more achievable now than ever.

The freeing experience in Pittsburgh, as well as many more in both diving and lacrosse, actually had nothing to do with the sport I was engaged in at the time. It had to do with where I was internally. For years, I was committed to my mind and the thoughts it generated, and I used that commitment to fight my mother’s coaching and teaching. Pittsburgh was a glimpse for me into what she was offering – an alternative and far more satisfying way of approaching the world.

Only now, nearly twenty years later, has the balance tipped to where I would rather experience that effortless activity, expanded consciousness, slowed time and pervading bliss and calm than to have my mind control everything. And only now am I really discovering that the experience of letting go and willing myself into the core of my being has nothing to do with a sport or any activity at all. It is my choice, and I can choose it all the time. When I am giving a talk, writing an analysis, negotiating an agreement, cooking a meal, cleaning my room, or even just sitting quietly, I can choose to be in the zone. Admittedly, I am far from the point where I have wrested control away from my mind enough to make that choice consistently and stay there all the time. But I know that it is a choice and I know how to choose it.

The zone is not the exclusive purview of sportsmen. While elite sports often afford athletes the discipline and intensity to let go and experience the zone, it is their internal state rather than their physical pursuits that produce that experience. Anyone who has experienced the zone – whether in sport, music, dance, or combat – would be crazy not to want it all the time. But most don’t realize that living in the zone is a possibility, and the controlling nature of the mind certainly works to obscure that reality.

Even out of the zone, I could, at times, be a decent diver or lacrosse player. Even out of the zone I can be a competent lawyer, strategist, analyst, negotiator, public speaker or writer. But my experience of life is so greatly heightened by choosing to be in the zone that it is worth the effort to continue to discipline my mind and keep making that choice to let go of everything and will my attention to the center of my being. When I do, I am better at everything that I attempt, but more importantly, my internal experience, regardless of the activity, is one of bliss and calm. Choosing to live in the zone means choosing to live life to the fullest. We all have that choice available to us all the time.

In order to be….

 June 14, 2015

In order to be in the Zone, the small self has to be willing to lose. Consciousness is the performer.

Neurotic wreck….

 June 14, 2015

  Neurotic wreck Accepting of what is Caring Indifferent  

The practice is not….

 June 7, 2015

The practice is not an idea. It is an action, an internal action. You literally redirect your attention into the Heart.

The Guru Stone….

 June 7, 2015

Many people have read my story of being given the Guru stone in my book Walking Home with Baba. For those who have not, I will give a short summary and continue from there.

Over my years with Baba, he gave me various semiprecious stones. There were several citrines; they are lovely but only resemble the Guru stone, which in Indic traditions is a yellow sapphire. At Christmastime in 1980 we were in Los Angeles. One day, after I had reached a place where I was no longer willing to waste my time and energy on someone who was not on the same path as me, Baba called me to his room and, in that person’s presence, gave me an 11-carat yellow sapphire. The Guru stone. As he handed it to me, he said, “Now you have the real Guru”.

He later directed me to have it mounted in a ring to be worn on my right index finger, set so that the stone touched my skin. I felt the ring was very intense, so to soften it I had two small diamonds placed on either side of the sapphire. When I showed it to Baba in the darshan line, he said, “No. Take the diamonds away”. He was not pleased with what I had done. I had the diamonds removed, and wore the ring without them. Baba was happy.

When I came back to America from India with a newborn son in late January 1983, my life completely changed. No Baba, no ashram, no sharing sādhana. The environment was hostile to where I had lived and what I practiced. I removed all the trappings of my prior life and, as Baba had taught me, took my practice completely inward. Wearing the Guru stone as a ring on my index finger did not quite fit the lifestyle of a new mother living what felt like an alien life.

Part of the change was transforming the ring into a necklace. Simple, with a strong chain, it remained around my neck every day. Several years ago, I switched to a stronger chain with an extremely secure clasp. Every day, from simple living and teaching to traveling abroad several times, I wore the stone.

On the morning of May 20th, I finished teaching and went outside to talk to my student Fraz and his landscaping crew, who were clearing away a massive pile of yard waste. We spoke for a good long time. I walked around among the debris and in the parking area, which was layered with wood chips. The phone had rung and David handed it to me. I talked and walked my way across the driveway and up the front walk into the house. While speaking, I went into my teaching room, and when I reached my pillow I leaned over. Out of nowhere the gold chain that had held the Guru stone slid from my neck and snaked down onto my seat. It appeared the chain had broken. The stone was gone. Without telling the caller why, I got off the phone abruptly and started the search.

I called to David, and we informed Fraz and the other two men outside. Everyone was one-pointed on finding the Guru stone. I patted down my body hoping it had fallen into a piece of my clothing. No luck.

Outside, we all scoured the large area. Knowing that the stone was large helped, but it was not large enough to find amongst the debris. I went in the house again. What did Baba want?

Surprisingly, I was calm. “Whatever God does He does for good”, I said to myself, and I felt it as well. The only thing was, I knew that later, at some point, I would be devastated. But for the moment I was peaceful, everything was as it should be. A half hour went by. Nothing.

Outside again, I walked along the front garden bed. At my feet were a couple of weeds beginning to wither on the asphalt. I vaguely remembered that I had pulled them out of the large area of sedum. Leaning over I separated some of the plant. And there, just lying there as if the place were its home, as if it belonged there, with no fanfare—was the Guru stone. Resting on the dirt under the sedum, of course it was there. “I found it,” I called. Relief and quiet remained, as if everything was going according to the script. There was no excitement.

Now, I could take the time to look at the chain. What had happened to it? Nothing. It was fine. I had assumed the chain had broken, but it had not. There was no logical reason for the chain coming undone. What was I supposed to learn from this?

The answer was clear. The time when I had concealed the stone in plain sight was over. It was time to return the stone to what Baba had told me to do with it. No more necklace: time to make the Guru stone into a ring again.

Recalcitrant puke….

 June 7, 2015

  Recalcitrant puke                           Willing learner 

Strong willed                                    Shapeshifter  

I Am No Fun….

 May 31, 2015

I am no fun. Throughout my life I have heard this. I have even believed it and felt bad. Being identified as a no-fun person means the activities and interests I enjoy are no fun. Some of those activities and interests included dancing at age six and becoming both dedicated and disciplined from the time I was eight. Neighborhood bicycling, touch football, hide and seek. In the winter, skiing, sledding, backpacking, and snow camping, along with various techniques of fort building depending on the variety of snow. And let us not forget the two months at overnight camp every summer until I was sixteen. These were all fun for me, but in my home and outside there have always been people telling me I am no fun.

Why am I no fun? At this point, I do not care. Why not? Because I am and have been having fun. My fun is different from that of the people who say I am no fun. These people play in a completely different arena than the one in which I have always played. Do not get me wrong. I tried their fun. It was not me; it was not fun for me.

Determined to find out whether I could not play like others or their activities were not for me, I plunged in. College gave me great opportunities to check out this other fun. I pledged a sorority and became president of my pledge class. Parties, games in mud—they were fine. I was fine participating, but when I was to participate with the voting on the new pledge class, for me the fun stopped. “Nice but not necessary” still rings in my ears. Having been called “not fun” in the past did not give me permission to return the favor. I quit.

My time in college was before Title IX. In high school, I lettered in every sport available; college left me with no options. So I decided to go out for cheerleading. Not only was I a Washington University cheerleader; I became a cheerleader for the St. Louis Cardinals football team. Everyone said, “This is fun”. I did it. Until, at a convention for Proctor and Gamble, we did a routine and then handed out Cardinals jackets. That was when the all-male convention started in with “I’d rather have the girl than the jacket”. I felt like a piece of meat. No fun. I quit.

In the ashram, I thought everyone wanted what I wanted: Muktananda, the bliss of freedom. I was so wrong. Working toward what Baba had was hard, not fun. Baba knew people were in the ashram for nothing but a lifestyle, not what was really offered. He would call me naïve for thinking people wanted the Self. People were caught up in the world and wanted only to enhance their sense experience. My thought was, why stay here for that? Go somewhere else for that kind of fun. But for those people, rebellion against the ashram was fun in itself. I was no fun because Baba would send me to find these people and they would not be happy to see me; they felt compelled to tell me, “You are no fun”. Baba always knew I was “no fun”, so he always put me in juxtaposition with the pleasure seekers. Baba was working for me to get okay with not being any fun. But Baba and I had a lot of fun together. I loved Baba’s fun.

It has taken a long time, but I now understand what Baba was trying so hard for me to get. I am no fun to self-indulgent pleasure seekers. I rain on their parades. And they enjoy telling me how much I am no fun. A year ago I wanted everyone to accept the hate inside them—accept that hate and then work to dissolve it away. There were people who thought, “No, I will not accept that I have hate, the hate that I know I have. No, it is too much fun indulging emotions and feeling victimized”. Once more, I was considered no fun.

So here I am, 66 years into “no fun”, and it is okay. I am still the same kind of “no fun” for the same kind of people. My fun is loving Love and learning Love. My fun is cleaning up anything that keeps me from Love. I have to do it God’s way. I will never be fun for the self-indulgent pleasure seeker. I am too busy having my kind of fun to care.

Love is so much more fun. The play that emerges from Love is joyous and shares itself with everyone. The fun that I am not is heedless indulgence in money, sex, food, power, or substances. That is temporary, and the fear of loss is always there. Addiction is the dedication of the pleasure seeker. These pleasures have to be generated externally. Me? I am lazy; I would rather let the Self generate Its play, and I will just quietly function, swimming and dissolving in God and Guru’s grace.

The Guru is….

 May 31, 2015

The Guru is not an electric fence.

No fun….

 May 31, 2015

  No fun                   Fun 

Responsible            Irresponsible  

The General on the Hill….

 May 24, 2015

Some commentators on the Yoga Sutras speak of the Witness as a General on a hill overlooking the troops. From this metaphor many people come to understand the Witness as distant and unengaged; a being who watches but is completely uninvolved. The troops are left to their own devices and therefore to fate, wandering the field without the guidance of the General.

My experience is that the Witness has agency and responsibility. The Witness/General participates with the troops and engages—just as a military general, though he appears to be separated from his troops, is directing and impacting their courses of action.

In truth, we are the generals of our own lives. Our job is to know this and share in the great game. As the generals of our own lives, we must know and accept our proper relation to the General. From the standpoint of the General, we are foot soldiers, and we must be willing to serve.

The General is Pure Consciousness. Put another way, it is Pure Love. The General enlivens people and events, but it does not dispense advice. Consciousness goes through various filters at the different levels of manifestation. How clean its final expression is into the physical plane depends on how pure the filters and vehicles are. The human psychic instrument, comprised of an intellect, data collector and identifier, is enlivened by Consciousness. If the psychic instrument is impure, then the clarity of Consciousness will be obscured. The same goes for our senses, personality and emotions, or any other vehicle.

