tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40983292011-04-21T10:43:45.231-07:00nondualogicality: vedanta with a few tweakspunditry and other manias from deep undercoverjody radziknoreply@blogger.comBlogger191100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-1100841484238569592004-11-18T21:11:00.000-08:002004-11-18T21:22:24.146-08:00Brahman is indivisible, and Atman is Brahman. Atman is not separated from Brahman to become a "drop," it is the whole Brahman known to an individual life.
There was never any separation. There is only apparent separation. It's a mirage, not a difference in location.
Seeing ourselves as these "drops" puts a layer of symbolic thinking between personal and impersonal awareness, keeping personal jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-1078850136196503042004-03-09T08:34:00.000-08:002004-03-09T08:46:52.873-08:00Dear Mokshayana.
I'm saddened, but not surprised by your decision to censor my writing on OriginalMind.
In my life as a devotee and a jnani, I've found that a great deal of spiritual culture only exists to perpetuate itself, its usefulness long gone by in the march of time and cultural evolution.
Holding on to this dead wood has the effect of stunting the spiritual growth of literally millionsjody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-1077852463344291412004-02-26T19:26:00.000-08:002004-02-26T19:29:46.716-08:00It occurred to me that thinking of who as a quantity is a measure of realization's effect on a life.
Before awakening, we are our who exclusively. When we decide to embark on a spiritual journey to find ourselves, we start out by adding to this who, sometimes greatly adding to it, with the materials we come across while being spiritual people.
As far as I can tell, much of spirituality seems tojody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-1074362685662880722004-01-17T10:04:00.000-08:002004-02-11T00:35:31.466-08:00I've been wrestling with a question this morning: Who is the one who likes to have a good time?
We are truly, as we are, uninvolved in anything that happens in the 'real world.' It's a scary thought to that part of our programming that operates under an assumption of control.
It's that assumption of control, the idea that we are 'doers' doing things, that seems the crux of the route. That jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-1073962030334567342004-01-12T18:44:00.000-08:002004-01-17T10:15:21.670-08:00Theosophical nonsense is a term which describes spiritual ideology which resorts to any of the following:
•Astral travel
•Life after death
•Ascended masters
•Heavenly hierarchies
•Extraordinary abilities
•Miraculous happenings
Whether or not any of these things happen, all of them are not one bit closer to the truth than you are right now. Not one little bit.
Even if it were all true exactly jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-2003431592003-05-26T20:57:00.000-07:002004-01-17T10:28:37.060-08:00Some folk make it their hobby to collect spiritual "experiences". They go from satsang to satsang, intent on absorbing whichever master's 'transmission' they are visiting. If they are sufficently dazzled by the show, they will leave happy and believing that something was transferred. That's what keeps them coming back, their belief that they are getting 'something' by way of magical jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-2001531242003-04-16T01:09:00.000-07:002004-02-11T11:04:27.873-08:00This is it.
Yet the activity of writing occurs. There's a writing going on, and it can only be by the mechanism of the personality. Only this can be the "voice" of the silence.
Everyone's voice is the voice of silence. Yet some spring from lives which have been freed from the exclusive attachment to the "I" thought, the idea of "me" that is the bounds of personal identity.
For these folk jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-2001277872003-04-10T10:39:00.000-07:002003-04-16T23:58:25.000-07:00The individual is the collection of identifications that have formed in the mind in response to life conditions. The awareness of that collection of responses creates the idea of a someone who "has" the response.
When "we" make a decision to get rid of this idea, it can only be from this idea that the decision gets made. Thus we acquire a whole new set of identifications, with our guru, our jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-2001125022003-04-07T19:34:00.000-07:002003-04-07T20:06:13.000-07:00Degenerative name calling, how spiritual is that?
But that's what I've been engaged in recently on a couple of the email groups I post to. It got me to wondering: who is the one calling this woman names?
The outrage and derision are reactions to insults. The thing that is hurt is my (this life's) way of seeing things.
