Fw: cycle of addiction/ suffering / AC/Nina

08-07-2005, 08:50 AM

To: NondualitySalon (AT) yahoogroups (DOT) com
Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2005 22:17:52 -0000
From: "Nina"
Subject: Re: cycle of addiction/ suffering / AC/Nina.

Hello, AC, I will assume you mean teachings that describe the way out of
suffering. To have heard of such teachings does not mean that those teachings
are understood or applied.

Why is it difficult to get out of suffering? There is a certain comfort in
suffering. Think of addicts, and how they respond to their 'hit'. At first, it
is a great comfort. Gradually, the effect wears off, and another 'hit' is
sought. This cycle continues, as gradually the amount of 'hit' must be increased
to receive the same effect. What are the choices here? Continue on with the
doping until death or rupture, or willingly enter into withdrawal, with all the
pain it entails, in hopes of overcoming the addiction. Drug addiction and
addication to emotional behaviors do not differ in how the brain processes them.
The hypothalmus emits chemicals, these chemicals seek out receptors
in the cells of the body, the cells of the body respond and demand continued
relationship with those chemicals. Once that pattern is set, it is not a simple
mental decision that can break the cycle. That, AC, is why so many remain in
addiction.

Nina

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Dear Nina,

Yes, you're exactly right. Back in 1972/73, I was involved in a drug
rehabilitation program of 3ho, which was developed by Yogi Bhajan. The
practice, which was very effective in all the Centers I went to over 3 years,
used the wide variety of postures and movements combined with breathing to burn
out the chemical addictions.

These addictions penetrate, as you pointed out, to every aspect of living,
binding us to a limited notion of identity we adhere to with a vehemence, so
that even when given ways out we refuse to believe that the "out proposed can be
real, let alone try to persue what that "out" may be.

The whole practice I took up is to bring up the voltage of the life force
throughout the body to a stage where the encoding of mental tendencies and
habits dissolves, leaving over a higher frequency. The higher frequency and
energy vibration radiating throughout the body converts the body into an
amplifier of sound, so that mantra produces a further powerful increase in the
electro-magnetic impulse of the body that centers in the Heart and polarizes.
The practice and effect is cumulative, so that gradually the radiance increases
and deepens, and one feels a sensation of penetrating de-contraction throughout
the cells of the body. As the focusing power of attention is related to a
certain level of energy awareness, meaning that, as you focus your awareness,
energy consciousness fills the area with sensation or insight (whether attention
is directed within the body or outside through the senses), when the voltage of
the body begins to increase, the awareness becomes pervasive versus focused, and
you discover that who you are is a field of consciousness, not a subject
focusing on varied objects.

With penetrating radiance the vibratory frequency of the body rises above the
frequency of thought patterns, the result of which is stillness of mind within
which you experience non-objective awareness.

As the nadis throughout the body brighten through continued practice, like
incandescent brightening of filaments in a light bulb, the apparent darkness in
and around the body gives way to being able to see and experience the inside of
the body and field around the body without the use of the senses or the mind,
but as a direct experience of consciousness itself. Here seeing and seen are
not distinct nor separate, and you realize very practically that it is though
this consciousness that the mind is illumined and in turn the senses, and that
what you apparently see and know comes as a result of focused consciouness,
which is already pervasive, rather than some separate knowable.

As one's Sadhana continues, interest in seeing diminishes, the mind begins to
reflect the seer purely, and when one reads or is told a story about the lives
and teachings of any of the Sages, Saints and Saviors, there arises a sudden
inexorable "recollection" of one's true nature and the experience of the "I"
pulsing as "I" - single pervasive, self-illuminating being.

Every experience, joyful or filled with sorrow and misery, experiences of anger,
hatred, as well as patters towards love, are all enactments of powers of the
mind that become addictive in one way or the other, and the patterns of
addiction - the behavioral patterns of action and reaction, chemically encode
themselves throughout the body until the experience of single pervasive being
illumining the mind becomes focused into a sense of identity to only those
repeating patterns of thought and behavior.

Nevertheless, there is some sense that we are in some kind of a delusion, some
amnesia that we need to awaken from. Some take up discussions of the
philosophical possibilities of non-dualism, others go to the temples and
churches to hear the words of the Saints, Sages and Saviors (hopefully) repeated
that in "hearing" they will awaken, others try out various yoga and meditative
practices, New Age ideas, and so on. The archetypal Self exerts Its force
towards recollection and awakening.

The key is to find some means to become pure enough that it becomes possible to
"hear" the Truth when read or spoken. Part of purity is also the rise in the
sense of belief that who one really is is some Truth and, with that belief, the
fervent desire to penetrate into It, to figure It out.

The pulsing of the "I" is an experience of being entirely consumed, of having
penetrated though to the other side with such a determination in trying to
"grok" what the Truth is, that one abides in a sort of perpetual inward
determination unwilling to relinquish the Truth once found and yet being
consumed and overpowered by Its realization. The frequency of determination to
realize the Truth suddenly impacts for the pervasive eternal radiance of That
Truth like 2 magnets whose fields have converged.

Then, you have a pervasive sense of being sucked in by a graviton, while
radiance penetrates through every cell of the body, decontracting and blowing
apart the power of the mind to any refocusing of attention. You become
undifferentiated.

