Love and Control

“Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it” ~ Rumi

“Love your fellow being as you love yourself.” – Jesus

Suppose I am in love with a beautiful person.  I think of her often and anticipate the opportunities to be with her.  She gives me such great pleasure when we are together, not just sexually but just in our togetherness; and in the feeling that I am loved and special in her eyes.  I love her because she allows me to love myself.  Hopefully I return the compliment.  But what happens when something inevitably goes awry?  Perhaps she is not as attentive as before.  Maybe she has ideas and opinions that I just can’t stand.  Maybe I suspect that she is attracted to someone else . . .

Just as suddenly and wonderfully the high came on it can be killed.  Then I am back to square one; trying to love myself.  If my self-loathing is so strong that I feel that I just can’t tolerate it, I might just try to manipulate her into some behavior that might “bring back that loving feeling.”  (Any Righteous Brothers fans?  Just in case: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QaASwKbUGE.)  Truth is one has to love oneself before he or she can love another. 

My sense is that violence comes out of our inability to accept and love ourselves.  Instead we seek to control others so that they reflect some sort of facsimile of love.  To feel powerful and in control is not even close to feeling loved.  This is the tragic side of all of our real and fictional villains.  As soon as we move into control we have given into fear and have relinquished love.  Let God be in control, let Love be control. 

Love doesn’t differ between you and me.  In Love we all are One.  Ego tries to control out of fear.  God moves effortlessly and endlessly out of Love. 

The Transcendent Singularity

The human design process will achieve a kind of infinite velocity,

everything becomes linked with everything else and matter becomes mind.

-    Erik Davis (Techgnosis, 1998)

Matter is derived from mind, not mind from matter.

– Tibetan Book of the Dead

We are accelerating inexorably into a crisis point in our evolution.  Our capitalist-industrial culture has poisoned the very earth that we depend for our survival in a search for short-term profits.  Global weather patterns are changing dramatically.  Political and financial systems are falling apart.  The future of the human race doesn’t look too good.  As much as we might try to deny it our world is changing from under our feet.  Impermanence is not an abstract concept these days but a daily reality.

At the same time our technological growth is increasing at an exponential rate.  Scientific discoveries, new ideas and inventions are happening constantly and reshaping our world in ways that our old traditions just can’t keep up with.  This is where the idea of the singularity comes in.  Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil predict that at some point in the very near future that we will have developed machines that are superior to us in intelligence.  Whether or not this is a good or bad thing is open to interpretation.  The question of whether or not a machine can be conscious, or self-aware, is disputable as well.

The singularity is the scientific equivalent of the apocalypse.  It is the end of humanity and the beginning of the “transhuman” era.  By definition we cannot predict what will happen at this point.  As Kurzwel predicts, “By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.”  The idea is that we will transcend our biology and merge with our machines.  This is really just a new techno version of our age-old impetus towards spiritual transcendence.  As Kurzwel eloquently explains:

“Evolution moves towards greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, infinite love, and so on. Of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never achieves an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves rapidly in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably towards this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal. We can regard, therefore, the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form to be an essentially spiritual undertaking.” (The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Penguin Books (September 26, 2006)

Some would argue that the singularity is not just imminent; it has arrived.  Certainly the explosion of technologies such as the internet, cell phones and tablets, world-wide social media etc. have created a world that would be unrecognizable to my grandparents who grew up in an age before automobiles of telephones.  In a very real sense we are already merging with our machines.  It is a love affair, a merging through “bhakti.”  This was evidenced this morning at Starbucks where I looked up from my Kindle to see a pretty young woman gazing raptly into the screen of her smart phone. 

It is evident in perhaps a more sinister way in meta-data surveillance, location tracking and the increasing ability of both business and government to follow our activities and habits.  We may feel outrage and complain all we want but this is part of our brave new world as well.  We all have to be savvy protectors of our “personal identities” as they are revealed through our electronic footprints.  In a sense, like with all love affairs, there is an undercurrent of battle to maintain our personal autonomy. 

