Hinduism / Vedanta
In the Far East, a peasant has no problem that someone can be born from another universe into a human body, walk up to their hut one day and ask for something to eat and transport them into infinite galaxies of awareness.
A very advanced master can glow so strongly that you see divine in them. You look into them and you see infinity constantly changing, evolving and radiating in new forms.
Life is endless reality. There is reality after reality, spinning on endlessly into the cosmos, billions and billions of manifest universes. Underlying all of this is the unmanifest --the absolute reality.
The self plays among the waves of existence. It surfaces, it comes up for a while, and then it disappears again.
In sanskrit they say: "Tat twam asi" - thou art that. You are God. The bubble of your awareness bursts and you're flooded with immortality.
Everything that you see before you with your physical eyes is an illusion. In other words, you are not seeing correctly. Life is made up of light. But if you are only looking through the senses, it seems solid and physical.
The wheel goes round and round and round forever. Pleasure, pain, birth and death, lifetime after lifetime, it is endless. All sentient beings experience this, the endless dance of life, the lila.
All of the universes are but phantoms, mirages, and while they have their own essence, their own pantomime -- they pass forgotten.
Self-realization is not the awareness that this world is a dream, that's a part of self-realization.
The perceiver of the dream, the one whom the dream is unfolding before, is what we call the Self.
Once you have personally experienced enlightenment, you will see beyond the ocean of death to the everlasting shores of immortality.
The universe is always ecstasy and it’s always perfect, but we don’t perceive it that well. If we keep doing our yoga in every lifetime, we perceive it more correctly.
The planes of light exist. Yoga is a method of unifying the energies of the body, the mind, and the spirit and directing them towards infinity, the planes of light.
The dream is so thick; the Maya is so thick. There's no magic as long as there's all this thought. So the first condition for the practice of higher magic is the stopping of thought.
Now, stopping thought is only the beginning. As Brahmananda, who was a disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, once remarked: The inner life begins with samadhi. This is an awesome thought, I realize, for the average person who meditates, that it could begin with samadhi.
Krishna once said to Arjuna: Consider the past and future with an equal mind, and pass the peanut M&M's.
You're much too hung up on all of your ideas and your desires. You still have not penetrated the essence of yoga.
Sri Krishna is said to be an avatar, which is a human way of trying to define very big. That is to say that Sri Krishna is not from the local area network, but he has come from a world that is different because his mind is different.
The void is ready to snatch you up like a Pac Man machine and Laskshmi is on vacation. You chant Sring -- and you get her answering machine.
Gods and goddesses are not what people think they are. Their names are terms with which we try to convey a certain experience, a state of consciousness.
Isis, the Egyptian goddess of renewal is symbolized for the Hindus by Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Brahma is the creator, Vishnu the sustainer, and Shiva the transformer or destroyer - the Cycle of creation.
In the Upanishads they talk about the path of the sun and the path of the moon. The path of the moon is rebirth. The path of the sun leads to self-knowledge, from which there is no return.
One path leads back to this world, to rebirth; one path leads beyond. Your soul stands at a crossword, trying to make a decision, flipping a coin, a nice image for the soul, I think.
You've got to go do things. Yoga is not a waiting.
Yoga means we accept responsibility for the tasks in our life, and we know that being a king, being an enlightened teacher, being someone who sweeps the streets, we know that nothing is a greater yoga than anything else.
We live in a world of careers. Work, as Sri Krishna points out in the Bhagavad Gita, is a necessary path for everyone attaining enlightenment. It is something that we all do. Some people work very hard at not working.
The road for Arjuna is unexpected. Sri Krishna says you have to face that which you fear the most that which you're most attached to and eliminate it. In this case he has to fight a battle, and the battle is his attachments.
Krishna says, fight. He says, go out on the battlefield and kill those people whom it's your job to kill; and whether they were your friends or not, you have to look at the big picture. In the big picture, you can't go kill anybody, you can't be killed.
A war is an incarnation. A battle is a day of your life. So we do one day at a time in self-discovery.
Everybody is in the waiting room of life. Yoga is not a waiting. It is a doing, today.
You have to be a warrior in order to become enlightened. If you think it's tough paying the bills, think about being everywhere all at once and doing everything in all the universes, simultaneously, past, present, and future.
What Sri Krishna is saying, is that it's a terrible mistake to believe that this life we lead is real. Obviously it's real, but it doesn't last very long in its realness. It's very ephemeral and to mistaken the forms of life, the shapes that life takes, for reality, is not wise.
There are people in the Himalayas who are thousands of years old. But that's just a power, you see. It would seem to me that would suggest a tremendous aversion to the experience of death.
The body comes and goes. This life, my friend, will come and go. It is a fleeting moment, an impulse in an eternal reality.
Sri Krishna refers, of course, to this world as a joyless, transient world. Obviously, he's never been to Disneyland.
The dreams of the self are manifold and endless and they exist in all the myriad worlds and conditions that appear to have solidity. When you're dreaming at night, something seems very real, but when you wake up the dream is gone and so is all that apparent solidity.
Yoga is a science. It is the science of consciousness. Yoga suggests that there is more, other realms, other dimensions, and nirvana - the central nexus where all this comes from.
