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The Shape Of Light #26
“Forms of limitation serve precisely as the space where the great bursting of expansion and luminosity will take place within each of us.” Paul Muller-Ortega The body with its limitations and challenges is precisely the arena that joy takes place. This speaks of yoga’s necessity, as it prepare the body mind. How does the light shape itself in order to disclose and reveal what it contains? How does our light do the same? The mirroring of cosmic and individual light, that is not truly speaking separate. Form and shape release in order to shape again. In our bodies it is the practice of asana, form made that permit energy’s flow unencumbered, health and ease result. In the deepest core of being it is the practice of meditation. Individual awareness melts as it is effortlessly merged with its source reshaping into higher iterations as it moves back out. Awareness no longer caught, trapped in the persistent, limiting shapes and contours of reality is expanded. Even that which is familiar takes on a new luster. What are we re-shaping? Do we simply return to the same shape or permit the tender, subtle reconstruction to occur? Stand firm and gentle in the light. Recognize the highest self, piercing the depths of the soul, see beyond. Resting here awareness steeps in the pure light of its own source, permitting a change, an up-leveling of outer vision to occur. It is a two step process: prepare the body-mind with asana and study; take awareness in to the depths, the source of steadiness and equipoise found in deep meditation, then refinement of body, mind and senses naturally and spontaneously occurs. Outward vision has a penetrating clarity that is rendered potent and any subsequent engagement is more efficacious. Live life from this stance . Anything we wish to do, to become will be made better, our offering strong and high. Practice yoga not to be better at the practice of yoga but to be skillful in life. We are told in the Bhagavad Gita: Yoga is skill in action. What then is the method, the way? This is the consideration of authentic sadhana, the path that permits fully realized humanity. Yoga is not for some later date but for this life now, permitting a more skillful joyful life. It is a two step process. We must go in to know experience the light. Then any action performed with eyes opened will be drenched with this light. The shape of your light determines the shape of your life. Where have you brought your light to bear lately? today? Recognizing this is the beginning of attention. Even if the recognition is that we failed to bring it as we wish. Knowing that alone brings it more fully to mind. I would truly love to hear the story of your light’s expansion. I invite you to share if you are moved to do so. In that we all bask in its glow and increase exponentially the power of our individual light.
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Gamble Everything on Love If You Are a True Human - Rumi # 25 When we come into the presence of one we love our entire being melts. Our arms float in expansion to allow the object of love in. We embrace tenderly but firmly. When looking in the eyes of one who loves us we see light. Their eyes light up at the sight of us. We are that object of love being compelled inward into company into embrace. This look of love, of light, is what the Tantric masters speak of when saying consciousness pulses everywhere in everything. We need only to have the eyes to see, heightened senses to know. Meditation heightens our senses and permits the knowing of what is ordinarily missed. Not by putting on rose colored glasses or some other outer prop. Not by convincing ourselves that we are worthy to see and receive the light that is love, but by ridding the body-mind of the debris and ignorance that prevents the light, always pure, always expanding from shinning fully. It is the alchemical transmutation of our very senses so we can see taste and touch love in its many forms as light. First we must go in. This is the work of practice, daily and effortless. And just like love no one can truly describe or explain it. It simply must be experienced. If poets touch our hearts with their words it is because we recognize what is being offered. We have all experienced this feeling that is so much more than a mere feeling. It is an invasion, an instantaneous immersion. It is natural, inbuilt and our birth right. A parent, a child, a partner, an animal- all can inspire love in us. That inspiration is an ignition of the light that is always there. It is our very source. It is love. I have felt ill equipped to speak of love. I am no poet and it always came off sounding corny to my sophisticated ears, like some sort of greeting card. And then there was the concern, how would others take the speaking? In offering, I risk receiving a form of the very thing I want, inclusion, acceptance, proof of my worthiness, love. No more. The desire to find love is a beautiful heart opening, heart breaking thing. It pulls us naturally and we revolve around its orbit, believing love to be something outside ourselves. The truth is we are the very source of love and we find it because like seeks like. We have only to learn how to find the mother load within, the source, the animating pulse that gushes outward into being. Once we do, we know a devotion that is pure, that lights the sky and permits the true seeing of what already exists. Yes there are degrees and this light flickers, sometimes seemingly to go out. But as long as breath moves and heart beats we have the capacity, like a moth to a flame to rest in its warmth and share its gifts with the world. First we must go in, know love. Not solipsistic, egoistic but the true knowing of our light. Then naturally love, light emanates in all we think, say and do. It emanates because consciousness is both immanent and transcendent. It is indwelling and beyond our imagination. Gamble Everything on Love If You Are a True Human. Be all you are. The Unknowable Other #24 January 15, 2018
