Meditation Is Not It Either

People see me post day after day a notice that I have done 60 or 61 or like tonight 72 minutes of sitting meditation.  Yoga is not only a method of raising your consciousness to some level of exhalted bliss. Yoga is much more about what you do in the other 23 hours of the day.  Do you use your sensitivity to construct a positive life around you?  Are you building a healthy mindscape for you to live in?  Are you developing your intelligence to solve your life problems?  Are you building a healthy external atmosphere that brings happiness,  to be, in this world and joy in the life you are leading.  Meditation is a tool that you can use to refresh your mind and resolve negative ego issues. It is not some big ego offloading thing but just the ability to quiet incessant tugs of desires long enough to let ego structure settle into a more healthy happy, compassionate and loving mindframe, like nature fills in weak structures by ccollapsing into the weak and fills with stronger structure.  And this is not candyass advice.  Most people are always complaining about their lives.  Meditation is a tool that allows you to do something about it, starting with the person in the mirror.

Dharma Means Truth

In Sanscrit Dharma means "truth"  as a one word English synonym.  Truth and adherence to the truth was considered as religious practice to the ancient Indus Valley civilization.  Truth too,  has levels of meaning.  There are relative and ultimate truths in our own existence.  There is the dharma, or truth of the chair in which I am sitting.  There are also truths in the words we speak and the actions we commit and to the replay value of the stories of our lives as we relive them in memory.  Dharma is also the truth of enlightened but realization of real Dharma is a reflection of the truth with which we live our lives.

What's love got to do with it?

I mentioned something on Facebook yesterday that I will talk about today.   I said that by living in love and gratitude, we open to the cultivation and growth of further gifts of the cosmos.  The good feeling engendered by living in loving kindness always inspires one to further  acts of loving kindness because automatically we will feel happiness engendered by our goodwill.  This happiness is contagious.  Other people respond kindly, more often than not to kindness.  This in turn frees us to be more kind, loving, and happy.  When we recollect our good circumstances and are grateful we also tend to be happy with our own lives and a little less drawn by desires for more or other.  We then too become a little freer and fulfulled, content that our lives are not unmitigated sorrow and lost in desiring things.  Love and gratitude set in motion the mechanism of freeing ourselves from the tyranny of suffering and desire and not only frees us but allows for those around us to be freed as well.

The Radiant Path Of Bhakti

We all bandy about the words "love" and "freedom" as if they were actualized in fact in our lives.  If you take a look around you, you will find yourself in a world torn by suffering,  suffering from greed and desire, suffering of the burning anger that says we should promote ourselves and the whats we want. Suffering from exploitation by bigger egos and ego collectives which maintain their tyranny over us.  We are not free and love can be a very rare commodity.  What we call love is usually our feelings of lust for each other that never really matures into a compassionate understanding of the other and hence we tear each other down and tear up our relationships.

Bhakti is real love.  Not just for you and those you say are family and friends but a more generalized compassion and caring for the suffering of others no matter who they are.  Bhakti actualizes practically as this kind of love.  The love that we have for everything is bhakti.  It is true that we need to earn a living but bhakti will still give without any hope of recompense.  Bhakti gives without concern for what one will receive, bhakti does not care always that "I" have concerns, bhakti may be more worried about satisfying "your" concern.  Bhakti does not obsess about oneself, it is that the bhaktin (the doer of the act of bhakti)  will rise above his need to satisfy your need, if possible.  If it is the case that your need is more of an ego need the bhaktin will perhaps apply a remedy and demand the recompense the bhaktin is due, but it is not a motivation of greed.  It is a simple response to ego exploitation of the bhaktin.  To be free in the sense of having a human body living on this earth is more of a matter of being able to meet the need of the situation rather than squabbling over pesos.  It is being able to correctly identify a situation for what it is and responding appropriately despite what the ego feels.

Bhakti does not just automatically come by listening to a few scriptural readings and asking for forgiveness or listening to somebody preach.  Bhakti is developed and redeveloped over the course of ones lifetime.  Bhakti is not a stasis but a dynamic balance one has with the world and the world and oneself may have differing needs that must be satisfied.  So the development of bhakti is the development of insightful giving and taking.  It is meeting the vicissitudes of life over and over and over again.  We start out by doing and maybe we give charity or things or do for others with the hope of reward.  The world rewards one as it does and often if we are helping someone more helpless than ourself there is very little to be gained but good will.  But that good will is priceless.  On a different level it shines in our hearts and gives us a little more reason to act, a little more reasons to believe in ourself and that we are doing the right thing.  So little acts of bhakta (I hope that bhakta is self explanatory)  give us the courage to act more out of bhakti than out of our ego.  We have just gotten a little freer and self confident and insightful as to the practice of Bhakti and also the problems we face in our own personality flaws.