So the General is always radiating the Consciousness we need to both discern and then take action. In order to fully express the General’s nature, the troops must be disciplined and surrendered to the fact that they are not in charge. The troops have to work hard to let go of anything that is an obstacle blocking the General’s radiance.

The General emanates Consciousness; the troops are to allow that Consciousness to direct all their actions on every level. Because the General is Love, when we are surrendered to him we are guided by Love in all aspects of our lives. From there, we stop seeing the General from our eyes and only see through the General’s eyes.

“Rohini” is an actor in the field for the Witness. The Witness enlivens her. She is a foot soldier for the General. She gets to act, but must always follow and obey the Witness. Baba wanted me to live this, so he was always directing me toward the Witness. Baba called me a general; he wanted me to know the Real General.

Another way to look at this is that in Truth we are like the sun, not the moon. The Self, the Witness, the General, is the sun. He is self-illuminative, Pure Subject with no object. The foot soldier, the individual, is the moon. Remember, the moon has no light of its own. Without the sun, there is no light. Without the Witness, there is no Consciousness, no light of awareness, no Love. To be in right relation with the General and with the world, the foot soldier must relinquish its sense of itself as the center of the universe.

The responsibility of the General is to emit Pure Consciousness. The responsibility of the foot soldier is to clean and clarify himself, moving from tamas to rajas to sattva and beyond so as to reflect that Consciousness perfectly. Our capacity, capability and will must work clearly for the General. Not until the foot soldier is purified will he fully express the General’s purpose.

Practice means….

 May 24, 2015

Practicing means boring inward toward a point. When you reach that point and rest in it, it expands.

Free to do as I please….

 May 24, 2015

Free to do as I please                                         Imprisoned / controlled / weighed down

Reckless / self-indulgent / wasteful                   Disciplined / responsible / adult

Our Birthright Is the Witness….

 May 17, 2015

Baba always had me witness, watch. I, however, always wanted to be part of the action. And the truth is I was; my acting took the form of witnessing. As a child I always preferred to participate, as in camp where I always wanted to be the camper, never the counselor who stood around and watched. As a dancer I hated teaching dance because the teacher did not get to dance. Teaching Tai Chi was a joy because I was both participant and witness with the student. As a spiritual teacher, I model and practice along with the student. I am a witness, and I participate. As the teacher, Rohini the small self practices by dissolving, and thereby allowing the Self, the Witness, to be in charge.

Baba used to say that happiness is our birthright. He did not say it is our small self’s birthright. Our small self’s birthright is to live out the effects of past causes.

If you believe that who you are is your small self, you have no choice, no agency. The small self has no real agency. Absolutely, it has no power to do anything. Relatively, it deludes itself into having agency, but behind the curtain is the Doer. So when we live unconsciously, lost in the small self, we have no agency. We are puppets who are unaware of the puppeteer and believe they are in charge. The truth is, the puppet has no soul, and without the puppeteer the puppet cannot function. The puppet lives out the causes and effects, while the puppeteer enjoys the play.

The small self is a construct of the mind. The mind witnesses the world and also witnesses itself. The mind appears as both subject and object at different times. When it is the subject, it witnesses outside itself. When it is the object, it is witnessed by itself. The mind cannot be simultaneously both subject and object. At one minute it appears as subject, and the next as object. The dissociative small self thinks it is the Witness; it is merely the small self looking down on itself. The small self is not self-illuminative.

The Real Self witnesses all and enlivens all simultaneously; it is always Subject with no object. It is Self-illuminative. The Real Self is the enlivener, witness, and empathizer for the whole manifested world.

As Witness, the Real Self is the witness of the waking, dream and deep sleep states. It resides in the turīya state, the fourth state, the state beyond the other three. The Witness is always awake, even when consciousness is in the dream or deep sleep states. When the individual is asleep and not aware of the waking state, on all levels the Witness is present and in bliss.

The Witness’s true nature is Love. The Witness is the one who is happy; that is our birthright. That is what Baba was talking about.

So if we have returned to the bliss of the Witness, our small self is fully informed by the one that Knows, the one that enlivens. We are no longer merely the puppet; we are also the puppeteer. The Witness is not aloof. The best participant in the world play is the one who is the Witness on all levels, and therefore the participant on all levels.

But being aware that the puppeteer, the True Self, has the real agency is not the same as returning to the Self. It is important here to distinguish between being enlightened and being Self-realized. We can be enlightened but not Self-realized. Enlightenment is the experience of re-cognizing the Self as something altogether different from the small self; being Self-realized is living as the Self, with no illusion of separateness. Enlightenment is an important stage on the way, but should not be confused with the goal.

People who confuse enlightenment with Self-realization are prone to delude themselves about their agency in a particular way. Those who have deluded themselves into believing they are only good believe that their agency only accomplishes good. When something bad happens, they take no responsibility, because their intentions are always “good”.

Another way people delude themselves about enlightenment is to conflate blankness with a still mind, and therefore with Self-realization. Blankness is not the Self; blankness is tamas (inertia). Pure consciousness free of individuality is the Self. The Self is beyond even sattva (brightness and calm).

As we get closer to Self-realization, closer to the Witness, we are finally empathetic with ourselves. We first practice empathy with others and then with ourselves. When we empathize with others, we feel what they feel though we are not attached to that feeling; we are not run by that feeling, it is not us. We know it is other. We are fine within ourselves and yet able to feel for others. As we grow toward the Self, we are conscious of being both the participant and the Witness. When we reach Self-realization, we are Bliss Itself, and yet we also feel what the small self feels without any attachment to the small self’s experience. We are the Self, and we empathize with our small self. This is what it means to be the Witness and the participant at once.

The Witness and the participant are, in the Absolute sense, One. This is what Baba meant when he said, “God forgets his own true nature and looks for God. God worships God. God meditates on God, and God is trying to find God. It is God who questions and God who answers.”

The best participant….

 May 17, 2015

The best participant in the world play is the one who is the Witness on all levels, and therefore the participant on all levels.

Moping….

 May 17, 2015

 Moping                                Present and joyful

Deep and reflective              Lost in pleasure

Honoring Baba’s Birthday 2015

 May 17, 2015

Rohini reads a meditation praising and thanking her Guru, Swami Muktananda, on his birthday.

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Honoring Baba on His Birthday….

 May 10, 2015

O Rohini, give up seeking attention. You are dust under the feet of your Guru, Swami Muktananda. You are so lucky to be the dust at the Guru’s feet. How many lifetimes did you work to finally get here?

Baba, you show me how and where to go; you illumine the way and guide me to you. I bow to your divine nature.

Like a dog following his nose I wander here and there. You pull me back from the mirage of pleasure. You take me to Love, the Source of All.

From our standpoint, that of the small self, we are separate. From your standpoint, we are the same. One.

From the standpoint of the individual the world is dual. From the standpoint of the Self it is One.

Nonduality only happens after we give up the small self; otherwise, we remain in duality.

Until I give up my nature I will not be God’s Nature.

When the individual believes it is nondual, it is narcissistic. Only the Self is nondual.

We are limited when we lose ourselves in the wrong direction, outward instead of inward.

Baba, you model Love. We look to you, and you are always looking to your Baba and to God. That is the true Love.

Baba, I came to you to find the bottom line of existence. You reveal it. With your guidance, I have worked to free myself from all that hinders living at that bottom line, that ground of Being.

Baba, you have helped me see deeply into myself. You have shown me that my clues will not be as my character, my small self, expects. My clues will throw me around and break things apart that need to be opened. I thank you, Baba, for doing that every day.

You knew me long before I did, and yet you did not run as I had been running from me.

Around you, surrender is a cherished action that brings Bliss.

You crush me out of Love, and because of you I see it is not me you crush, but all I thought was me.

Only when I come to Consciousness do you have time for me. You always guide me to the Truth by the very way you act toward me.

Baba, you pay me no attention when I am lost in my small self. Why waste your time?

Whenever I feel lost, you not only show me the way back to God; you also show that I have never left. You show me that all separateness is illusion.

You love to play. Until you unlocked the cell of my own making I was imprisoned in my small self and could not play.

How many times I have wished you would save me, but out of Love you did not because you knew what I needed to go through.

Baba, you pay attention to Me. You use every weapon to disentangle the attention-seeking small self from Me, so I can see the Truth. You do not coddle.

Buktimukti. Baba, the Bliss of the world and the Bliss of liberation: that is what you want for me and for each of us.

Because you embody the Truth, you live the Truth and you share the Truth by everything you say and do. There is never a moment when you do not shine the light of God.

Thank you for allowing me to be the dust under your feet as you walk in Sahaj Samādhi, walking Bliss.

Jai Gurudev.

When the individual….

 May 10, 2015

When the individual believes it is nondual, it is narcissistic. Only the Self is nondual.

Coddling self-esteem….

 May 10, 2015

  Coddling self-esteem                           Uncompromisingly rigorous 

 Affirming process                                Demoralizing  

Who We Think We Are….

 May 3, 2015

The life of self-esteem is the death of the soul.

Self-esteem is one’s overall assessment of oneself as an individual. The assessment can be backed by actual internal experience or it can be decided by phrases we repeat to ourselves. When the self-esteem becomes more important than the soul, we are lost.

Our job is to reassess the assessment. The truth is, no matter how low or high our self-esteem is, it is still just an idea we have about our character. Not until we have actual experience of the differences between self-esteem, our character, and who we really are can we understand them any way other than intellectually.

Spiritual practice brings us from who we think we are to who we really are. This allows us to set our inner and outer lives in order. As I wrote years ago, “Bring into harmony how you feel about yourself, how you think you come across, and how others perceive you.”

Last week, I spent three days in jury duty. I admit that when I learned the trial might be five days long I tried to be excused. “Whatever God does, He does for good”, I said at lunch on Monday. “I know it, but I sure cannot understand it. I will be missing work. I have writing I need to do. My son is only home for a couple of days; there is work we need to do.” No. Whatever God does He does for good. There has to be a reason for this; I just do not know what it is. And so I began my lesson. There were eight of us on the jury and we each had lives that were being disrupted. We each needed to surrender; we had no choice.

I was the last person to be added to the jury. When we returned after lunch we each had a notebook and pen we could use while in the courtroom to take notes. On the cover of each was a number. My notebook said Alt #2. I was second alternate; unless two other jurors dropped out, I would not participate in deliberations.

Why, karmically, did Rohini have jury duty as second alternate? Rohini was there to witness a system built by and for small selves, as a drama of small selves. She was not to get involved in that drama.

This was an important clue and help for me. Baba was moving me toward the understanding of the witness on all levels. All my years with Baba, he would have me witness different situations and then tell him what I saw. Here, too, I was only to be a witness. What was I to see?

