we’ll see

I am leaving for a 10 day retreat at Lake Tahoe today and won’t return until a week from Monday.  I very much enjoy writing to you and hope to be able to continue while I am away; but I do not know what will be available up there.  If I don’t post for awhile, all is well and I will return with all kinds of things to talk about.  In the meantime, may blessing fall out of the most unexpected places and leave you giggling with delight.

Santosha.

My Prayer

According to my commitment of a few posts back, today is about acquiring the six virtues. I am going to come in through the backdoor on this one because I think there are too many folks trying the front door at the moment and things are getting ugly. grin.

There is a famous story about a peasant man who hears a priest read to him from the scriptures that one should pray without ceasing. He is curious as to how this is possible and what the actual nature of the teaching is. This quest starts his spiritual life. Your entire life is, in fact, a prayer. Every thought and action is a request to the universe for a given end. It is a prayer that God never says “no” to. The divine sums up the total of our moments and gives us the exact result at every turn. Most of us pray our prayer with very little consciousness about what it really is. The mind is scattered and diverted by multiple influences. The sum total is a rather mediocre, multi-colored life of no real focus.

The exercise of acquiring the six virtues is the solution to this lack of consciousness on our part. It will train us to become aware, vigilant and focussed in the prayer we are constantly offering to the divine. Now comes the time to figure out what you want and turn the prayer of your life into a clear and consistent request.

Things have prices; but the rarest and finest jewel is an audience with the divine himself. Religion is not a collection of beliefs and dogmas. It is the direct experience of God. It is worth all you have ever had. God is listening; the answer is yes; what will be the sum total of your prayer today?

throw it out!

A young man went to a gallery opening for an artist friend of his.  He stood in front of a painting of a beautiful woman and gazed with his mouth open for the entire evening.  The artist approached his friend and chatted with him for awhile, but the young man never took his eyes off of the portrait.  The artist, knowing the beauty of the young woman was captivating his friend decided to play matchmaker and introduce the subject of the portrait to the young man.  Afterall, he had painted her because she was indeed the most beautiful person he had ever seen.  After retrieving her from a boring conversation on the other side of the gallery, the artist giggled to himself, pleased to be able to make the young man’s fantasies appear before his very eyes.  But, when he brought the young woman to the man staring at her portrait, he could not get his friend to take his eyes off of the painting no matter how much he tried.  The man was so enamored of her beauty in the painting he could not turn to see the young woman now standing beside him.  After apologies, the artist dismissed the young woman back into the crowd, patted his friend on the back and walked away.

The painting is the world of the senses; the artist is the guru; the young woman is God.

Swami Brahmananda said to a young man once a few years ago:

“[God] shines forth always and everywhere.  He dwells within you.  He dwells within me.  He dwells within all creatures, and in the plants and herbs as well.  He dwells everywhere.  The only difference is that in some He is more apparent, while in others, He is more hidden.  The one supreme Spirit pervades everything.  Make him your ideal, Him and Him alone.  Make a little effort to realize Him and then you will see what fun it all is; what an inexhaustible fount of joy He is.  You have seen enough of the world, now see the other side of life, the real side. ‘Knock and it shall be opened unto you.’  There is only a screen hiding the Reality.  Remove it and you will find Him.  Apply yourself to the attainment of this ideal and the whole world will be transformed before your eyes.

What is?

There is an endless storehouse of bliss that has been buried deep in the heart of every person.  To find it takes a great deal of discrimination, self control and determination.  According to the sage Ramakrishna, this discrimination is about sorting out the real from the unreal.  He defines “real” as being permanent and “unreal” as being those things that are transitory.  The journey usually starts by investigating the senses since this is where most of us live and find our definitions of self and happiness.  It is odd when you first begin to look for what is real because everything we have lived with up until the investigation starts is temporary.  You will not find anything with your senses that is not transitory.  What a strange dilemma then.  Where else to look?  This is the beginning of spiritual life.

An interesting experience for me happened a few years ago while I was trying to meditate in the shrine of the monastery.  It occurred to me as a fundamental truth that everything that was necessary for fulfillment had to exist with me at that moment.  I remember thinking, “All I will ever need to be content is with me here and now.”  This notion is fact and with a little poking around, it has some beautiful and challenging implications.

I continued to sit and watch as discontent would form in my mind.  First, it was the desire to get up and go play outside the shrine.  I raised the point with myself that all I ever need is here, why the discontent?  I began to touch around the inside space for awhile to find a solution to my discontent.  By doing so, I saw that my discontent was itself merely a thought that could be discarded.  I did not have to own it nor accept its demands; as a matter of fact, I did not have to have any relationship to it at all.  This idea is true for all thought.  This is the first step to learning how to be present.

My meditation that day was one of my most beautiful moments with the divine; for I realized a bit more what it meant to depend on him.  It is not necessary to run all over the place in distraction to keep myself content.  The divine is my contentment and I may sit (or stand) anywhere at any moment and enjoy the peace that surrounds him in the heart of all devotees.

for list lovers…

From Swami Nikhilananda’s preface to the Gita:

The purpose of philosophy is to enable its student to see the Truth, that is, to realize It in direct experience.  Hence, certain moral and spiritual disciplines are necessary in order to create the right mood for study of the scriptures.  Hinduism lays down four such disciplines, namely:

• discrimination between the real and the unreal
• renunciation of the unreal
• acquisition of six virtues: control of the mind, control of the senses, forbearance, restraining the mind from distraction by worldy objects, faith in the words of the teacher and the scriptures, concentration and longing for liberation.
• Inwardness of spirit, cultivated through self-control and contemplation, enables the student of the scriptures to grasp their subtle meaning, which otherwise remains hidden from the mere intelligent reader.