No matter how much we love someone, how well we believe we know their heart, we can never really know other. Yet it is this desire, to know what we intuit will complete us that drives relationship of all kinds. There is a yearning to fill the hole that all humans feel. It is quelled for a time but never truly healed, the ache like a phantom limb remains no matter the companionship or the amount of material goods we have at our disposal, we can never really grasp on the surface of life that which is missing inside. It is a beautiful dance this search for relationship, it can also be painful. No matter the profundity or length, all relationships end, it is the pulse of life. This is the natural course of creation, maintenance and dissolution. We know this intellectually and still we are driven to seek that which is eternal, that which will complete, fill the hole and quell the ache. So the search continues or we give up, believing it is simply the lot of all humans or at least ones like us, to be alone. This ache is what sets us on a course to find a deeper knowing. Know Self says yoga. Actually, many traditions say it, the poets and writers say it, artists and scientists say it, people of all stripes hope for it. We are driven to know. What is it that animates you? Is it possible to know that, to experience it? This is the ultimate relationship and truest meaning of yoga both as that which joins and as a conscience act of contemplation. To know that which animates you is not naming it, you may name it what you wish, that is as we know, the mind’s job. It is not predicated on belief of any sort, though you may hold whatever belief you wish; nor is it allegiance with a grouping of any kind other than humankind. What is it that animates you? Know this source and be connected to that which animates, whatever you name it, everything. Duality, the binary system, is the nature of reality, yet we long for union wholeness. To combine any two things requires skill, nuance and great subtlety. So we practice. The non-dual, that which is in union, complete, arises from the dual. We cannot overlook or bypass this realty to reach the wholeness we seek. To do so keeps us at surface, renders inauthenticity and is ultimately unsatisfactory. So many levels! We seek them all, but always the highest first. Capture The Fort! We have many goals in life and we can think of each of them as separate mines, one of gold, one of diamonds, etc. This ancient teaching states, rather than trying to conquer each gold or diamond mine, (each separate facet of awareness), or demand that a single relationship fulfill our deepest yearning, capture the fort (unite with the Source) and rule over it all. Absolute Consciousness is the ruler of the entire relative world and the source of wholeness. That is what the practice of Neelakantha Meditation does. It rapidly shifts our perspective and the experience of our lives. Align with the cosmic sequential source and all falls into alignment like metal shavings to a magnet. We yearn to be fully realized humans. This implies knowing one’s self, not just the social persona we present to the world but our whole, truest self. We can never really know other but we can know our self and in that, all other relationships are served. To meditate is to know one’s whole self. What Does Yoga Mean? January 07, 2018
Yoga means many things. It is most widely defined by the same Indo-European root for the English word “yoke”, so is often referred to as that which joins. In joining we have many options, movement to breath, body to spirit, heart to mind. In these and other combinations then, yoga seeks, to one degree or another, to make whole. Sanskrit scholars also trace the etymology of yoga to the root ‘yuj’ meaning to contemplate. What is it we contemplate? At the highest, it is the contemplation of the Self; the full whole Self. More then that, it is the knowing of this fullness and then living life from that fullness as opposed to partiality. Everyone wants to make a difference. Never mind difference says one great teacher, there is enough difference in the world, make wholeness. Yoga is the physical practice making the body strong and supple- yoking apparent opposites. It is one of the classical Hindu schools that provides a philosophical frame work, on which Tantra builds upon to offer a blue print, a method, a path by which we may experience that wholeness now in this very body, in this life. From this source space, it is a potent lens from which to view, to contemplate the big questions of life: why is there something instead of nothing? Why am I here? How do I fit in? What is