Yogis (consistent practitioners of yoga, not cartoon bears) have sought and reportedly found a similar transcendence of the human condition through Samadhi.  Samadhi is a state of consciousness in which one recognizes that one is not body nor mind but pure awareness, pure being.  Yoga is an inner technology of the mind, brain and nervous system.  While information technology holds the promise of “uploading” our souls onto some kind of transcendent mainframe, yoga teaches that there is a deep aspect of ourselves which is already immortal and transcendent.  It is known as the Atman, or Self.  “The knowing Self,” states the Katha Upanishad, “is not born; It does not die. It has not sprung from anything; nothing has sprung from It. Birthless, eternal, everlasting, and ancient, It is not killed when the body is killed.” 

We “know” this inner self when the mind becomes quiet, when we detach ourselves from info-stream of the mind and senses.  According to the Yoga Sutras we are in a state of spiritual ignorance, or avidya, when we are identified with our personal identities.  The personal identity or ego is a temporary manifestation of that greater Self.  Ultimately it cannot be contained as “information.”  Instead it is the formless awareness that cognizes information.  The Self is separate from mind and body and so is separate from their technological extensions.  The yogi considers mind and body as instruments of the inner being.  So too our technologies are tools and toys for us as soul-beings.  The trick as always is to try to remember our true identity in the midst of chaos.

The transformation of our external and internal worlds of experience is a wild ride.  Hang onto your Self!

Here are some links to more information of the singularity concept:

http://io9.com/7-totally-unexpected-outcomes-that-could-follow-the-sin-512600550

http://www.finerminds.com/lifestyle/singularity-technology-superintelligence/

http://www.seriouswonder.com/zoltan-istvan-the-transhumanist-wager

Reality and Illusion

The ego mind paints its own picture onto reality and we then judge “good” or “bad” on the basis of this hallucination. Our ego mind cheats us by projecting its own hallucinated view of reality, in which we believe. – Lama Yeshe

The mind of an individual is a part of the cosmic universal mind. You must understand that your individual mind is part of the universal mind. The space in this room is an individual space, but it is also a part of a greater space. Because you have four walls around it, you call it your room space. Similarly, the individual mind is a concept and not a reality. – Swami Satyananda Saraswati

The idea that our reality is an illusion runs through many spiritual traditions and has cropped up again as people attempt to interpret quantum physics.  Absolute reality (and face it, what other kind of reality matters?) is not to be found in the circumstances that we seemingly find around us.  The sensory world albeit how indisputably real it seems is not it.  Instead it is the mind that constitutes our reality.  “It’s all in your mind?”  Actually, it is all in our mind. 

Our symbolic mind can be seen as a conceptual overlay of reality.  It is an attempt at describing, encoding and interpreting reality symbolically, whether linguistically, mathematically or otherwise.  This is a wonderful capacity but the problem is that we come to live in a world that is primarily conceptual.  We take the map to be the territory.  As one of my favorite writer-teachers, Robert Anton Wilson, said, “We all see only that which we are trained to see.”  We see our world through the eyes of our own experience based upon our cultural conditioning. 

Absolute reality is beyond concepts, beyond interpretation and more immediately present as the tip of your own nose.  True reality is not something that we need to seek but that which is already ever-present.  It is the unified field of consciousness underlying the illusory separateness of our experience.  Absolute reality is not involved in our space-time continuum.  However it is ever-present.  It is foremostly within us although it is also projected without.  It is immanent as well as transcendent.  Our primary problem is that we focus entirely on the manifest circumstances of our experience rather than resting in the reality of our unified being. 

Why Bother With Spiritual Practice?

"It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are."
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Sadhana means setting the mind right so the light of God is seen directly.