The investment I have in this vision forms a constellation of significantjody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-902274672003-01-24T06:24:00.000-08:002004-03-04T15:08:43.996-08:00Yesterday was my last night at the Kali temple, but I'd actually left well over a year ago. As much as I loved the devotees and the devotion, the place had come to reek of significance. I moved here two and some years ago to be close to this temple. I was an active participant in its daily activities as I looked for a job, and even after I found one I spent many evenings sitting at puja, jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-902164782003-01-21T18:18:00.000-08:002003-06-07T01:34:39.000-07:00There are times I'm prone to delusions of grandeur. They usually come during periods of elation, like the one I'm in right now. It makes it easy for me to see how a big time guru can end up as one of the vanguard of the grandiose.
For how could you be a bigtime guru without being grandiose? They build ashrams all over the world, go wherever they like whenever they want, and have thousands of jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-902104352003-01-20T14:18:00.000-08:002003-01-21T19:42:44.000-08:00Identity, The Self, and the Snare of Significance
Why don't we know who we really are? Why are so many of us limited to the idea of being a person instead of understanding ourselves as limitlessness itself? Such questions are especially perplexing given the fact that we've never been anything else! What exactly is Maya's veil, this trickery that has us seeing snakes instead of ropes?
The jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-902072322003-01-19T20:17:00.000-08:002008-11-15T12:52:21.747-08:00This afternoon I took a call in the heat of a USENET debate. I related to my friend what I was doing and why I was so excited about it. I explained that the guy was playing right into my hands with his expectation-laden beliefs about vedanta and Self realization. My friend was amused and offered that I was excited because it was boosting my ego. That caught me by surprise, mostly because she jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-902044492003-01-18T23:21:00.000-08:002003-06-07T13:21:49.000-07:00Saturday night at home adding an entry to my blog.
There was a time in my life when Saturday night meant going to at least two or more rave events. This was during the trietary coming of my adolescence, which occurred between my 28th and 37th years, my "rave" era.
But that doesn't mean I don't approve of the activity anymore. Most of my good friends and many people I admire I met in the jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-901970102003-01-17T01:29:00.000-08:002007-06-25T18:11:28.851-07:00The literature of mysticism is full of accounts of the lives of its deified luminaries, the saints. These are the people who have come to know themselves as oneness who have also left enough of a wake to gain notice in the literature. But we're not going to talk about these people. They are figments of the historical imagination.The fact is that all saints are people first, but we rarely get jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-901899692003-01-15T16:27:00.000-08:002003-01-19T00:26:59.000-08:00From yesterday:
"Only then does Kali look down from Her completely insane activities and gaze into the eyes of a Shiva who is now fully awake."
I sort of got off the subject with that attack of Vivekanandian rhetoric, but it does provide the segue into a discussion of the world.
If we are only oneness, and oneness only knows oneness, what is this thing we call the universe? It exists as an jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-901861232003-01-14T23:49:00.000-08:002003-06-07T13:25:01.000-07:00Yesterday I received some feedback encouraging me to attempt to "convince the organism that it's really one thing."
By "organism" my friend meant the Earth as seen through James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, by way of the deep ecologists and the Wiccan folk. Peter Russell's vision of a global brain is another source of the idea, that the Earth is a discrete, living organism complete with an jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-901803652003-01-13T18:16:00.000-08:002003-01-20T16:09:00.000-08:00What have I gotten into? Or better yet, why am I writing this?
When one is trying to make a case for the non-reality of the person, it doesn't help to keep referring to oneself as "I". Yet anybody who speaks must admit to the existence of their voice. "My" voice has been formed out of a particular life's experiences. If I am to determine why I'm writing, I have to start with these jody radziknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4098329.post-901735332003-01-12T10:59:00.000-08:002003-01-19T00:31:46.000-08:00Who is writing this?
Everything we know and do is based on the idea that we are individuals, separate people who make decisions and interact with other people in ways funny, brilliant, and terrible.
To question this is more ludicrous than making Hilter a saint or calling G.W. Bush intelligent.
It is unimaginable to think that the "person" we think we are is really only an idea, even if it's anjody radziknoreply@blogger.com