Resolve to lose yourself

Here is an experiment for you. Close your eyes and make an intent to wiggle your toes. Now deeply explore what happens. Toes move. How did this happen? When did this happen? How do you know it happened? Stories will start to fill your head about the stuff you have been taught. An intention originating from an unknown place sends a signal and a thought surfaces that toes are wiggling. The movement caused friction which sends back a message to the brain confirming the move. Or something like that. The real mechanism is not important, just a story.

Now make an intent to make your heart and body healthy. There is no feedback loop so you have no idea if that is happening or not. Much scientific evidence suggests that it is indeed happening. Since it is a long process and intent, you will not know until sometime that it is happening.

That is the power and benefit of meditation.

So, make a resolution to change something that isn't as clearly visible as wiggling your toes and keep that intent as often as possible. And watch the miracle unfold.

Mine is simply to lose the self that makes the resolution.

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.