To Be or Not: Loving And Kind?

Loving kindness is not a charitable act or a meditation prescribed by the Buddha as a way to rid the world of evil and suffering. IT IS A SELFISH ACT.

You or I can not be anything but selfish. You and I are not capable of charity. Self can not be selfless.
To recommend a self to be unselfish and charitable to all sentient beings is ridiculous, an oxymoron. It is impossible.

Every cell in my body, every thought, every act is aimed at the self.

Buddha, the wisdom personified could not make such a mistake asking you to do a selfless act. His words have not been properly understood. LOVING KINDNESS IS NOT A PRAYER BUT AN ERNEST DESIRE.

By practicing loving kindness, you are not trying to end suffering of others, of all sentient beings even though you may say so in your meditation. YOU ARE TRYING TO END YOUR SUFFERING.

A self can not cease suffering unless it feels only love and kindness to ALL beings and perhaps beyond. To feel anything but love and kindness towards all means recognition of a separate self. A separate self will always suffer.

Bad news is if your next thought is unkind and unloving towards another, you are far from free of suffering. Good news is no one else has to feel loving kindness to end YOUR suffering.

This is why the proper practice of loving kindness meditation has the following;

May I be happy
May you be happy (including those who have apparently done this self wrong)
May everyone be happy (without which I is still more than a concept).

Understand the golden rule before meditation and may you be free of suffering.

This blog is not charity. It is not a selfless act but a very selfish act, a reminder, a diary entry so that I may not forget that I am not a separate self but just a misunderstanding.

Wake up or stay asleep and dream on?

How do you wake up from sleep? A dream, a jolt, a nightmare?

Nice dream with beautiful family, lots of wealth, amazing holidays? What do you do, you roll over and try to recapture the dream. Who wants to wake up?

Painful nightmare on the other hand is reason enough to startle out of your reverie. Wake up and realise it was all just a dream.

Be so very thankful for the pain and suffering, the nightmares in your life. One of them will finally break your tundra and make you see the truth. May you be blessed to see that what you face as pain and suffering is nothing but recollection of stored sensations in your brain coming back to haunt you. But it is simply a very bad dream.

There is another way a dream ends. That is when your sleep is over, it is the morning after. Don't wait, for that usually comes at the end of your life.

What is this moment?

How can we know anything if we don't know what this moment is? Isn't it simply a story based on sensations caused by movements? Aren't these sensations also labels attached to an unknown process going on?

Isn't what we call knowing, past or memory just labels on other sensations recorded at other moments?

Isn't the passage of time another sensation with a label of time?

Isn't future a label attached to a certain sensation called expectations?

Grattitude Journal 3 : Shakti and Sex

Although this is called gratitude journal 3, it feels like the final one as I am utterly, forever, absolutely and uncoditionally grateful to shakti. In fact all I know is shakti, all I could ever know will be shakti. All there is is shakti.

I better explain. Shakti is a sanskrit word which simply means energy. Now, everyone knows energy. Right? Really? What is energy? And don't give me the textbook definition, I have spent decades learning that and even after decades of not thinking about the mathematics of energy transfer, I could have a dialogue with you. Yet the dialogue will be inconclusive for I can't really explain to you what energy is? My profs or texts couldn't. As a confession I have not read any of latest works by Hawking, which I will. And so there is the reason this is only the gratitude jounral 3. A fourth may come.

Any discussion on the origin of energy takes one quickly to big bang. As Jay knows, we can always blame it on big bang. Try it ernestly and you too will end up at the beginning, wondering what ever strated it all. Forgive me for making an assumption but I think it started out as it is now, just an incredible unfathomable concentrated source of photons itching to get out from a nonthing like form. Then  someone let the cat out and the universe started to change forever.

That is a cop out as well. As I have replaced the metaphor of energy into another metaphor of photon. Metaphor by the way is just a label with a story, somethimes known, sometimes forgotten. Now if you haven't done much physics, photon you  know is light. But it is lot more than that. What you see as light are photons which are both particles and waves with just enough energy so that your eyes can detect them. Little less energy in the photons and you sense them on your skin as heat or cold. Even less energy and it is radio waves or a lot more nergy and it passes through you like x rays.

So bottom line, all of this universe is just a bunch of photons or potential photons, waiting for the right incentive or intent to get out. A pound of Uranium 235 is this incredible store of photons waiting to be released by a neutron. This interplay of energy transfer is at the centre of all creation.

How could I be not grateful to energy? How could I be grateful to anything but energy for there is nothing else?