– Paramhamsa Satyananda Saraswati

I just had my 59^th birthday.  Big deal, I know.  However, I agree with the position that the purpose of this life is to awaken to our true identity, to experience a unified consciousness – “The” Unified Consciousness, aka “God.”  The reason is that I have had some “tastes” of that experience and I know that it makes all of our worldly concerns seem absolutely trivial.  I’m not talking about world hunger, war, poverty, disease, human trafficking or any of the other darkness in the world.  I’m talking about our ordinary ego-centric concerns for security, pleasure, personal control, romance, even “righteousness.” 

Aging can be used as a means of gaining some perspective on one’s body and one’s life.  Everything, even what we identify with as ourselves, is a temporary manifestation of something “greater.”  This body that I enjoy through the senses is a transient phenomenon.  In fact it is constantly changing.  We grow, develop, reach our prime and then decay.  But “that” is not really who we are.  Underlying the surface of phenomena is the timeless, non-spatial essence of our being; the inner witness.  Who this inner witness is, is not a question that can be answered through the ordinary workings of our minds.  It is not material, not mental or emotional but it is always here, right now. It is always present as the locus of experience.  This is the true essence of our being(s).

Sadhana, or “spiritual practice” is any means that works to help us enter into our deeper identity.  I practice and teach hatha yoga asana and pranayama, various meditation techniques and devotional song, kirtan.  Reading and contemplating spiritual texts can also be a form of sadhana.  These all work well, especially in combination.  But as I remind students, one’s practice must be regular and consistent.  Regular ongoing sadhana enables us to de-condition ourselves, release toxic emotional energy and false beliefs that we have accumulated as to who and what we are.  It is work that we must do on ourselves and there are no real shortcuts.  However, the work is not really all that painful or arduous; in fact it can and should be joyous, at least more often than not.

With ongoing practice the inner peace which is cultivated begins to grow.  However, it must be nurtured to some extent.  I have found myself withdrawing from “normal” situations and relationships because they do not serve it.  Why stay attached to people and things that distract me from bliss?  Of course the attachment is within me, the reaction is my own and no one and nothing is to blame.  However, loud music, violent media, judgmental conversations, one-upmanship, gossip, etc. simply do not serve spiritual practice; at least not for me.  Any and all situations and relationships reflect where I am attached or not.  As Ram Das wisely puts it, “What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.”  When we recognize and release our attachments we can evolve further.

In the Dhammapada, Buddha states, “Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced by mind.”  Sadhana is a means of purifying one’s mind.  It is a means of bringing negative mental patterns to light and letting them go, as well as cultivating and reinforcing positive ones.  When we let go of our mental baggage we open space for the light of God.  It is not a matter of judging whether something is “good” or “bad,” but of letting go and trusting the “goodness” of our own essential nature.  When we truly surrender in our practice we give up any and all expectations, desires, fantasies, ideologies in order to enter into “reality.” 

Growing older allows me to let go of attachments, although I am hardly “liberated.”  It also reminds that life is short and that it is necessary to focus on what is essential.  Sadhana connects me with that even if I can’t truly define what that is. 

Freedom and Immortality

"Our divine perfection – not registered by the physical eye but only by the heart’s knowing – is who we truly are. Our mortal imperfections – registered by the physical senses – are not who we truly are. Yet we keep trying, in love, to find each other’s perfection within the world of imperfection. And it simply is not there." ~ Marianne Williamson

Liberation, bondage, what are they to me? What do I care for freedom? For I have known God, the infinite Self, the witness of all things. ~ The Heart of Awareness

We can characterize the spiritual path as it is stated in the Upanishads as the movement from the unreal to the real, from darkness into the light and from death to immortality.  It involves a growing awareness that we are not these bodies, not our temporary personalities even, but something deeper, more essential and ultimately beyond measurement, quantification or definition.  We are beings of consciousness, which is essentially unlimited by either space or time.

It is the dawning recognition that this world of dire circumstances is basically ephemeral.  It has no substance beyond the belief we are willing to invest in it; the projection of our collective hopes and fears.  Although many would argue that this is a retreat from the very real problems of the world, it really means empowering ourselves.  By waking up to who we truly are and seeing our circumstances for what they truly are we are in a position to make whatever changes we deem necessary. 