You have to elevate yourself to that point and bring your mind into the Godhead, into nirvana, into that perfect and pure radiant knowledge. It will not come to you. It never does.
Those who seek liberation want to go beyond individualized perception. The essence of their being wants to dissolve back into the cosmos.
Self-realization doesn't imply loss, gain, even transition; it's only a settling. The separate sounds on the beach, the birds, the waves, the wind. They all come together again, they blend, they harmonize.
Yoga makes you free. It makes you happy. It gets you out of the traps that create human misery. It makes you vibrate faster.
In the Far East, studying yoga is comparable to a mixture of attending one of the best Western universities, and of being an intrepid explorer.
Ramakrishna didn't suddenly become enlightened. We had years of him meditating, seeking, crying to Mother Kali, going in and out of samadhi; but after many years of this process, he was enlightened. He was no longer a finite individual.
The smoke from the fire passes through the building and the soot affixes itself to the walls. The smoke passes through the air and keeps going - liberation.
The awareness of liberation is not liberation. The awareness of time is not liberation.
The awareness of place, space, or condition is not liberation. You can't say what it is, but you can sure say what it isn't.
Sri Krishna's message is the message of anyone who comes from far away. His message is the same as Buddha, Lao Tsu, Bodhidharma, Milarepa, Padmasambhava.
One day the play ends and the screen goes blank. There is nothing. Everything returns to its original formlessness - and then another dream begins.
Krishna says meditate and you'll see the various ephemeral worlds, the various ephemeral beings, all of them going through the same thing; some are rich, some are poor, some are more knowledgeable, some are less knowledgeable -- in countless myriad universes, forever.
We are immortal life. Think of the opportunity of self-realization. What a gas!
Beyond the parameters of the self is an ocean ... and it's most excellent.
In order to create heat, you have to have something to burn. So what we do in yoga is, we burn ourselves up to create light.
Yoga means we go a step further back. In yoga we go to the cause. The cause of pain is not the world. The cause of pain is us.
When the sun sets, beautiful though it may be, billions of stars appear. The ego is but one sun. When that sun sets, there are endless suns, endless horizons beyond it.
Yoga is a removal of the conscious awareness from the world as you know it -- the world that you've constructed -- through your focus within your mind, to something else.
Trying to use the power of yoga to improve your life, this is a terrible mistake. Because all you are doing is binding yourself more. You're putting more of your attention into the transient world.
Observe your actions but be so busy that you never contemplate their possible effects. It is only this consciousness that leads to liberation. Everything else is illusion.
Illumination in the outer world is to be happy no matter what is going on. In the inner world, it's more ineffable. It's harder to express.
Self-realization: No ego, no desires, no weight problems, no tax forms, no death to die, no life to live.
Self-realization is a very quiet thing. It's not flashy. No one might see you light up a room. No one might observe anything
Self-realization is a strange term. You don't actually realize your 'self'. If anything, you go away. The caterpillar enters the cocoon of meditation: A butterfly emerges - metamorphosis.
If you are with a fully enlightened being, a jivan mukta, liberated soul, the quality of light is so clear, that you don't really know that it is there until later.
Self-realization is liberation. Liberation is self-realization.
Sri Krishna says whatever role we have in life, we have to play it to the hilt. We have to take it all the way. We have to assume responsibility for our role. To run away from it causes misery.
The directions for meditation that Sri Krishna gives are very exacting. He tells Arjuna exactly how to get past all the things that cause suffering and transient pleasure to something that is perpetual ecstasy. His directions are that exact.
Beyond mind, beyond time, beyond space there is immortal awareness.
There's a source, there's a perennial source from which all things come forth. We call it the Godhead, Nirvana, the Tao, enlightenment. It's big; it's bright; it's perfect, as are all of its children, as are we.
The cool thing about the universe is that it can format itself into tiny little manifestations that are not entirely aware of all aspects of life.
When all of the selves have been dissolved, you will enter into the super-conscious awareness. Then, you are free. Then, there is no suffering. Then, there is no attachment.
Yes, there are siddha powers. Yes, you can heal people, transform attention. You can flood the sky with light at night so you can't even see the stars. But the greatest miracle is the spirit -- it is light
Consumer goods become enlightenment, relationships, anything! It doesn't really matter because infinity exists in everything. "Greater than the greatest, smaller than the smallest, the self dwells in the hearts of all," that is the Upanishads.
Tantra is the perception of the oneness and the perfection of all things. Not just the perception of light, but the perception of darkness, seeing God in both beauty and horror.
In the Bhagavad-Gita Krishna says: Arjuna you cannot avoid action. Everyone is stuck in the world of action. The world of action is forever.
If your state of awareness is low, then all the material success in the world won't help. If your state of awareness is high, then in poverty, you will know no poverty.
Psychic development is a necessary skill in leading a successful and happy life. Your intellectual processes and your senses don't give you enough information to distinguish the real from the unreal.
Don't become a slave to success or failure, family, friends, possessions. If these things come to you in life, enjoy them, but fix your consciousness on that which does not change.
Mind delineates experience, and through the filter of mind, experience becomes something else; it becomes knowledge in tantra.