These will be my topics for the next four days. 

Memory Lane

I finished reading the Narada Bhakti Sutras yesterday with my friend Bill.  I think the last few pages were actually the very best of the book.  Narada really sets the bar for what it takes to see God.  He really takes flight as he calls the reader to let go of everything for God alone…even your own body.  He says success does not come any other way.  Jeezalowheeza kids, that is some real cookin.  I became a monk in order to realize the Divine and have  been exercising myself for a decade now.  Mind you, I thought I would have gotten somewhere by now (grin);  but when I read scripture like that, I feel like a turtle watching the birds fly.  I keep pluggin along cause I have to say I’m better off than when I started.  I suppose that is the great thing about walking…you eventually get there.  My vows are around the corner now.  Things like this are on my mind a bunch.  The only blessing I’m looking for is to really mean those words as they come out of my mouth.  Here is to gathering all your marbles and giving them to God.

A letter to me…

If I wrote a letter to myself as I would think that God would write to me, it would be full of words of encouragement.  It would tell me to lift my eyes off of the mundane and to keep them high on the ideal.  I would tell myself to dig deep for integrity in the way I lived my life.  I should know that God has got me covered as far as my weaknesses go; but I should be endlessly earnest in my effort and struggle to rise above them.  I would want to encourage myself to dream about being realized.  I would tell myself how much wonder exists and how worthwhile the journey is.  More than anything, though, I would tell me when I’m getting home.  That way I would know that I would be ready when I got there.  I would leave numerous little hints between all the words of how much I cared and loved and longed for that unity.  I would then sign it “your closest friend” and sit for a moment before I signed and sent it.  I would be saddened that words could never really tell me of the full nature of pure love;  I would hope that he would see me in all the other ways I am saying the same thing–to see me everywhere.  Only then could I actually understand how ideal the ideal really is.  I would mail the letter and wait eagerly for the response…for in my world, we are the very best of friends.

hyperpresence

There is only the present.  The past is comprised merely of attachments to a non-existent present.  The future is the interpolation of this selective record.  To be fully present is to remove the sense of self from between the two unreal aspects of existence (past and future) and to be merely fully aware.  This state is very much the Buddhist teaching of mindfulness and its implications run deep.  To be fully present is to be devoid of “personality”, to be devoid of preference or aversion, to be void of expectation and thus disappointment.  The nature of this moment is existence, knowledge and bliss (love) absolute.  To be realized is to to dwell here everfree, uncontrolled by the samskara bookends of past and future.  The notion of “I” is unhooked from the train (wheel) of samsara (body, mind, and thus past and present) and merely eminates its true nature (knowledge, love, existence absolute) purely and only.  In this pure acceptance of the present is the seeing of “God” everywhere, in all things.  It is an innate perfection.  It is to be enraptured by the presence of God continually.

In a practice it takes on characteristics such as hearing God in what others say to you.  It manifests in treating others as the beloved naturally as it is, in fact, the reality.  It animates the world around you with a tangible sense of spirit and communion.  It is the ability to become easily fascinated with the mundane, deeply inspired by what was once insipid–not for the sake of the thing itself, but for the awareness of the divine in and around everything in every moment.  “Open your eyes and see him” the song says.  It is the seperating out “your story” from what is actually present–the removal of personal interpretation in exchange for a more universal “is-ness.”  It is the ability to be perfectly content regardless of “sense reality” (general circumstance).  The experience of living becomes infinitely deep and infinitely tall with the realization that the “apparent world” in which most of us operate is but a fraction of the spectrum of what a moment contains.

The daily commitment involves grabbing the assumptions as they appear and re-examining their validity from a perspective other than merely a body-centered “I”.  It is to work on a witness level and to remove the sense of self from the middle of the thought process.  Place the “I” in the heart and witness unattached the moving of mind and refuse identity with mind and thought/emotion.  “The mind wants, I am content.”  “The mind is angry, I am ever blissful.”  “The mind is afraid, I am infinite.”  “The mind plans, I am free.”  Be free.

2seek

I’ve added a daily vow to my little repertoire of focus:  to seek the divine first.  It seems kind of bland on the surface and when the idea first occurred to me it seemed kind of trite.  It is the thinking process that it has inspired that made me keep it.  First I had to decide what it meant.  I didn’t want to be told or given the answer, so I pondered it for a few hours and came up with this:

seeking = hyperpresence

I’m going to leave that up here for a day and let you come up with your own ideas of what it means.  Tomorrow I will write what will be my longest post to date with my own descriptions.

A Word from Hafiz…

Dear love seekers, wake up and seek the Temple of Love ,
Because there alone, you’ll find the wine that puts your spirit on high

His endless love, even if it puts lovers on fire,
Gives you new face in love, revealed from the heaven

Worship o lovers, at the Tavern of Love,
Because there alone, you’ll find the water that transforms your soul

At dawn, a voice was heard from the heaven above,
Wisdom said, “It seems saints and angels are practicing the words of Hafez!”