This was a discrimination case; an African American woman against the Board of Education. She felt the Board had not taken sufficient measures to ensure her well being while working in an alternative school. She had taken the job knowing full well the population of the school, and yet when they began ridiculing her skin color, she wanted the school to stop these children. The students she worked with in this middle school were ages 12-14. The complaints were only about boys, and those boys were mostly African American.

As the African American lawyer for the Board of Education said, “This is about words, only words. Words spoken by children 12 to 14.” From the names she was called this para-educator felt humiliated and her self-esteem was damaged. Her idea of herself was being attacked–by children she knew were a problem. And even though the Board used various measures to shift these boys from their behavior, she was intractably upset. The one thing the Board did not do was expel them because they were under the age of 16. And yet this woman was not satisfied; nothing was going to quell her pain other than that the boys stop ridiculing her or that they be expelled. Never did she see that she needed to do some adjusting. There was no clue for her. No lesson for her. No reassessing of her ideas about herself.

As for me, I witnessed. I watched everyone. The jury, the judge, the clerks, the lawyers, the witnesses, the plaintiff. My job was to see it all and understand what was happening. I was to witness, the way I did with Baba, knowing I would not be deciding, deliberating, coming to a verdict. And yet as a witness I was a full participant. Though detached, I was participating by being present to the entire event. On both levels—as an alternate juror present at a trial, and as the Self enlivening the manifested universe—the witness was contributing consciousness. My fellow jurors clearly were seeing through any ruse there was. Everyone was in the end on the same page, not swayed by posturing or political correctness. The assessment was to be straight, without bias of any kind. And so justice was served, and I so appreciated each of the actors that came together to provide the opportunity to learn and shed a layer of the individual.

The very individuality with positive self-esteem for which the plaintiff’s attorney was looking to gain sympathy was the individuality I was sitting there unwittingly dissolving. Baba used to say we as individuals are wrongly identified with our bodies. For the psychiatric and pharmaceutical communities, the body is a machine; all we are is a soulless set of chemical reactions. For them, by changing our thoughts and using the right medication we will be who we truly are; happy, pleasured, small selves.

The belief is that what makes us human is our physical body. That was why the plaintiff could not resolve the situation. She saw herself solely as an African American woman; a human body with black skin. And because her self-esteem and identity were attached to the color of her skin, the calling of names about the color of her skin brought her great pain. For this I was sorry for her, but that was not what was to decide the trial’s outcome.

Our small selves are of service to us. They are not us; they are vehicles. When we detach and disentangle from our vehicles, it does not mean the vehicles then don’t function. They function under our guidance, but we no longer believe them to be us. They are serving us, not the other way around. When it is the other way around we feel imprisoned. If we believe we are our bodies, then money, food, substances, power, and sex are to be pursued and worshiped as the sources of our happiness. God is no longer in the equation. We are worshipping false idols. And the greatest false idol is our self-esteem.

The dissociative small self….

 May 3, 2015

The dissociative small self thinks it is the Witness; it is merely the small self.

Hermit….

 May 3, 2015

  Hermit                              Lost in others 

Lost in introversion           Gregarious  

The life of self-esteem….

 April 26, 2015

The life of self-esteem is the death of the soul.

Clues….

 April 26, 2015

When I was around 24 I had a dream that was so powerful, I knew it was real while I was having it. When I woke I knew I had no soul. My experience was that there was nothing inside me. There was no ground of being. Nothingness, emptiness. I was sure there was nothing there, I was a façade with nothing to back it up. In the horror of this reality, I went to my Tai Chi school to teach. As my students came in I confessed to them that I was the first person in history without a soul. It was going to be on the cover of the Boston Globe that night. As the day proceeded and I continued to communicate my truth, I began to laugh and this truth began to lose its grip. By the end of the day there was a freedom from a belief that had felt so real, that had been sitting there informing my existence and creating a sadness and pain. It was gone. That experience had been a clue for me, something I was to face and move through, not something to run from or deny.

We tend to deny clues or experiences that seem unreasonable or feel painful. And yet these are the very opportunities that will free us to take the next step in our lives. When I give someone a clue, it may look arbitrary and tyrannical. Depending on the situation, I may be very emphatic. It is not my idea; all I am doing is conveying a message. Most of the time I am unaware of the why of the clue and where it will take a person. Usually, following the clue will free the person of something. When the person does not take up the clue, nothing changes, and they remain stuck.

Baba used to say that whatever God does, He does for good. God is always providing clues; we may fail to understand them, or we may even ignore them.

In Mastering the Art of War, Zhuge Liang discusses clues as opportunities: “There are three avenues of opportunity: events, trends, and conditions. When opportunities occur through events but you are unable to respond, you are not smart. When opportunities become active through a trend, and yet you cannot make plans, you are not wise. When opportunities emerge through conditions but you cannot act on them, you are not bold.”

The opportunities have to be discerned even though they are actually right in our line of vision. Life is a treasure hunt, but we have to know the clues in order to proceed. So many times our reasoning intellect will discard or pass over the clue that is crucial to our hunt. These clues are there for us; they are there to help us, and yet we cannot or will not see them. Strategy that is off the grid never seems reasonable, and the small self is determined to maintain its sense of reason. The treasure hunt then does not move forward, and we remain trapped in the mire of our own reason.

Back around 1980, Baba started to give me the clue to have a child. I told him I was fine, that I did not want a baby. He was so patient. He just kept telling me this clue. Baba would say, “If you don’t want a baby, then you should become a sannyasa”. My response was always, “I am fine the way I am”. Gradually, the desire for a child arose, and when I went to tell Baba, before I could open my mouth he said, “So you have finally come to ask permission to have a baby.” He knew this was an important opportunity for me and had kept at it. He was so right. Parenting two sons was the hardest and most rewarding job I have undertaken, and it moved me forward in my sādhana. Quite the treasure hunt.

The treasure hunt is here to clean up the effects of something we once caused. It is sad when we see the clues and fail to recognize them as opportunities. The clues are guiding us to the next effect we must clean up. They are moving us to freedom, to the stillness and bliss of the Self. Following the treasure hunt detaches us from what is not us and removes what covers Us.

The treasure is our true Self.

Cripple….

 April 26, 2015

  Cripple                      Liberate 

Supportive                  Neglect  

Accepting surrender….

 April 19, 2015

Surrender is not throwing away or giving up and losing. Surrender is giving up the fruits of the outcome. Acting complete in every minute without expectation of winning or losing. Outcome is off the point. The question is, “Did I play with integrity and authenticity, and without thinking? Did I give my all without seeking any reward?”

In his introduction to Mastering The Art of War, Thomas Cleary speaks of the dangers of success: “[E]ven in success they are in danger, for success itself becomes an object of contention that continues to animate the aggressive tendencies of all people on this level.” The truth is, unless we are careful, success will feed aggression. Then both the success and the successful will be crushed. As the I Ching states, “Honor will be taken away from you three times before the day is out”.

According to Liu Ji, “When you have won, be as if you had not”. This is not about pretending you did not win. This is about surrendering the results, the fruits of your efforts. When we operate from this place, we do not have any pride or personal ego investment. The small self does not and cannot take credit, because it was not the doer and therefore not involved at all. At this point we no longer have excessive celebration; we are nonattached, so we act with equanimity. We no longer care in the conventional sense, nor do we have apathy. In developing our sādhana, we learn that neither the one who turns inward nor the one who acts outwardly is who we truly are.

Care

Not care

Enmeshed

Nonattached

“Care” and “not care” are still on the same playing field; they are two sides of a coin. If we have the quality of care, then we also have the quality of apathy. When we are surrendered and nonattached, we are the blissful spectator. That is why it is so enjoyable.

This is not about tricking the small self to go to the other side, the side of not caring. It does not take place in the faculty that thinks; we are letting go of the ideas of caring and not caring and relocating to a completely different playing field, the Heart. Here the one you have always called “I” is no longer the invested player and the receiver of the rewards.

Elsewhere in the introduction to Mastering The Art of War, Cleary cites the commentator Cheng Yi: “‘Even if the army acts in the right way, the leaders must be mature to obtain good results. After all, there are those who are lucky but also faulty, and there are those who are faultless but still not lucky. To be lucky and also faultless is as mature as people can get. Mature people are stern and worthy of respect’”. The mature person or leader sees the whole and proceeds appropriately. He is not swayed by expectations or ideas. He accepts what is, takes that in, and then clearly discerns how to proceed. The mature person actually is not lucky; rather, he sees the whole spectrum and can choose how to proceed to an outcome that can be both lucky and faultless.

In spiritual practice we are uncovering the layers. We have to work inward from outward manifestation to subtle vibration. The vibration gives rise to words, which we must be able and willing to articulate clearly. But the answer is never just words. It is what is underneath, internal to all we do, that changes everything. Acceptance of the deeper vibration allows us to let go of the more superficial manifestation. Proceeding in this way continuously, we find ourselves as our Self.

Once we have let go of a deeper vibration, though, we have to resist the temptation to re-establish it. For example, a person says he wants to get rid of emotional pain. I say, “Let’s do it”. We then do the practice together and get rid of it. The practice calms wave after wave of vibration. Now there are no excuses, because we are doing the practice and it works. But then the person actively pursues the return of his vibration of emotional pain. He does it by going into his head and looking for resistance so he can recharge the vibration by thinking about it. He had dropped his ragged old doll, and then went looking for it. He had surrendered and let go, and then he turned back to look for what he had lost instead of being glad he had lost it.

These seekers usually say the practice does not work. The reason it doesn’t work is that they are committed to doing it wrong; therefore they aren’t doing the practice at all. Whatever it is they are actually doing will not work, and the small self is thrilled about that. So these seekers need to stop calling what they are doing practice, because it is not the practice.

What every small self really wants is to be off the hook. Until you know who you really are, you are just whining to get off the hook. But if you really wanted to be off the hook, you would complete your sādhana and find that God is the only doer. God is responsible for it all. An intellectual understanding of this Reality won’t get you anywhere. Intellectual knowledge is shrunken knowledge; it doesn’t give your voice authenticity.

In order to strip away all the layers of your inauthenticity, you must first accept them. You can’t get rid of something until you accept it and take it in; only then can you let it go. We become what we fight against.

Accepting / taking in / receiving

Rejecting / denying / dismissing

Impressionable / weak / dependent

Independent / powerful / self-contained

We use our emotion….

 April 19, 2015

We use our emotion to exaggerate the events in our lives so as to make them appear exceptional rather than mediocre. An example would be a person who thrives on conflict and crisis management. Crisis, along with heightened emotionality, becomes a peak experience imbued with significance. The crisis may just be “I don’t know what to wear,” but it is made into a pinnacle experience. We then believe we are rising to an occasion when we are only overcoming the simplest of tasks.

Insecure….

 April 19, 2015

  Insecure                         Self-respect 

Responsive                      Self-absorbed  

Exceptionally Mediocre….