Being oneself is not a personality flaw.  If one is genuine as to how one feels ones' self we can feel it. Whatever one does there is always a witness in ones own mind that tells us how we feel about ourself when we do things.  Sometimes for right actions it is wrong because what we do is our own ego pimping its need.  But under the good feeling we may have had out of ripping someone off with the expressions of our own needs there is a witness that tells us exactly what we did and it may not feel as good about the act.  Learn to listen for your own inner voice informing you of what you just did.  There are times that one may feel one has made a mistake too, and is pressing one's need over the needs of the rest.  It may well be that it is not a mistake and that it was an act one needed to do to prepare for the future.  We are not always in control.  We are very often channeled into this or that choice by circumstances and no choice is what one would want.  Life is the expression of bhakti and this is always life's expression of love for you.  I will quote John Lilly "Universal love is ruthless, it loves you whether you love it or not."  Best wishes my friends.  Try it.

I Had A Dream

I don't know, I guess that's a dream common to humanity, to find a deep and caring love. I may never be with anyone who is such in this lifetime. I have thought I met her many times but she has slipped away,leaving me alone, each one of them. Life itself is the unfoldment of perfection. My vision must be flawed because I am not satisfied. You are beautiful, a vision, fading, as I am. Freedom, real freedom is a crazy dream. Everything that one cherishes in this life seems to be another trap for "mara" to throw at one to kind of say "see how you are missing out on life" and watch us chase the bait. Watch us go through our head trips and heart trips...wanting. The yogic idea is to simply accept things that come our way, not to avoid those happinesses that come our way but not to chase them, and to face head on the suffering in our lives and to solve the underlying problem, which is a craving for pleasure that is actually just a reinforcement of our ego to our ego. This is something that kicks me around over and over again and when I think I get the point something new gets me chasing the bait again, ultimately to get clobbered again. I have given up on getting much in the way of compensation for the things I do. Sure I still want to live the "American Dream," get filthy rich, pin down a girl and raise a million brats. But life takes us where it wants us to go. Our only control is our awareness and control of our attitudes. It is enough to generate positive attitudes to our situatiins and gratitude at the possibility of change.

NNNNObodies fault but mine.!

How many people here have been mad at something someone else has done but you yourself had been an "enabler"? I will give you an example. I recently loaned a friend some money. When the agreed on time to pay it back had been reached I did ask about it. The short story is that I may never see my money again. I was kind of pissed at the other whom I had lent the money to and that they are just going to walk on the loan. And I started thinking and the answer I found was not that THEY were at fault, but that I had not assumed responsibility for making the loan. I first looked at it that I had been duped once again by a friend with a hard luck and need story. I empathized with their story and knew that the need was real. But was angry I had bitten on the part where they promised to pay back and now would not. But really, to make it short and sweet, I loanded my friend money, and I did so with out thought that I may never see that money again. I assumed the other party was a scout and scout's honor would pay me back. And I am sure my friend would indeed pay me back if they had it but they are poor people like I am and do not have the money to pay it back. I realized that when I loan someone money that I assume the risk that it will not be repaid. If I do anything for friend or foe, I am taking a risk. And I have to assume in my calculations and reflections on wherher I do this or that, that I risk that I may be on the totally loosing side of the equation and that I have to understand that, I am taking a risk. Me , no body else, is taking the risk. And until that time when I see that money back in my hand, I am the one that make the decision to make the loan. I am the one that made the loan and that I am the one that is the ultimate guarantor of such a loan, and should consider it charity until it is paid back. And I should remember to give charity with a generous heart. Of course money is the earthbound universal constant. Everybody talks about money but money here is a metaphor for any risk taking behavior. I am in love with a lady now, for instance, who has had my putative child. No matter whose responsibility it was that the child was conceived and that she married a third party, I am on the outs with her and have been unable to access the child, we did do the "wild thing" and there is a child. I can be angry and upset but I cannot blame my part in the interaction, where it was an interaction, on her. I was not bound and forcibly made to ejaculate, I chose to do so. She was my desire and so was the child. That it stands as it stands for the time being is also my responsibility, what I do in response to this is MY responsibility, and how it works out, was a product of taking any such inceptive step to resolve the situation, in short my responsiblility. So in conclusion may it be said that to the extent possible, we ourselves are in control of our decisions and actions and when our decisions go wrong in the aftermath we have to consider that we ourselves were primarily responsible for our decisions. We cannot blame others.

Is Happiness What We Want?

I was observing the conditions on a psychiatric ward where the emphasis was NA and AA oriented treatment. I made a remark to the chief psychiatrist on that ward that these people were not getting better, and that is the difference between Asian and Western psychology. Asian psychology aims at making people happy. Western psychology thinks it is good to be miserable and bear it in sobriety. Why are we here, on this planet, in this life, in this time and our particular place and stations in life? Is it only to suffer and bear the pain? Is it solely to reproduce and get old and die? When we say we are "clean and sober" are we really, when we have personalities as undistinguished, flat, fragile and limited as a cardboard box, and we are a little pissed at everyone, a little hateful of life and very self seeking? How can anyone be satisfied in such a condition? Is the purpose of life to become more uncaring? Really? When we say life is for learning, what is it that we are learning? Knowledge does make you more free. Freedom builds happiness, and happiness is the true meaning and true lesson we all need to learn.