Imagine being locked in a prison in a dream.  While dreaming, you search here and there looking for a way out.  Maybe you even give up.  But what if you start to awaken and realize that you are dreaming?  Everything changes.  The circumstances by which you were victimized no longer have any power because you recognize that they were only in your mind.  You can turn the prison into a pumpkin pie with ice cream.

I liked the film “Inception.”  Many people made fun of its underlying premises because they were not terribly logical; dreams within dreams where one could be killed, etc.  Of course the nature of dreams is that they don’t make sense to the rational mind.  The rational mind wants to analyze everything for some kind of linear causal connection.  If we pay attention “reality” is often more like a dream than a linear sequence of events.  You think of someone you haven’t seen for a years and then suddenly meet them unexpectedly.  C. G. Jung described these kinds of phenomena as synchronicity.  Just as when we start to recognize the linear inconsistencies in a dream and awaken, synchronicities remind us that this supposed waking world is also a dream.

The problem with dreams is that they are pretty much always based on previous experience.  They reveal our samskaras, our collected mental patterns.  Occasionally perhaps we might have a truly prophetic dream in which the gods speak to us.  However, mostly not.  True awakening means transcending the three conditioned states of waking, dreaming and dreamless sleep.  It is the recognition that we are not part of the system at all.  We are always absolutely free and immortal.  As Deepak Chopra, MD puts it, “We are not victims of aging, sickness and death.  These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change.  The seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.”

Meditation is a primary means of disengaging from the dream, from unreality, and being real, letting go of the darkness and revealing the inner light and realizing that there is no birth and no death.  Our very nature, swarupe, is freedom and bliss.  Practice and realize this.  Then keep on practicing until you are established in that realization.

Beyond Love

Love is a by-product of a rising consciousness.  It is just like the fragrance of a flower.  Don’t search for the roots; it is not there.  Your biology is your roots; your consciousness is your flowering. – Osho

Whatever we think we mean by love is not love.  As egos we are only able to glimpse the possibility of love when we are free from attachment.  “The one you love you cannot possess,” states Tantra.  Because we are under this mass hypnosis of avidya, we operate from a basis of delusion and fear which causes us to cling to this false self-identification of ego.  Because we are not authentically ourselves we can’t truly experience love. 

Ego is the movement into separation.  The expansive I Am becomes the limited “I am this body.”  We become “skin-encapsulated.”  On a biological level we “love” another out of sexual desire.  We bond with each other because oxytocin is released in the blood.  We bond in a very limited way where the self-clinging of ego becomes pair-bonding, family-bonding, ethnic-bonding.  Spiritual love, true love however, doesn’t exclude anyone.  It is based on the recognition that there is “only one of us here.”  The Mayans have an expression for this.  Inlakesh means, “I am another you; you are another me.”  It is essentially the same as the Sanskrit Namaste. 

True love requires spiritual work, i.e. sadhana.  We can’t do this on a purely intellectual level.  We have to enter into the stream of devotion.  We have to develop a practice of meditation.  We have to love and appreciate ourselves on a soul level.  We can’t see God in another until we have accepted that God is within us as well.  Sadhana, spiritual practice is basically a means of dehypnotizing ourselves and waking up to who we truly are.  Meditation is a state of consciousness which can arise out of many diverse methods.  The method whether TM, kriya yoga, mahamudra, vipassana, contemplative prayer, ecstatic dance, etc. is just a means to help us enter into a sacred inner space. 