 April 12, 2015

While away on a campaign, Zhuge Liang, the great Chinese strategist, became fatally ill. He wrote letters of advice to his nephew and son before he died.

To his nephew, Zhuge Liang wrote:

“Aspirations should remain lofty and far-sighted. Look to the precedents of the wise. Detach from emotions and desires; get rid of any fixations. Elevate subtle feelings to the presence of mind and sympathetic sense. Be patient in tight situations as well as easy ones; eliminate all pettiness.

“Seek knowledge by questioning widely; set aside aversion and reluctance. What loss is there in dignity, what worry is there of failure?

“If your will is not strong, if your thought does not oppose injustice, you will fritter away your life stuck in the commonplace, silently submitting to the bonds of emotion, forever cowering before mediocrities, never escaping the downward flow.”

To his son, Zhuge Liang wrote:

“The practice of a cultivated man is to refine himself by quietude and develop virtue by frugality. Without detachment, there is no way to clarify the will; without serenity, there is no way to get far.

“Study requires calm, talent requires study. Without study there is no way to expand talent; without calm there is no way to accomplish study.

“If you are lazy, you cannot do thorough research; if you are impulsive, you cannot govern your nature.

“The years run off with the hours, aspirations flee with the years. Eventually one ages and collapses. What good will it do to lament over poverty?”

Though written around 234 CE, Zhuge’s words speak to us with great relevance. He is writing to us, guiding us to live our lives fully and with integrity. It is not the action we take that is mediocre; it is what we bring to the table, our intention, that makes our action mediocre. When we live in the vitality of the moment while resting in the Heart, our simplest action is filled with import.

Living in Swami Muktananda’s ashram proved this to me every day. Baba’s actions were always filled with Love and life. No matter what he did, whether sitting in the courtyard, feeding the elephant, walking in the upper garden, cooking or just yelling at us, all was full, rich and so alive. His very presence buoyed us up to a life we had not lived before. He always was encouraging us to live; to live fully.

Muktananda was extolling us not to live mediocre lives, but to choose lives filled with the love of God, the Self, who is present in every moment of our day. No matter how mundane our obligatory actions are, we are to live fully with God.

Unfortunately, we use our emotion to exaggerate the events in our lives so as to make them appear exceptional rather than mediocre. An example would be a person who thrives on conflict and crisis management. Crisis, along with heightened emotionality, becomes a peak experience imbued with significance. The crisis may just be “I don’t know what to wear,” but it is made into a pinnacle experience. We then believe we are rising to an occasion when we are only overcoming the simplest of tasks.

Mediocre

Exceptional

Realistic

Dreamer

In his study The Mystical Theology of St Bernard, Étienne Gilson describes the Cistercian practice of self-awareness, humility, and self-discipline:

“Misery of man: to have lost the divine likeness; greatness of man: to have kept the divine image; to strip away the alien likeness with which sin has covered it over–that is what the novice first learns at Cîteaux. But, to strip it away, he needs must recognize it; that is to say, learn to know himself for what he has become.”

Baba always said to see God in each other, and that means we have to see God in ourselves. Our true greatness lies in our being images of God; any other pretense of greatness is just the posturing of the small self. By doing as Zhuge Liang instructs—detaching from emotions and desires, and getting rid of any fixations—we can ensure that we will not spend our lives cowering before mediocrities and thinking of ourselves as exceptional.

Is your mediocrity exceptional?

Stop being a lawyer….

 April 12, 2015

Stop being a lawyer, a defense attorney, an advocate for your small self.      

Mediocre….

 April 12, 2015

  Mediocre                   Exceptional 

Realistic                      Dreamer  

No matter how intense….

 April 5, 2015

No matter how intense the experience, it is never personal.

The Great Stories….

 April 5, 2015

It isn’t that we don’t know the stories. But the important thing is that the great stories are always teaching us. There are many great stories. Within them, at every moment, the great beings choose to live completely—not to settle for a mediocre, unconscious life that depends on emotion for its heights. The stories teach us the great lessons of life. They teach us how to live and what to work toward. They are not personal, and the characters always know it is never about them. The greater good is always working.

We listen to the Passion narrative again and again. The results remain the same. The Passover story, too, is repeated every year—the same story. The results remain the same.

Jesus played his part fully, as did the other actors in the Passion play. Jesus could have left Jerusalem; the story would have been very different, and we would not be listening. So what happened? At Gethsemane, Jesus faced what was to come. If he had said “no” and had not surrendered to God, then we would not be looking to the Passion for how to model our lives. He lived each moment fully; he did not run away. And yes, he questioned: he asked if some other outcome was possible. But God was clear: this was the way it was going to be played, and Jesus was to fulfill his role.

Jesus surrendered to God’s will and did the unthinkable: he submitted to the cross and attained the highest. He is Christ. And Christ does not die; only Jesus did. The story reveals that true life comes through surrender to God’s will. Even in the horror of being killed on the cross, he revealed the greatness of character, strength, and will all in alignment with God. That is how we are to live, no matter what actions we perform. We are to surrender and live fully in God.

The Passover story brings us to the same place: exalted awareness of God’s play and our roles as actors who are only here to express His greatness. One part of the story that has always been important for me is God’s direction of Pharaoh. When the plagues and pestilences get to be too much for Pharaoh, he agrees to let Moses and the Israelites go. But each time, God hardens Pharaoh’s heart. It is as if God is saying, “No, Pharaoh, you have forgotten your lines. It is not the time yet, and I will decide, not you.” God directs all: it makes no difference whether we believe or not.

Moses surrendered to God, and as Jesus did, he questioned. God used Moses as the example for all to see: if we obey in every fiber of our souls, all will be fine. Moses is also used as a negative example when he disobeys and takes credit for what God has done. As a consequence, Moses is barred from entering the Promised Land. Isn’t this also God using Moses to teach us that if we are prideful and disobey God, we will not attain what we think we are entitled to?

The stories of Jesus and Moses teach us that we must overcome our flawed character and surrender to God’s will. It was not personal for them, and it is not personal for us. The way we relate with the world is based on how clearly we see this truth. Jesus and Moses both lived fully through their commitment to God. We are called to do the same.

So as we listen to these stories, do not assume that they are just stories. Every person who hears them is being exhorted to live fully with the love and awareness that God is the director of our play. Surrender to His script, and you will be with God at all times, in all places. We are to Love God with all our heart, mind, and soul. Then our lives, no matter what mistakes we make, are not for naught.

No agency / blank screen….

 April 5, 2015

  No agency / blank screen                            Generative / having a core 

 Pleasing / gracious                                       Bossy / hard  

The small self believes….

 March 29, 2015

The small self believes pain is forever and happiness is fleeting. That is a choice, not a reality.

The Oncology Lesson….

 March 29, 2015

I have always approached my yearly meeting with my oncologist with great trepidation. It means returning to the scene where I played the part of the patient. Dr. Fetting has always engaged willingly and graciously with my dialogue of facing my fear, of wanting to conquer both fear and my desire to remain in this body. Looking back, as the chemo proceeded and my body disintegrated, I would openly say I wanted to remain in the world. And yet I did look for a back door out in case it all got too much for me.

Even after the powerful experience I had in Ganeshpuri while stricken with malaria, when I left my body and was no longer “Rohini” and everything was perfect just the way it was and is, there was fear, pain and of course terrible nausea.

It was not until today, at an annual check-up twelve years out from my diagnosis, that I finally got something I had been unable and unwilling to face. My body had had cancer; I had not, nor could I ever have cancer in truth. It was never personal. I had taken it so personally, which then did not allow me to fully get the lesson I was to learn from all of this and move beyond it.

When I walked into the waiting room today, as with any time I have gone to the Oncology Center, my blood pressure went through the roof, and I felt a tremendous sadness and fear permeate the area. No one is acting inappropriately or even giving away that this vibration is just under the surface. But the vibration is still there. No tool, technique, or approach has been able to lower my blood pressure. It has been just so personal. My body remembers the place and goes into flight mode. The seat where my blood pressure is taken looks directly at the doorway to the room where the chemo is given. Sitting in that seat, I would try not to care about what happens there, and intellectually I did not—but deep within there was always something, whether I felt it or not, that would send my blood pressure soaring.

Actually, maybe today was a little worse, fraught with the fear of something. Each year I have been fine and my MRI was in November, so there should not have been any surprises. And yet why not? Why not a surprise that would signal the return of the cancer? Why not? Intellectually I knew better, but in the spot where the unknown is unknown, why not? Of course the cancer could come back.

So when I was called to have my vitals taken, I was surprised to be escorted down a hall and into a side room that does not look at the chemo room. A change. But no change with my blood pressure. No change internally facing death, and more importantly facing the fear of death.

Back at my seat in the waiting room, I saw a man whose body was having a difficult time, and yet inside him there was strength. People were speaking about their different kinds of cancer and treatment. Sitting there, after twelve years, I felt the same feeling inside and out. My name was called and I went into the exam room I have been in so many times. I waited for Dr. Fetting. I closed my eyes and worked to let go. And then finally, for the first time ever, it was not personal. Never, after the intense experience I had been through, would I have allowed “it is not personal” to come forward. But it is not about me, and it never was. It is not personal. A relief.

It is always good to see Dr. Fetting, an intelligent and kind man without the slightest insincerity, always direct yet gentle, softspoken in a really difficult job. Sitting down in the examination room, he asked the usual questions as to my health which, has been fine. The exam, fine. I brought up the sadness and fear that fill the Oncology Center: how does he handle them? Empathy, he said. Yes, he has empathy.

Then I brought up the one piece that I had failed to see and therefore failed to detach from: that it is not personal. It was hard to get clean of this one, hard to see that it was not about me when I believed I suffered so. But how attached am I to my vehicles, how much more do I have to clean out? Dr. Fetting and I agreed that in order not to take it personally, one has to get to the essential self. My body had cancer; I did not have cancer.

This is what I was meant to learn. Now I could and would take the time and learn it. Then Dr. Fetting said we could suspend the regular visits and come only as needed. Really, is it true? Are you sure? Twelve years. My doctor visits are safety nets. No net now. Really? I graduated? Tears well up, and I feel deep gratitude for Dr. Fetting’s commitment to his work. He was a big part of saving my life, as were the other people there—especially Kelly and Linda, the oncology nurses. The team of doctors who saved my life: Michael Schultz, who caught the disease early and cut it out of me; John Fetting, who shepherded me through the dark night of chemo; Mark Brenner, who figured out how to attack nothing but the diseased area with radiation. Along with all the other nurses, technicians, and administrators. Thank you all. And I now know it was not personal. We were together in an intense drama that came to a happy ending. Many such stories do and many do not. It is not personal. And yet here I am tonight, sitting in this body and not some other one. The family I love dearly, people who worked so hard to keep me here. It is not personal; it is Love that is universal.