my purpose and place in the frame of things? Everything pulses. Surging out, life evolves and presents itself in a coat of many colors. A multi-hued diversity is displayed everyday in so many ways. But what surges out has a source. What is that source? What is the source of my life, of my individual identity? What surges out has a corresponding current that naturally magnetically pulls back in. We are indeed metaphorically each that individual wave surging from the ocean of consciousness, crashing to the shore and we must return. We are called. Whether or how we heed that call is our choice and in many ways the definition of our fullest humanity. Yoga is many things, It is the breath and the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind that affords the capacity to be one pointed ‘ekagra’. Wherever we place our attention, we go deep because we have practiced going deep into self, knowing the whole Self. We deserve no less. At the highest, and we are always aiming for the highest, right? At the highest yoga, from the Tantric Shivite non-dual perspective, is more about re-joining as it were; reclaiming what is already the case, but been forgotten. Having increased capacity, realizing the fullness of human capability, living from the source of diversity permits the highest deepest contemplation to bloom. Know your source, live in fullness, and watch the multi-hued display of life take on more vivid color, increase in richness and depth and multiply in possible iteration. You deserve no less. Meditate. Resolve To Be Happy #22 January 1, 2018
The arrival of a new year often signals resolutions. Generally they revolve around releasing something old and embracing something new or at least old in the sense that it is unwanted and new in the sense that it is desired. The success rate of New Year’s resolutions is abysmal even with the best and strongest of intentions and dedication. Why is this so? It is not merely a matter of will power or talent or skill, though all play a part. Attachment, say the Eastern texts, is the root of all suffering. Humans seem to cling quite naturally. Perhaps it has something to do with our evolution, all that swinging in trees. Joking aside, we naturally come by our attachments from a deep place. Life brings experience of every sort. Every single experience we have in life, good, bad and neutral, is stored in our very DNA waiting to pop again at the right trigger. This is the birth of our patterns. It is the work of deep meditation to burn the negative kernels and give will power a big assist. Of course, if we have nothing we care deeply about, then we are not likely to suffer it’s loss. But then again, if we have nothing we care deeply about, we are marooned on the surface, stuck in the shallow end of life. So, do we care deeply and take the risk of continually being deeply hurt? Or do we skim the surface, with a thin veneer of protection that keeps us from feeling, knowing deeply? The truth is humans crave depth. It is this longing that sets us on the path of relationships of every kind. We want to fill that hole that exists inside, the one nothing seems to truly satisfy. No matter the quality of relationship, it is based on other and as such, destined to disappoint if we are not first whole inside. We want to go deep but are not sure how. Meditation teaches us innocently and effortlessly how to go deep into our own heart, to the source of our individuality and in doing so, we learn how to go deep into everything. There is the image of the bow and arrow that illustrates this beautifully. In meditation we take the arrow of awareness deep, deep into the vibrating silence that is the source of all possibility. When we emerge, anywhere we place our attention, our arrow, it will be profoundly, deeply released. It will hit it’s target with potent accuracy and depth every single time. Once recovered, recognized, the pathway to deeply knowing anything and everything is forged . Yes, attachment does cause suffering, but this does not mean we must be indifferent in order to go unscathed through life. Even if we could wall ourselves off, think how much we would miss! Yoga is the invitation to learn to be skillful; to celebrate and fully embody the joys of life without clinging to what will inevitably end, as all on the surface must. Skillful also implies the means to handle life’s challenges without becoming imprisoned by it’s sorrow. Neither condition indicates unfeeling, or uncaring, in fact, quite the opposite. Life is precious, too precious to be lived on the surface. We want to go deep, we want to be whole, full, complete. What is the method that will permit this sort of depth and skill? We are human and as such limited. We all have an expiration date stamped, as it were, on our backs. We all instinctively search to be made whole before that date arrives Yoga, meditation, is the journey inward, the trajectory of growth in consciousness that brings access to that wholeness permitting the fullest knowing of our human capacity. Why is it we resolve to do anything at all? To feel of purpose, to be happy, to be more fully who we are, these are found inside self. ‘Happiness lies within’ say the great masters. Once discovered, its celebration can then be fully realized and shared. Resolve to be happy, meditate. |
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