In the tradition of Bhakti Yoga, “The Yoga of Love,” there are different terms for different stages of love.  The first term is “bhava” which means a loving, devotional attitude.  Love begins with the intention of loving.  It begins with the cultivation of a positive attitude.  In a sense it is more conceptual than emotional; the acceptance of the inner divinity of oneself and the other, the “object” of our loving intention.  This the first stage of “conscious love.”  It has nothing to do with our notions of “falling in love” which is really a state of unconscious infatuation.  Bhakti yoga is the path of conscious love, rising rather than falling in love.  “The method and purpose of Bhakti,” said Swami Satyananda Saraswati, “is to take you away from identification with the little "I": the body-mind. The aim is to reduce personal whims, conflicts, disharmony, etc., which tend to imprison and severely limit awareness. The aim is to make the mind a perfect reflector, a perfect mirror of experience.” (http://www.yogamag.net/archives/1992/djuly92/bhkyog.shtml)

“Prem” is the second term.  It means “love.”  Bhava paves the way for the more spontaneous flow of love from the heart.  Prem is the experience of bliss as one sheds the false form of ego and longs to unite with the Divine essence.  There is wonderful mantra “aham Prema” which means “I am love.”  Prem is the awakening to our essential nature as loving awareness.  The universe, the multiverse, is the evolving product of the outflow of love from its formless essence.   Love is the essence of everything that exists.  As we willingly shed our ego defenses it is revealed as our own Self.

Bhakti is the flowering of love.  It is the state of devotion wherein the “little I” is completely transcended.  As Swamiji says, “. . . in bhakti the 'I' is lost; there is only 'you'. That state of self-awareness is known as bhakti.”  Love in all of its forms helps to disintegrate the cage of ego that we have come to live in.  With the flowering of Bhakti there is no cage left, no separate self, only Love.  (http://www.yogamag.net/archives/1995/bmarch95/say295.shtml)

Are You My Soul Mate?

Love is a union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self. It is an experience of sharing, or communing, which permits the full unfolding of one’s own inner activity.
~Erich Fromm

The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind I was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
~Rumi

Once in the middle of protracted and bitter breakup she said, “I believe you are my soul mate.” 

“Hmmm . . .,” I said mostly to myself. 

I had not yet given any thought to the subject.  There had been a recent book on it released in the new age world and I was suspicious of the whole idea.  More so because our “soul mate” relationship had devolved into mutual abuse, attempts at manipulation and recrimination.  If it was a “soul” relationship it seemed to be a partnership in Hell.  It was a battle of egos from which we both came away with multiple wounds and perhaps had learned a lesson or two. 

The spiritual tradition of Yoga is not big on relationship advice.  Yoga discipline is mainly about turning inward, examining and releasing the cognitive-emotional programs (samskaras) within us that block us from realizing our true nature as unlimited consciousness.  Conventional relationships can support spiritual work, sadhana, but most often they are distractions that keep us from entering into the peace within.  Sex is definitely problematic.  If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that sexual desire is basically uncontrollable.  “Resistance is futile.”  Not that some spiritual heroes have not overcome it.

The Tantric view, the path of awareness, suggests that there is nothing to “overcome.”  Instead of fighting we transcend.  This doesn’t mean retreating or rejecting but allowing and witnessing; being aware of ourselves without judgment.  Being present without judgment is love.  Guilt, accusation, shame and blame are all antithetical to love; whether turned towards oneself or another.  We allow everything to be as it is in the open space of awareness.  At the same time we gently apply some discipline.  The discipline, however, is just to increase awareness.

All relationships begin with one’s self and end with One Self.  We get stuck in personal relationships when we fail to move beyond our limited personal views.  We get stuck sometimes in the concept of the “relationship” as if it were something real instead of the illusory play of two illusory egos.  Problems always start when we start to take ourselves too seriously. 

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

We can’t really love from the standpoint of “just you and me, baby.”  It sounds romantic but it is an evolutionary cull-du-sac on a spiritual level.  Love is expansive, it doesn’t confine itself to one object.  Like the sun it radiates in all directions nourishing all.  In order to know love we have to go beyond our ego-centric view.  Love is the power of transcendence.  It is Kundalini.  When two people can share this love they are truly soul mates. 

From a karmic perspective, we all have karmic connections in this life.  Most relationships serve to work out past karma.  This does not mean they are soul relationships.  A true soul relationship is based on a mutual vow to wake up together.