It’s personal….

 March 29, 2015

  It’s personal                        It’s not personal 

Committed / Invested           Distant / Apathetic  

Avian Samadhi….

 March 22, 2015

The winter was brutally cold. Weeks on end below zero degrees Fahrenheit, with wind chill minus 20 to 30. Even when the sun came out, it was bitter cold and dangerous to go outside. Our acre garden spent the winter covered in snow. No hellebores blooming through February for us. A couple of years ago we began feeding the birds that wintered with us. Word has gotten out in the neighborhood. We now are feeding a large group of birds that, on most days, function politely at the various feeders.

There are always moments, though, when all the birds disappear. That is when a hawk comes through looking for a meal. If a bird remains in the branches of a tree he is usually safe. The hawk cannot maneuver through the tangle to reach its prey. Only when a bird makes a run for safety is it lost. The hawk will appear nonchalant until a bird dashes from its out-in-the-open hiding spot. Then the hawk will strike like a laser.

The irony is that hiding in plain sight in the tangle of the branches is actually the safest choice. Yet the birds tend to feel exposed, or they feel the hawk’s dangerous vibration of no vibration. Even instinct will not save a bird fearing death.

On one of those below-zero days in February, we were remaining warm in the comfort of the house, congregating close to the fire, when one of us noticed the hawk on an ash tree branch ten feet from the house. In the downstairs rooms there is a great view, so we all scurried down the stairs to the window.

The drama was unfolding. The hawk was cold, so he would only stand on one leg at a time. The other he would tuck under him in the warmth of his feathers. Shifting side to side, side to side. We were so engrossed in watching the hawk’s regal and martial stance and dance that we were missing the real drama playing out before our eyes. As if the curtain had opened and we were entranced by the star, we needed to expand our awareness to see the whole stage. As we each adjusted to the hawk one by one we noticed an equally compelling actor, a blue jay.

The blue jay was clinging with both feet to a branch of the snowbell tree not ten feet away from the hawk. He was staring at the hawk. The blue jay was mesmerized, unable to move, even in the extreme cold. He never blinked, and no matter how cold he was he did not even shiver. He was one pointed on the hawk. Even while the hawk appeared nonchalant, the blue jay was riveted and lost in the hawk. Minutes went by, which seemed like hours of intense drama. Everything was on high alert, with life and death in the balance.

We, the audience, were in awe of the performance; we barely moved ourselves. Each of us now moved our focus from the hawk to the blue jay and back to the hawk. What was each going to do? Who would make the first move? Could the blue jay in its terror not be able to stand it one more minute and make a run for it? What was going to happen? In the bare, relaxed movement of the hawk and the frozen one-pointedness of the blue jay, the externals were minimal, yet internally all was vibrantly alive, so utterly important. Life and death was playing out before our eyes. The actors were magnificent.

Then, offstage, there was a sound and apparent movement. The hawk exited stage right. In an instant the drama was over, but the other actor remained onstage, so caught in the moment that he could not move. The blue jay was still frozen, unable to free himself from his one-pointedness. We were now rooting for him and wanted him to leave. We called out and banged to get him out of his Samadhi. He became aware of the mundane once more and flew away.

When we have….

 March 22, 2015

When we have forgotten ourselves, our inner voice of “righteousness” is in fact the voice that is the most destructive to us.

Insulting….

 March 22, 2015

  Insulting                                    Valuing / appreciating 

Being honest / assessing              Obsequious

We hate ourselves….

 March 15, 2015

We hate ourselves; we see ourselves as bad. Codependency happens when we are drawn to people in whose presence we get to feel bad, small, and unworthy. We believe those people must be “good”, so we can be “good” only as long as, and as far as, they accept us. What we call “love” is the feeling of having an insecure hold on the affection of someone we believe is “good”. If someone gives us real Love, without encouraging our delusion, we reject it—because whoever gives us that couldn’t possibly be our idea of “good”.

Becoming Human….

 March 15, 2015

Are you a sinner? No. Is your proxy a sinner? Yes.

Being truly normal is being truly human. We are made in God’s image, and we should act it. Stop thinking of God as a selfish being. We believe that, since we are made in God’s image and we are selfish, then God is, too. But to act as God does, we have to surrender to God. God is the most surrendered Being. He is pure Subject and puts up with our pretense of self-sufficient existence.

To be human, then, is to be surrendered to God—surrendered to Love. God’s nature is Love. Is that your nature? What is your motivation? Do you not understand why we have foursquares? They are designed to uncover the Truth. We always call what we do good; even when we tell ourselves we are bad, we really believe that saying so makes us good. Even in our wretchedness, we are goodness and piety. We never accept within ourselves the negative of the foursquare; instead, we project the negative onto others and keep the pure for ourselves. Really? You are so pure? We are all dirty. You can’t get rid of what you won’t own.

Dirty

Clean

Connected to the world

Aloof and isolated

We cannot begin to be in God’s image without first accepting that we are dirty. Only then will we finally begin to head in the direction of pure. Resist your dirtiness and you will remain dirty always, no matter how many mantras you recite. As George MacDonald wrote, “But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!”

The small self—who we think we are—is a mess. Thank God it is not actually who we are. We are supposed to learn what the small self is, both good and bad, and then Be who we really are: the Witness of that good and bad. This is not about dissociating, which is just another way of being attached to the small self. This is about being nonattached. Who we truly are is Love. Being the “good” or “pious” or “lady” or “gentleman” that fits your foursquare is just inhabiting and projecting your narrow idea of those qualities—an idea that ultimately is selfish, and not anyone’s true nature.

So’ham. I am That. Not “I am a good person”. Not “I am a lady, gentleman, fearful, courageous, holy”. Sādhana is learning the ins and outs of the worldly playing field and enjoying the joke that none of it is us. We have proxies playing on that field, while all of us actually live in the playing field of the Heart. There is no one, no matter how evil, who does not in Reality live in the playing field of the Heart.

We have forgotten this, and lose ourselves working so hard to perform on the world playing field. We gradually become more and more miserable and wander further away from the Truth of our identity. When we have so forgotten ourselves, our inner voice of “righteousness” is in fact the voice that is the most destructive to us. But we listen to it, and become more and more twisted. Then we are far from being human, because we are so far from being in God’s image. At that point God, in the form of people and events, rises against us and frees us through battle to return to ourselves.

Wake up from the dream that is a nightmare. Wake up from your righteousness and become human. Wake up from the dichotomy of good and bad. Stop projecting onto others. Wake up and love yourself, so that you can love others. The only way to do that is to give up your wrong identity with the proxy on the worldly playing field and return to who you really are. The most human you can be is to know that you are made in God’s image and live that Reality.

Dirty….

 March 15, 2015

  Dirty                                            Clean 

Connected to the world                 Aloof and isolated  

We become what….

 March 8, 2015

We become what we fight against.

Guest Blog by Johannes Wagner: Three Weeks at Rohini’s….

 March 8, 2015

I knew many things about Rohini’s house long before I arrived – voices, faces, stories, certain parts of rooms. To be honest, I expected it to be more austere or in another way strictly ruled, which very nicely displayed a misunderstanding of mine. As it turned out, the only disappointing thing was seeing how small I had made myself internally. It was ugly to admit; whenever I was in my head, I perceived people who wanted me to be truly happy as enemies. As somebody put it very poignantly for me during a period like that, misery becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The house, however, turned out to be an extraordinarily cozy and comfortable place.

This was especially true for the living room and the fireplace. People would gather there occasionally and be merry, talk things over, or get to the rotten root of a particular issue, ranging from the personal up to the international scale. The room that meant and means the most to me, however, is the teaching room, which, at least to me, was really the heart of the house. It is a very noble place, and everything Rohini taught me is intimately associated with the appearance and atmosphere of that room.

It thus was not easy to leave the house and the people who live there, as well as those who pass in and out from time to time. I met many interesting people, all of whose skill in their particular areas was just astonishing. I’m grateful to everybody who shared experience or skill with me, introduced me to the less beautiful parts of what I think to be myself, or just took out a little mountain boy to get a glimpse of the United States. I got to see the Mall in Washington, the National Aquarium, Lexington Market, and the Inner Harbor of Baltimore, and spent a very cool day at the University of Delaware. I am most indebted, though, for the things I learned in terms of spiritual practice. I know now what happiness can feel like; I know how to move, and the direction is clearer.

When I finally had to change directions on the physical plane, something interesting happened. Already on the way home, my flight from Baltimore to Philadelphia was unexpectedly delayed. That meant that I only had about thirty minutes to catch my connecting flight back to Europe. This was an opportunity to practice something I was supposed to work on: namely, not being timid. Rohini and the others had advised me the day before that if time was short, I should ask a flight attendant while I was still on the plane. Normally I would have been timid, and tried to come along on my own. I got over myself. The flight attendant told me to catch a shuttle bus after landing to get to the departure gate. I caught the bus and ran a small distance to the gate, where the boarding guys were already awaiting me, applauding. They knew that my flight had been very late and were happy that I made the connection. I was the last one to get on the plane.

The day after I got home safe and sound, I had a soccer game. While I had been in the United States, my club had picked up a new trainer. He doesn’t encourage sadness or acting like timid chickens, qualities that are deep-rooted in the hearts of my team, and which I used to strongly manifest. (That‘s why I got called “Dark Cloud” at Rohini‘s house; or “Yohei”, after the whiny character in the movie “The Seven Samurai”. Like Yohei, I want to be a chicken and hide somewhere in a safe hole.) Funny that, exactly after three weeks abroad, when the tide slowly started to turn internally, a trainer shows up who has the ability to help me. Coincidence? Maybe. Anyway, I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a game so much.

Also, being with my family feels very different now: much clearer, and more understandable. That’s just beautiful. Though my family is actually pretty humorous, there is a ton of sadness and pain inside these four walls. I always thought my job in bringing up my siblings is to be physically present and help with the work. Yet somewhere over the past three weeks I understood that staying at home and being sad will only model misery for the kids. To contribute something of true value, I have to become happy myself.

May I be cursed (and reborn as a chicken) if I waste what I received in these three weeks at Rohini’s house. I wish my own life to be informed by the experiences I had there…and all will be well.

Liebe Grüße,

Yohei

Dark Cloud

Johannes

Pious….

 March 8, 2015

Pious                        Unholy     

Cringing               Vibrant

L&Q(3-7-15) Becoming Human….

 March 7, 2015

Rohini explains the way to our true humanity.

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True Normal….

 March 1, 2015

There is a difference between conventional and normal. Most people, when they hear the word “conventional”, tend to think in terms of other people and see particular situations, groups, cultures, or religions. The word “normal” tends to encompass a larger, vaguer area, and people tend to think of it as applying universally. Many times we conflate the two words, and in our limited view believe our convention is what is normal.