Now, shakti, as in shiva and shakti of the spiritual discussions, appears to be lot more than simply energy or photons. Apparently no photons are involved in the sexual attraction which seems to rule the lving world. What shakti trasnfer takes place that motivates the monarch butterfly to fly thousands of miles or a salmon to find its place of death? I do not know the answer. I do feel that the activity resulting from this unknown shakti ends up being material, very much like the actions of photonic energy. I could use a little engine to send the salmon upstream hundreds of miles which the intent or shakti makes it do all by itself. You could send a text message to the beautiful soul mate sitting across the room from you or you could let the shakti or sexual energy drive you together. If you get my metaphor. I recommend a book called Red, Hot and Holy by Sera Beak where she declares herself as a spritual prostitute.

I am forever grateful to the sexual energy. I would not be here without its creative power nor would I do anything without its continuing influence. Chek it yourself. How much of your daily decision in grooming, housing, food or life in general is influenced by your uncontrollable desire to satisfy the sexual energy? No wonder shakti is often considered to be sexy.

Gratitude Journal 2: Senses

1.  I am grateful to the five senses which allow the body to hear tranquil sounds, to construct beautiful images from simple play of light, to translate simple friction of touch into tantalizing sensations, to turn dead chemicals into exquisite taste and turn simple gases into heavenly scents.

2. I am also grateful to these senses to quickly report upcoming distraction as pain and suffering. Without these warnings, the body would have perished long ago. It is the pain and suffering that endures life.

3. I am grateful to the brain of this body without which none of the senses could work, poetry would never get written and music would simply be noise. Above all this would be a thought less world. Joy would not be joy, tears would never arrive either of joy or of sorrow. 

Gratuity journal 1: Wisdom

1. I am most grateful to a score of teachers who have made it possible for me to know that everything I sense or think about is untrue.

2. I am grateful to the inherited biological system that has made possible to see this delusion.

3. I am grateful for the complexity of this universe which is the source of much joy and other pointers   which makes this dream ever interesting.

Purpose of Life

What is the purpose of life? Why do we do what we do? What is the program, today, this week, this year, rest of your life or even this second? Is there a theme?

Every cell, every living being is programmed to seek happiness, joy, bliss and love. Even the most difficult pain and suffering is for love.

But it is in search of this love, the essential purpose of all life, something happens. From birth, we seek and relish love and joy, often through a complicated chemical process designed in the body and it's brain. Craving for more, the brain embarks on storing these experiences through its detectors or our senses as memory. That memory becomes thinking. We lose the child like process of instantaneous joy and start using logical faculty of the brain to recreate, repeat and seek love in ever more complex methods. This diluted love never equals in purity and intensity to the first love.

Until we embark on the direct path to love. That direct path is through elimination of these complex and temporary love connections and return to silence, the placeless place where there is nothing but love.

To Be or Not: Happy, Joyful and Blissed out?

Joy, any joy or bliss you feel is when your body touches truth and love. Albeit briefly, meditation can make that happen without an addictive prop. It's up to you to make it your whole life. Practice Monday night at 8 pm. At Be Yoga Wellness, Burlington.

Much controversy exists whether fireworks, feeling of joy, bliss, kriyas are useful or something to be ignored during meditation. I am of the view that I will take good clean joy any day and then try to deal with an addiction with such feelings. Surely it can't be worse than kicking a smoking or drinking habit. Besides I am in a human joy-seeking instrument called the body which likes to be bribed to pursue anything.

Touching that spot where joy permeates during meditation is not that difficult. It is easier than running a marathon or becoming a tennis pro or getting drunk. Just sit in meditation regularly for a few weeks. sunilk.vidyarthi@gmail.com

Confession of ignorance

Late Mr. Richard Rose a West Virginia mystic and founder of TAT where I had my first wow moment that liberation was possible in this life time  for everyone, said you can't know the truth, you can only become truth. Like everything on this path, it has taken me nine years to understand this and even then I am not sure because as he said, I can't really understand the truth.

What he went on to say is that to try to know truth is a fruitless exercise. It is however possible to know what is not true. And that is just about everything including the idea of you.

All your senses lie to you. Even the sixth sense, if there is one is telling you a lie. Your thoughts are untrue, your memory is untrue, all you see, taste, touch and feel are untrue. All these lies create this illusion which you take to be you, another big fat lie. What is left after all these eliminations ends up being the truth, which you may refer to as you albeit erroneously.

Shankaracharya said something similar in his incredible poem called ashtakam.

But I simply want to confess of my ignorance expressed through so many words here. I apologise for leading you on.

Do you need it?

Nisargdatta said that the most critical requirement to liberation is earnest desire. Buddha talked about noble suffering and Jesus said the rich has more difficulty than a camel to pass through a needle. And of course the dictum that when a student is ready the teacher shows up.