What Sadhana to take up? There are so many means to become pure offered, means
to "overcome the world." Means to "hear" the Truth. For myself, I was
practicing the Raja Yoga that Baba Ram Das taught in Franklin NH back in 1969,
living 5 days a week at a Carmelite Monastery, fasting, 2 times a day the series
of postures, 4 times a day the series of pranayama. There were a number of
people that took up that practice in tents and teepees on Baba Ram Dass'
father's 88 acre estate at the time, many others took it up in the mountains of
Big Sur, others in the mountins of NM.

After around 4 to 5 months many internal experiences arose for which I had no
guidance or explanation, apart from the various books I had, such as Tibet's
Great Yogi Milarepa, Raja Yoga by Vivekananda, the Upanishads translated by
Nikhilananda and the New Testament. So I left the Monastery and started
hitch-hiking, as many others at the time, around the USA looking for someone
that could guide the way on. In April 1970, I met someone, while on the way to
the Lama Foundation in NM, who told me that probably the only person that would
be able to help explain the experiences was Yogi Bhajan in LA. So, I left
Espaniola for LA, and when I met with him and explained everything that
happened, he was the first person that could explain exactly what it was, where
I was in the practice and what to do next, a bit like Yogi's one would read
about from ancient times.

After a month of going to the classes and collecting a number of Kundalini Yoga
sets and kriyas,apart from the ones Yogi Bhajan gave me to practice, I set off
to find a place in seclusion I could practice, along he lines of the ideal of
Milarepa, and by September I was in a small village between Paris and Lille,
where I had rented a house to begin the practice Yogi Bhajan perscribed, which I
took up with the same fervor as I had done after Baba Ram Dass had instructed in
the practice of Raja Yoga.

In February (10-12) 1971, radiant from the practice so that even the sun seemed
dim by comparison, I happened to go to Paris and, while waiting there, went into
an English bookstore on the corner of rue de Rivoli and the way to Place ven
Dome, where there was only one spiritual book, "Ramana Maharshi and the Path of
Self Knowledge." As Baba Ram Dass had often spoken of Ramana Maharshi as the
embodiment of the Self in modern times, I bought the book and stated to read.

I'm sure many, if not most, of the people on this list have read the book by
Arthur Osborn. It's a book in which on the one side one reads with a sense of
awe and devotion the life of a great saint, and on the other one is confronted
with the many questions posed in so many ways by a great variety of people
regarding God, Sadhana, spiritual practice, Self Realization, the quest for the
Self and so on, where in every case the question is turned back to the
questioner to find out first "who is asking the question?" The result of this
was that for 3 days I was in a state that moved into and out of single pervasive
consciousness, where there were thoughts percolating up from the heart and a
body performing actions, but no thinker nor doer, yet everything continued
automatically. Near and far had no meaning. Inside outside, totally
transparent. The body at the Heart a radiation and in and around the crown,
with the atma nadi irradiant, and a multi colored flame rising through the spine
and through the top of the head, the knot binding the sense of "I" to the images
of the mind completely disengaged. Even the sense of "I" had no meaning.

When this finally subsided, there remained an inexplicable pulsation of "I" as
"I" in the Heart, what yogis call the Anahat, the soundless reverberation of
Self, giving, on the one side the perception of the world through the mind and
senses and, on the other the expanding deepening penetrating experience of
single pervasive consciousness. (Now what???)

I wrote everyone I knew that had any spiritual inclination, including Baba Ram
Dass, who advised that I continue my practice and meditation, and Yogi Bhajan,
who wrote back with a clear explanation and advise of what to do next. The next
became his directing me over 3 years to going to different ashrams in London,
then Washington DC, then Phoenix, then Tucson and then Pomona, where he had
different teachers that had been taught at different times with the same
practice but different sets and kriyas. (At one time I had collected over 1,000
from classes taken.)

And then it ended, and I went off on my own, occasionally writing Yogi Bhajan
with questions or with what I was experiencing and receiving his replies.
Towards the end the replies were mostly of the nature, "Always abide in the
non-dual."

When I took up the Sadhana Yogi Bhajan taught, he had been saying that anyone
that took up the practice ardently would within a matter of months have an
experience of Reality so different from their perceptions that they could not
imagine it. I took his words to heart, and something inexplicable happened,
something radically different from anything I could have thought or imagined.
And then there was unobtrusive always available guidance. In an abstract sense,
a bit like Vashishtha's continued guidance of Janaka, after his sudden
realization.

In Reality, the advent of the pulsing of the "I" - like Christ's advent of the
Holy Spirit, is just the beginning of one's Sadhana. In Kundalini Yoga
parlance, we call it Crystalization or the perfecting of a Diamond from opaque
to clear.

Afterward, though, the reading of the lives and words of the Saints, Saviors and
Sages brought about the increasing force of the pulsing sense of "I"
obliterating thought impressions and vision even while watching them.

Thus, the matter is to start some Sadhana, some practice that will cause the
voltage to increase throughout the body in a manner that dissolves the chemical
electric encoding throughout the body that reinforce patters of behavior and
thought, so that the progressive state of amnesia we are all in can be reversed,
and a simple reading of a spiritual text can invoke the sudden and clear
recollection of who we really are, so we can abide as That.

The only purpose of Yoga Sadhana is simply to make the mind pure. When that
purity comes about then"hearing" becomes possible and manifests. "The pure in
Heart shall see God ('I AM')." Detachment ensues, and eventually dissolves into
non-attachment.
http://www.kundalini-matashakti.com/...TheExperience\
ofDetachmentandNon-attachment080405.pdf

Pieter

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