If we take “normal” as having a universal meaning, then it has to apply to everyone. The true normal, however, is being in harmony with God; this is our birthright. Normalcy is an underlying consciousness moving constantly toward God.

Convention is something else: it is a custom that can either coexist with true normalcy or conflict with it. In one family the convention may be to yell. In another, the convention is to remain silent. Both, if their motivation internally is to be with God, can be normal with different conventions. When we go outside our home environment, we may decide to serve the situation and sacrifice our conventions, as long as the adjustment does not require us to be offensive and allows for us to keep our integrity.

Problems arise when the merely conventional is taken for the truly normal. The only way sādhana is going to be considered “normal” by most people’s conventions is if the goal of sādhana is to have a beautiful, happy “normal” life. That would mean that the goal of sādhana is to be a perfected small self. We tend to believe the one we call “me” is really who we are. From that standpoint, sādhana then will only clean up that “me” so that we have happy “normal” lives. We believe that the lives we lived prior to practice were “normal”, and now with sādhana that “normal” life will be even better. Of course, each person’s idea of “normal” life will look different, because each person’s idea of “normal” will be based on the particulars of their early life.

The truth is, sādhana will and should turn your life upside-down. During sādhana the small self will crack. The façade and its conventions will be revealed for what they are. If you want to remain the “normal” you have always known, you will want to heal the crack. Sādhana will be seen as a battle against the teacher in order to remain “normal” and “true to yourself”. If you aid the teacher in further breaking up the façade, then the truth that your “normal” was only convention will be revealed, and you will be able to free yourself from that attachment.

The reality we are seeking in sādhana is not a thought construct. Your life as you understood it was just an idea that you constructed and called “normal”. It will be exposed as nothing more than a vocabulary list that you formed into a story. Your narrative will look very different once it is examined and a light has been shined on it. Your life will not be the same. Thank God.

But most people, even those who consider themselves seekers, cling to their “normal”. I keep finding seekers who say they want God but don’t want to give up their “normal” lives. And they can maintain those lives—if those lives are in harmony with God. If your “normal” is dysfunctional, it has to go.

If we are truly normal, we will maintain our attention in the Heart and adjust our vehicles as required. In other words, we will be with our experience, let whatever comes up come up, and function appropriately on the physical plane.

This applies as much to groups as to individuals. Fitting in brings harmony. It may bring harmony and peace within the group but disharmony outside. It may bring harmony and peace within the group but disharmony within each of the group’s members. We need to be careful about accommodating ourselves to various groups, fitting into different settings. If a group is inappropriate, then to be truly normal will mean not being in harmony with that group, and to fit into it will be merely conventional. We need discernment to decide when it is appropriate to fit in. If fitting in requires us to sacrifice without receiving fulfillment and love, then there is a problem.

These foursquares will aid you in freeing yourself from attachment to convention:

Fits in

Outsider

Conformist

Independent

Conventional

Authentic

Fits in

Defiant

You are wrong by my convention

You are right by my convention

You are free with integrity

You are bound to the wrong thing

Each of us has to make the choice to be truly normal rather than merely conventional. In order to make that choice, you have to know what your conventions are, and have experience true normalcy. My sadness is in watching people choose to cling to convention when they have experienced true normalcy. Ultimately, the true normal is the Truth, and the Truth is So’ham: I am who I am.

Don’t have the small self….

 March 1, 2015

Don’t have the small self “let go”. The small self has to be surprised. Your task is to let yourself be surprised.

Timid….

 March 1, 2015

  Timid                        Bold 

Cautious                     Reckless 

Why wouldn’t anyone want….

 February 22, 2015

Why wouldn’t anyone want to crack open? We are languishing in hell if we don’t.

Guest Blog by Ian Ralby: The Choice To Practice….

 February 22, 2015

At the conclusion of the course on “A Spiritual Survival Kit” , I asked for the chance to guest blog in order to share some reflections. Having grown up with my mother as both my mom and my teacher, I have witnessed her teaching and her students’ development from a fairly unique vantage point. I vividly remember when she wrote the Survival Kit in 1991 and why she wrote it. Almost a quarter century later, it is helpful to take stock of what has changed. And what hasn’t.

In revisiting the Survival Kit, my main observation is how consistent my mother’s teaching has been all these years. What she says now is no different than what she was saying in the early 1990s. For me, those same words have totally different meaning at this point, but they are still the same words. In a funny way, I’m left wondering how I could have misunderstood so much for so long when it was so clearly articulated in black and white all those years ago.

The truth remains the truth.

And yet so much has changed. I have changed, my mom has changed and her students have changed. People who have resisted growth have fallen by the wayside. Some have left and come back to her years later, ready to grow. Some have disappeared. And new ones have come. And through all this, my mother has been saying the same thing for twenty-five years.

So why do the Survival Kit and my mom’s daily lessons make so much more sense now than they did in 1991? Or even ten years ago? I’m reminded of the experience of reading the US Constitution at school, again in law school and again when I had practiced law for a while. The document did not change, but my relationship to it did. Each time I return to the Constitution, my understanding of it is enriched by my ongoing professional practice and development. I pick up on new things I had not really grasped before – things I didn’t even know enough about to know I didn’t understand. The same goes for the Survival Kit.

Understanding the words is not enough. Repeatedly returning to texts like the Yoga Sutras, the Shiva Sutras, the Bible, Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism, and my mom’s Spiritual Survival Kit gives us the chance to see what we have learned and to discover how much more we have to learn.

And then there is the matter of choice.

I remember the day, the weather, the temperature, and the smell of autumn air at the moment I consciously chose to practice. It was a simple choice – choose to live my life to the fullest, or to let my small self, my ego run me. Yet it had to be conscious and had to be active – I had to choose my path.

We all have a choice – in everything. The more I work with my mom, the more I recognize my own choices and those of others – conscious and unconscious alike. It has been amazing to watch people transform over the years after making the choice to live fully. They are unmistakably happier (even when going through difficulties), more authentic and more alive.   And it has been equally sad and disappointing to watch people either stay the same or, indeed, transform upon making the choice to stay committed to their wrong identification with their small selves. Their discontent (even under ‘good’ circumstances), inauthenticity and dullness are palpable. What has been nice to see in the short time that I have been back from abroad is that most of the people coming to study with my mom at this point have clearly chosen to let go of their false identification with what is not truly them. It is always a joy to see people make that choice.

When my mom wrote the Survival Kit in 1991, I had lots of choices laid before me. It took me a long time to even recognize that and perhaps even longer to consciously and consistently choose to practice. Revisiting the Survival Kit has made me want, more than ever, the wisdom beneath the words. That’s what I choose to pursue. You?

Accepting/taking in/imbibing/receiving….

 February 22, 2015

Accepting/taking in/ imbibing/receiving                               Rejecting/ denying/dismissing

Impressionable/spineless/dependent/gullible                        Independent/powerful/selfcontained

One of the most common and….

 February 15, 2015

One of the most common and damaging mistakes a spiritual aspirant can make is to believe that the shakti will take care of everything.

Shakti and Wisdom….

 February 15, 2015

Everybody loves energy. It is everywhere, and manifests in countless ways. Without energy, there is no life. In my tradition, the term for energy is shakti; the shakti is God’s power of manifestation. Spiritual energy is latent, asleep, in each of us. And the term for that spiritual energy is kundalinī-shakti. In order to return home to who we really are, we must have our kundalinī awakened and then fully unfolded; this cannot be done without real understanding and committed practice. Baba used to say that the bird to paradise flies with two wings: self-effort and divine grace. It can also be said that the bird to paradise has the two wings, of shakti and wisdom. You can’t fly with just one wing.

The shakti is conscious energy. It is all-knowing. But we aren’t. The shakti is wise; we are stupid. One of the most common and damaging mistakes a spiritual aspirant can make is to believe that the shakti will take care of everything, and it isn’t necessary to cultivate wisdom. That way, we believe we are freed of responsibility for our own spiritual condition. From all my years with Baba, I can say with certainty that such a belief couldn’t be further from the truth.

Shaktipāt—the “descent of power” that constitutes awakening—can be an overwhelming and ecstatic experience. Still, it is only a glimpse of where we are heading; it is an invitation to undertake the journey. It is like receiving a picture postcard of a destination we must now set out to reach. Baba used to say, “Even a dog can give shaktipāt”. His point was that spiritual awakening can happen spontaneously and does not necessarily require a Guru. But discerning what to do after shaktipāt requires wisdom, and this is where the Guru is essential. If you do not have wisdom, then you are going to misinterpret the shakti. A great teacher has wisdom and shakti. Better the teacher who has wisdom and no shakti than the teacher with great shakti and no wisdom.

Wisdom arises from nonattachment, acceptance and surrender: nonattachment to all that is not the Self, acceptance of who and what we really are, and surrender to what God has in store for us.

The shakti enlivens. Where there is no wisdom, it will enliven ignorance and delusion. It will enliven the small self, and its desires for power and control, money, sex, food, or intoxicating substances. Without the guidance of a wise teacher, the shakti will delude the small self into thinking it is powerful and enlightened. Wisdom, on the other hand, will teach the small self what it actually is, and then the shakti will enhance and enliven that wisdom. All too often around Baba, I saw people go for the shakti and forsake the wisdom—there was no need for wisdom in their minds, because the shakti would do all the work.

Baba had me look after many people who came to the ashram. Some of them were false Gurus. Often, they had tremendous shakti, without a jot of wisdom—but their followers were hooked on the intoxication of shakti. Many people were intoxicated by Baba’s shakti, which was overwhelming. But when Baba used to say, “I give you what you want, so that one day you’ll want what I have to give you”, part of what he meant was that he was giving people shakti so they would someday want to receive his wisdom.

Shakti can give you an experience of true witness consciousness, but without wisdom everything will be again cloaked by shrunken consciousness. Until we are willing to develop the wisdom to know our shrunken self for what it is—a limiting system of thought constructs—and then dismantle it, we are destined to be bound in a prison of our own creation. But if we seek wisdom with the guidance of a teacher, the shakti will help us on our way. Together, Guru and shakti will lead us home.

Shy….

 February 15, 2015

Shy                     Outgoing 

Reserved            Coarse  

Imagination Isn’t Practice….

 February 8, 2015

Sit in the room and be realized. Do not offend anyone or make anyone uncomfortable. Then leave and resume your ordinary habits. Is this what you think sādhana is?

Around Baba, there were people who did just sit around and then go home. Their discomfort came from their fellow ashramites, so their interactions and relationships looked very much like the ones back home. Baba would sit and smile and say, “Meditate on your Self. God dwells within you as you”. These people believed that by showing up and hanging around, they had imbibed all that was needed, and there was nothing more. They could have powerful shakti experiences around Baba and imagine their own place in the universe. When they returned to their homes, they would continue “sādhana” by living life as before and occasionally sitting, maybe even religiously, and imagining their experiences with Baba.