Look in your own life. You are where you are because in all honesty that is what you wanted and needed. I am not talking of what nature has provided you as a body and other resources. I am talking of what you wanted to do with what you have. You are rich if that's what you needed to be, you are poor because you didn't want to do what was needed to be wealthy. You are loved because you wanted love and you are alone because you need to be alone.

Not much different in spirituality. You must need to be enlightened before you can be liberated.

VIPASSANA MEDITATION CENTRE

If you have not, make a resolution to attend a ten day silent meditation retreat at the Vipassana Center in Ontario. I wanted to note down my insights from this tapasya.

IMERMANENCE (ANICHA) MAKES EQUANIMITY (UPEKSHA) POSSIBLE WHICH IS ULTIMATELY ONENESSS AND TRUE LIBERATION.

No other technique I know of that makes it experiencally possible to achieve this.

Here is what actually happens.

All events are first reported as a sensation to the body which you can feel and see as impermanent and their ability to make you happy or miserable. Reacting to these sensations appear automatic and create further deepening of misery through habits or Samskara. You can reverse this wheel of misery through meditation taught by Buddha as Vipassana or clear seeing.

WHY MEDITATE, PART II

Whether we meditate, worship or intellectualise truth can not change. But this truth can not be known by the body and mind. Is that however true?

Nisargdatta was fond of saying truth is not complicated, life is. Pursuit of happiness is by far the most fundamental desire of life. It uses chemicals to give the body temporary boosts. Is it then possible to have this chemical available to the body 24/7without having to go for these short term fixes?

If you carefully scrutinize these chemical process as well, it is not the pot, booze or sex that releases the Happy chemical. It is a brain process which is a mild result of these small events that does. In fact the chemical is released when there is no longer a longing. It is the void of wanting nothing that is permanand or perfect bliss. 

Many old ones say that this void can be touched by the body and mind. One way is meditation. Why follow? Unfortunately the only way the body mind learns anything is by copying. That's how you learnt to walk and talk and that's the only method available to train.

You could ask why seek happiness? You really have no choice in that matter. Whatever you do or not do is the body's way of seeking happiness.

WHY MEDITATE?

It is to know, live and be the miracle of experience.

See Spira's u tube clips.

http://youtu.be/_oWHbsHO2-0

And Feelings.

http://youtu.be/uCtCMuoVEhI

A New Year Resolution to Keep

Meditation Work Shop

Beginning 19 January 2014

Sundays at 6pm

Be Yoga Be, Burlington

Attend this six week meditation workshop to experience first hand some of the most exotic and energetic meditation with some one who has beenpracticing it for fifty years.

Meditation practices are common to most societies, cultures and religions and each has its own strength. It is important that you follow a modality that resonates with your body, your background, your emotional state and where your fitness level today.

The only way to know what is right for you is to experience many with someone who has been on a similar quest and feel the effect in your heart and soul.

Week One and Two; Falun Dofa:

This is a secret Chinese method of harnessing Qi energy through standing and sit down meditation lasting about an hour ending with serene relaxation. Background Chinese flute makes this especially resonant for all.

Week Two and Three; Shaktipat Oneness

Building on the Qi Gong practice, this is a meditation of the millions of yogisinspired by Oneness University in India to raise global energy at individual level through transmission or diksha by intent or by touch. Some lives are changed forever by this.

Week Four and Five;  Inner Engineering:

Taught by Sadhguru of Isha Foundation of Kentucky, this is an active meditation based on principles laid out by lord Shiva. We do a combination of yoga postures and breathing followed by deep trance like meditation. Very powerful.

Week Five and Six: Osho’s Dance and Chakra Meditation

Finally we flow all into Osho, the love guru’spractice, aka dynamic meditation from his ashram in the USA and India. It is being practiced even today around the world with milliions of followers.Be prepared to dance your way into a trance.

Your Guide:  Sunil Vidyarthi, PhD.

As part of his Vedic priest heritage, Sunil has been meditating in the age old Indian tradition for over fifty years. A shift happened for him in 2005 when he attended a theosophical group called TAT in Pittsburg, realizing that liberation from suffering is possible in this life with practice of yoga and energy meditation. Subsequently he has completed hundreds of hours of Kundalini, Hatha, Pranayama,Oneness diksha and Qi Gong including a two week deepening retreat in Chennai. He teaches hatha yoga and meditation following the kundalini principles.

He also guides aspirants awaken to truth online at liberationunleashed.com. He owes his life to the Buddha, Krishnamurti, Nisargadatta, Rose, Robert Cergol, Sri Ama Bhagwan,  Bob Fergeson, Ramana Maharishi, LU.com and unnamed masters who wrote the Upanishads. His poetry and inspirations can be viewed at deadenduphere.com