Sitting with Baba and experiencing bliss happened for me also, but I did not want to imagine. I did not want bliss only when I sat for meditation. That would have been just like when I had formerly relied on Tai Chi Chuan for my bliss. I had already done that. I wanted bliss all the time. I did not want to imagine and then be slapped back into relative reality. I wanted the Real.

I did not want Baba as an abstraction, or the teachings as abstract. The lineage was not about imagining, or about having a great awakening and then being realized. We had to, and have to, walk the path Baba walked. That does not mean adopting particular external trappings. That means doing what he modeled: surrender of the small self.

That surrender will probably remain no more than an abstraction unless you have a teacher—a teacher who is willing to do battle as you should with your small self. Sādhana is not an intellectual exercise. We have to do something to get to the Self and then live the Self. What do we have to do? We have to give up our wrong understanding, our wrong identification with the small self. We have to give up our smallness.

Of course we want to get rid of our smallness, you might say. Really? Then do it. Right now. Be who you really are. It is not that easy. We do not realize how much we are attached to our wrong understanding. Again, this is where a teacher comes in. The teacher will be able to see this wrong identification and begin the process of awakening the student, not just once but all the time. This has to be done over a period of time, with the teacher constantly bringing the Truth to the student. Each student is different; hence the Guru-disciple relationship will manifest differently for each person, but the outcome is the same.

The teacher will shine a light on who we think we are, then call it what it actually is and show us our delusion. For instance, a student may think of herself as noble and generous when in fact she is a miserable doormat. Facing this reality will hurt. The teacher will then work with the student to remove her wrong understanding. So the Guru will be with us through our pain of our stupidity and guide us in the burning up of our delusion. Each time another layer of delusion is removed, we will feel lighter, and the bliss will be there for us.

If all you want is a course that teaches a tool or technique like meditation, then you do not want or need the Guru. If you want the Truth, then the Guru will be there and shine the light for you. Meditation will be just another tool you use in the process of removing your darkness. Meditation will support what the teacher is saying and guiding you to do in your daily life.

So whether you are a monk or a householder, whether you live in an ashram or house, know your commitment. And do not fool yourself into making your imaginings into something they are not. Sādhana with a living teacher is not easy for the small self. It pulls back the curtain on the small self’s magic show. Only the Guru can do this with us.

The Guru shines a light….

 February 8, 2015

The Guru shines a light on who we think we are, then calls it what it really is and shows us our delusion. Our job is to surrender to what the Guru teaches us.

Pretend….

 February 8, 2015

  Pretend                  Real 

Insulated                 Exposed  

My Apparently Useless Gift….

 February 1, 2015

When I owned my school of Tai Chi Chuan in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I had a lot of energy. People would feel it and even I would be overwhelmed by it, yet I had no wisdom. People thought I was something more than I was because they were entranced with the energy and identified me with it. The energy knew things; I had much to learn.

Baba had tremendous energy. He gave shaktipāt (awakening) to many thousands of people at a time. But I did not go to Baba for the shakti. I went to Baba for his wisdom. I experienced the Truth within him, and I knew he could teach it to me. There are myriad teachers with shakti, but very few with wisdom, and almost none who have realized the Truth.

Being with Baba meant, for me, surrendering to his wisdom and receiving what he had to give me. He passed on to me the essence of spiritual practice—not an insight or idea, but an actual moment-to-moment practice that will lead us Home, where wisdom resides. In teaching me, Baba removed the obstacles blocking my path, and activated what was latent within me.

Everyone has a gift. Within each of us there is some latent capacity that spiritual practice will nurture. In the course of sādhana, a person’s gift or gifts will expand, and may take on qualities that had not appeared before. Over the last thirty years, my own gift has developed. This gift is the ability to burn up people’s pain. This removal of pain is what happened for me with Baba. It is one of the many things he taught me.

Yes: people’s pain is dissolved when they sit with me. I go deep within myself to the groundwater of consciousness, where I can feel their pain as if it were my own; then I dissolve it in the light of consciousness. In relative reality, of course, their pain isn’t mine, but in an Absolute sense we all share all the pain and joy in the universe. Many people have experienced me removing their pain.

When Baba was teaching me, all I had to do to facilitate his dissolving my pain was to let go. And yet very few people are willing to do this. They want to hold onto their pain. They would not know who they were if they let it go. Their small self would lose its grip. They would lose their motivation. They would lose everything if they sat and I dissolved their pain. And they certainly wouldn’t want to acknowledge that they needed me to do for them something they couldn’t do for themselves. The small self prefers to believe that I just sit there while it dissolves its own pain. The problem is, the small self cannot dissolve its own pain.

I have to say that I am naïve, as Baba once said I was. I really thought people would want to get rid of their pain. People are always saying they do, but when it comes to actually doing it, the resistance is palpable. We all have fear and resistance, but we do not have to let fear and resistance run us. I want to teach people to get to a point in their practice where they can burn up their own pain, but people refuse to give up their sense of control. They don’t want to feel dependent on me as their guide. Nor do they want to be wholly independent, because that means taking full responsibility for their own pain.

So I am left with the realization that very few people want to accept what I have to offer. Many don’t even want to accept that I have something to offer. Baba used to say, “I give you what you want, so that one day you will want what I have to give.” Now I see every day what he meant.

Shakti enlivens….

 February 1, 2015

Shakti enlivens. Where there is no wisdom, it will enliven ignorance.

Self-sufficient….

 February 1, 2015

Self-sufficient Dependent Unteachable Learner  

If we really are….

 January 25, 2015

If we really are longing for God, then we should be doing everything to let go of anything that is in the way.

Speaking Freely….

 January 25, 2015

For many, free speech is the freedom to say what we want to say. “I can say what I want. This is a free country.” “Everyone has the right to free speech.” What is free speech really? Here in America, we pride ourselves on free speech; it is enshrined in the First Amendment. Of course, there are reasonable restrictions, as the famous example of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre indicates. But what I am concerned with here is a deeper kind of freedom of speech. For instance, political correctness of all kinds remains entrenched in our society. Even in the privacy of our homes, we are watching our language so as not to offend anyone. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, anything that upset anyone was removed from view. Exactly how are we policing our speech? How do we reconcile free speech and inoffensive speech?

People are up in arms when someone offends someone else, or hurts that person’s self esteem. We are working to protect the individual from anything that may make them feel bad. Well, maybe there are times when we should feel bad. Maybe there are times when we need to be offended. There are also times when we should risk offending. If, for instance, we are unwilling to offend someone who desperately needs to be called out, we are only setting them up for disaster; we become accomplices. And there ought to be times, when those things are said, when we “own up” and receive them, saying, “You know, though this hurts, you’re right. And thank you for being honest with me. Thank you for respecting me enough to say something that in fact is just meant to wake me up.”

If we are all about being able to say whatever we want, no matter what, then we must be ready to face the consequences. Free speech is a two-edged sword. We must be prepared for someone to respond in kind. In The Art of War we are to know ourselves, know the terrain and know our opponent. When we speak up we must first know ourselves. What is our real motivation? Are we ready to do this? Are we able to face what comes? Then we must know our terrain. Is it safe to say what we want? What are the ways to do that? And are we able to maneuver the terrain? And finally, we must know our opponent. Do we know how they may respond? Can we handle their response appropriately?

Free speech

Policed Speech

Unchecked ego

Restrained ego

With Free speech comes responsibility. This responsibility requires us to speak up and keep quiet as appropriate for the situation. We are not to be too timid if the occasion calls for up-front communication. We need to examine what is the purpose of free speech. Are we communicating to confuse or delude? Or is our motivation to speak for the betterment of all involved?

Free speech from the small self starts with being deluded by one’s own individual voice. Small self free speech is empty chatter believing itself authentic and profound. The small self is fascinated listening to itself, and assumes everyone else will be fascinated, too. Its communication is usually boring, often hurtful, and maybe destructive, depending on the motivation. Small selves tell themselves that they are kind and good when this is not true at all.

Small self free speech is not universal. The belief that one’s individual expression is priceless and unique is wrong understanding. “I don’t want to be universal”, the small self says. “I want to be unique”. We are all too apparently confined within the small self when we “speak our truth”, which is really opinion, without knowledge or discernment. The internet, along with texting, creates an illusion of connectedness, but too often encourages us to feel insulated in our individuality. The internet is a zoo of small self free speech; it encourages us either to remain in rajas (agitation and incitement) or tamas (numbness and inertia). Outbursts of excitement, outrage, and sentimentality turn up everywhere, all under the guise of authentic expressiveness.

Truly free speech comes from an inner place of nonattachment. It is clear, clean, and honest both inwardly and outwardly. Its motivation is selfless, and it is never merely partisan. It works for the betterment of all. It is heard by all—though small selves are repelled by it—because it comes from Love for All. It goes beyond politics, culture, and religion. It encourages us to move from rajas to sattva (clarity and calm). Real free speech will inspire us.

We all need to work toward a right understanding of truly free speech. The state of the world calls for it. Thanks to technology, nearly everyone in the world inhabits the same “now”. Culture and language no longer insulate us. “Safe” and “unsafe” no longer exist as distinctly as we would like. There is no escape at this point. So we have to be responsible, and contribute genuinely free speech. Removing our wrong understanding by constantly focusing our attention in the Heart, where we actually reside, is the way to this freedom. Rather than remain in the prison of the small self and its delusion of freedom, we must liberate ourselves in Truth, from within. Then all our speech will truly be free.

Free Speech….

 January 25, 2015

    Free speech                     Policed speech

 Unchecked ego                   Restrained ego  

Pain is a way….

 January 18, 2015

Pain is a way to distinguish between when we think acceptance and when we actually accept. When we actually accept, the pain dissolves.

Living Sādhana….

 January 18, 2015

You can’t think your sādhana. And yet that is exactly what so many people do. They think good thoughts and believe that is sādhana. They wear “pure” clothes and eat “pure” food and act “purely”. They “believe” they are doing everything to succeed in sādhana. They are in fact going about it all wrong because they are approaching practice as if the goal is a worldly one. They are following the path of worldly success to reach God.

In Vedanta the longing for God is a requirement. We cannot truly pursue sādhana without that longing; it has to have been earned at some point. So it is both a requirement and an earned trait. Longing for God has nothing to do with what we call worldly success. The approach to God is not like anything in the world. Longing for God and the journey to God require the aspirant to surrender his attachment to the world even as he is in the world. The self has to be let go of. We must give up our identification with the individual and individual success. God is the doer.

Even people who want to help others have to practice this nonattachment. As the theologian Jürgen Moltmann says in his essay “The Theology of Mystical Experience”, “Anyone who wants to fill up his own hollowness by helping other people will only spread that very same hollowness. Why? Because people are far less influenced by what another person says and does than the activist would like to believe; they are influenced by the other person’s own being, by what he is. Only the person who has found his own self can give of his own self”. And the only way to find the Self is to be willing to surrender the self.

In sādhana there is no private or public; there is only authenticity. And authenticity is about being, not merely thinking. If we oscillate between private and public in the way we act without remaining inwardly centered and discerning what is appropriate, then we are just moving around in the room of our mind, and thinking where we are rather than being where we are. Our individuality then works to separate us; we struggle within ourselves over being good or bad. We decide what we are and what we do. Until we get off this playing field, we are just thinking our sādhana.

In the same essay, Moltmann describes the consequences of thinking spiritual practice without living it. “In societies which force men and women into active life, and only reward achievement and success, meditation…counts as being superseded, useless and superfluous. That is understandable enough. What is not understandable is when meditation exercises are recommended to nervy activists and worn-out managers, on the grounds that they provide a useful kind of counterbalancing sport, which will help them to recover their mental equilibrium; or when yoga techniques are sold as a means of increasing performance. Pragmatic and utilitarian marketing means the final destruction of meditation. It does not let people find peace, and even if they find peace they do not find themselves in the process”. When we think our sādhana without living it, we turn it into a kind of accessory to the mental life of the small self, which isn’t really internal at all.

Since anyone reading this probably has a physical body, chances are we all live in relative reality. Anyone reading this will also have a subtle body, because that is where the mind resides. We can delude ourselves all we want, but the more we pretend, the further we are away from sādhana and the purpose for which we say we pursue sādhana. If we really are longing for God, then we should be doing everything to let go of anything that is in the way. The doing is not about attaining God; God already is. The doing is the small self, the individual, working to “know” itself. Once it truly faces and knows itself, it unwittingly has dismantled itself. It dissolves in the brilliant light of honesty.

So as we move from tamas, delusion and hiding the truth, through rajas, pain and agitation, to sattva, serenity and the Truth, we accept what the individual actually is: a vehicle for the true Self. We then are no longer thinking sādhana but living it, being it. We then move from intellectually knowing the truth to experientially Knowing the Truth. We move from delusion, to the pain of what is, to accepting the light of it all.

Emotional pain is a good thing, in that it tells us we are not accepting reality or Reality. Pain is a way to distinguish between when we think acceptance and when we actually accept. If we have fully accepted something, we will no longer be pained by it. When we actually accept, the pain dissolves. If instead of truly accepting something, we only think we are accepting it, we will feel pain, because we are still attached. If we feel pain, we are rajasic, and are not reconciled to the truth even if we “know” the truth. Or we may not believe or want to see the truth, in which case we are tamasic. Not until we own, master, and transcend—not until we move from tamas to rajas to sattva—do we move from thinking sādhana to living sādhana.

Remember: thinking sādhana keeps everything pristine and nice. Lived sādhana is not either. Sādhana can have those qualities, but that means it also encompasses the impure and unkind. Not until we embrace and know the individual self we are working with can we get rid of it. In the world, we put our best foot forward in heading for success. In sādhana, there is no best foot or worst foot. We have to just BE.

Ultimately, truly living our sādhana means going within and beyond all that keeps us from God. Hugh of St. Victor expresses it beautifully: “To ascend to God, that means to enter into the self, and not to enter into the self solely, but to go beyond it in one’s innermost being in a way that is inexpressible. He therefore who enters with supreme inwardness into himself, who passes through himself in his innermost being and who rises above himself—he in very truth ascends to God”.

Comfortable in own skin….

 January 18, 2015

  Comfortable in own skin                             Uptight/Insecure/Boxed in 

Inconsiderate/Insensitive                               Well-mannered  

Seamless….

 January 11, 2015

What you see is what you get. When we are clear, what you see is what you get. There is nothing to hide and nothing to reveal. We are. We no longer hide from ourselves or others.

Usually we present our best foot when meeting with people socially, professionally or even in the privacy of our families. This means that somewhere we know we have another foot; a foot we do not want others to see.

The foursquare below presents this set of beliefs about our interactions with others.

Fake/ For Show

Authentic/ Honest

Polite

Rude

In sādhana everything is to be brought to the front and dissolved. There is no best foot forward or worst foot hidden. We are to work to know all that is within our individuality.

Surprisingly, being given the opportunity to acknowledge the other foot makes people angry. This last year, we worked on accepting our self-loathing. I gave everyone permission to hate, to feel the hate that everyone has inside themselves. People did not want permission because they did not want to face their own feelings of hate. Not only do we want others not to see our dark side; we do not want to see it ourselves. We decide what we as well as others can see.

This presents another foursquare, built around our beliefs about self-presentation and self-concealment:

Deceitful

Up front

Secure/ Discreet

Exposed

Even if we own, master and transcend this foursquare, people will still project their imaginings onto us. When we are not identified with what is being projected, though, there is no need for upset or joy. Just quietly watch, marveling at the creativity.

When, instead of being who we really are, we decide who and how we are, we box ourselves in. We act in ways that we have decided express the characteristics we believe we embody. This presentation is motivated by the ideals to which the small self is attached. Being comfortable in our own skin would have us functioning from the Heart, and all would be infused with the Heart. If we are imposing ideas on ourselves, then only our outer shell will mimic those ideals. Our presentation is only skin-deep. If and when we go deeper, or if something occurs to throw us inward, that shell will no longer be what we present outwardly. When we are tested, we get to see what we are made of; it is not the thin veneer we have presented to the world.

There is a reason I trust Swami Muktananda, my Guru. So many events occurred in the ashram that tested all of us. I found myself in many an uncomfortable situation. Each time, Baba could have done something that would have hurt or crushed me. He never did. He always guided me, even when I had done something terribly wrong. He showed me over and over again that what he wanted was what was best for me. And because I was always willing to step up and face my own delusions, we were on the same side of any battle of wills or egos.

This does not mean I did not question. The way to build trust was to question, to commit, to participate. If I had walked around presenting as something I was not, Baba and I never would have cleared out so much of my inner debris. I would not have seen my motivation and its flaws. Over and over again, Baba proved to me that what he wanted for me was true love and happiness. He wanted me to be free in the best sense of the word. He neither wanted nor allowed me to box myself in or have others box me in.

This foursquare shows how we box ourselves in:

Comfortable in own skin

Uptight/Insecure/Boxed in

Inconsiderate/Insensitive

Well-mannered

As my time with him went on, it became clear to me that Baba was the same all the way through. He was seamless. There were people who used to say Baba was different in public and in private. Baba was just different with them privately because they themselves were different in public and private. Baba used to say, “The world is as you see it”.

So maybe I am stupid and did not see what others saw. I looked and questioned, and I trust Baba with my physical and spiritual life, both of which he actually saved. For me, Baba was seamless. What I saw was what I got. No regrets. Just my deepest gratitude.

In sādhana everything is….

 January 11, 2015

In sādhana everything is to be brought to the front and dissolved. There is no best foot forward or worst foot hidden. We are to work to know all that is within our individuality.

Deceitful….

 January 11, 2015

Deceitful                        Up front                       

Secure/ Discreet           Exposed

Belonging….

 January 4, 2015

We are in this together. Who is in it? All of us. Who? All. In order for me to be special I have to be separate. In Truth, I have to be together. When we separate, we believe there are places we do not belong. When we unite, We belong everywhere.

“I am uncomfortable here because of them.” “I am uncomfortable there because of the environment.” In truth, it is because of me. That is the reality, and I have to work to be ME everywhere. Then everyone gets to be themselves. The risk of being excluded is always there, based on our karma. Not everyone in our midst wants us to be included. The more limited we are, the more narrow and superficial the criteria for membership.

When I went to Washington University in St. Louis, I was not sure how I was going to navigate the environment. In high school I had played a varsity sport every season. Now in university, that was not an option since Title IX was not in place. So I went out for cheerleading and pledged a sorority because those were two kinds of activities I had shunned in the past. I wanted to see if my dislike of them was because I was sour grapes or they really were not me. I became president of my pledge class and cheered as a varsity cheerleader and then as a professional cheerleader for the St. Louis Cardinals. Because I belonged to particular groups, other groups tried to exclude me. I would have none of that, and found myself going back and forth across borders. There was a sense that I was testing to see if I could do it all. I was unwilling to be forced into limitation.

Years later, I had lost this understanding and willingly limited myself. At the time I first was introduced to Baba and his teachings, I was not interested at all because the tradition Baba came from was Indian. The trappings turned me off. This was not where I came from; I came from a Chinese Taoist and Zen tradition and culture. I believed there was nothing in common between what I was studying and what Baba taught. Of course, I was completely ignorant. Surrender to the truth of my own stupidity came when I saw how I was approaching the teachings as if they were glued to culture and not to the essence.

Of course, there were others who divided rather than included. One woman in the ashram told me that Baba did not like women with suntans or with short hair. At the time I had both. Then there was, “Baba does not like Tai Chi Chuan”. When I finally allowed myself to do the form even if Baba did not like it, one of the trustees said that it was beautiful and there was no way Baba would be against it.

Baba taught me that the physical trappings were not what any true tradition is about. He made sure I was not attached to anything temporal. What Baba taught was universal and internal. We are truly One. What divides us can and must be let go of.

Coming back to America after Baba had left his body and my first son had been born tested me to see if I could really live being inclusive. After three years at Yale Divinity School we moved to Wilton, Connecticut, the town The Stepford Wives was written about. These people prided themselves on belonging and fitting in. No one who did not fit in could easily survive. My then husband was the curate of the Episcopal church. It was expected that I attend services weekly. I now had a second son whom I was nursing discreetly in the back of the church. After nine months in Wilton I was told I could not nurse my baby. A prominent woman in the parish said, “They may do that in India, but we don’t do it here. We have put up with you; now you have to toe the line.” Someone from the diocese came to help and told us about an Eccentricity Quotient. This meant that groups can handle just so much difference. To fit in, we could not have too many elements outside the norm. We would have to decide which things we could give up in order to belong. The irony was, I now had long hair. This was unacceptable. Rather than cut my hair, I began to wear it up. Friends sent fancy clothes that were not me, but I did not care. I stopped nursing in the church. Though I now fit in externally, I never fit in internally. Thank God.

Skin. Clothes. Hair. Language. Accent. Food. Style. Education. Money. Race. Profession. Nationality. Gender. Age. Sexual orientation. Body type. Sports affiliation. Ethnicity. Religion. Politics. Music. And any other element we can use to try to separate ourselves from each other. Even if we had all the same attributes, none of them would be what keeps us together or separates us. We all belong to each other. We all belong to God.

Whatever vibration….

 January 4, 2015

Whatever vibration you have, it is appropriate that you have it. What you do with it is another matter.

Non-resistance….

 January 4, 2015

Non-resistance                   Resistance 

Doormat                             Standing up for self