Transformative Awareness

The ego is a monkey catapulting through the jungle: Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses, it swings from one desire to the next, one conflict to the next, one self-centered idea to the next. If you threaten it, it actually fears for its life. Let this monkey go. Let the senses go. Let desires go. Let conflicts go. Let ideas go. Let the fiction of life and death go. Just remain in the center, watching. And then forget that you are there. – Hua Hu Ching

True yoga can actually be defined as the mastery of awareness.  Through the various practices of yoga we are developing our capacity to expand awareness, to move from the limits of ego-infatuation to an expanded state of selfless presence.  It is a progression from bodily awareness to mental awareness to formless awareness.  Many people think of yoga as a merely physical practice of asanas, but this is just a start.  Asana is actually a way of transcending physical awareness.  Through asana practice we can learn to relax the body so completely that we can forget about it.

The same with pranayama: through pranayama we bring our subtle energy into balance and harmony so that both mental and physical restlessness is alleviated.  We are then ready to enter into a state of inner awareness wherein the subconscious filters of our experience become apparent.  The Sanskrit term for these filters is samskara.  Samskaras are the latent impressions within our minds which condition how we experience ourselves and our world.  As we become aware of and release these samskaras we achieve greater freedom and self-transformation.

Samskaras are both personal and collective.  Our personal conditioning is a result of the unique experiences of this and previous incarnations.  All of our thoughts and beliefs about ourselves, others, our reality are the result of previous impressions.  Psychotherapy is generally aimed at helping people to resolve negative samskaras from an earlier age.  Trauma is a powerfully charged samskara which can completely take over our awareness and leave us stuck reliving a past event.  Collective samskaras belong to us as a race.  They are passed down culturally and are generally harder to separate from.  When we begin to become aware of them however, we can begin to understand that we are not who we have been taught to believe we are.

The process of yoga meditation is a process of dehypnotizing ourselves and awakening to a deeper reality.  We move from gross, to subtle and then into causal realms of being.  The causal realm is found in the state of deep sleep.  It is nondual, non-spatial and atemporal.  In the earlier stages of meditation we are learning to separate the witness from the objects of experience – gross-physical and subtle-mental.  In the deeper stages we find there is no separateness of anything.  There is no observer and nothing to be observed.  This is liberation – freedom from the idea that there is anything to be liberated from! 

The idea however is not to remain in some state of suspended animation.  We can bring this awareness into our daily activities through the practice of karma yoga, or nonattached action, selfless action.  In this way the enlightened ones work tirelessly for the liberation of all beings, helping us to awaken from the illusion of suffering.

Inner & Outer Evolution

Meditation is mind management. It is remembering who we are and observing the

relationship with the mind and its activities and finding a way to manage and

integrate that. – Swami Shankardevananda Saraswati

We are beginning to understand that evolution is an integral phenomenon.  It is not just a biological process, but also an evolution of society, technology, thought and awareness.  Biological evolution has given us these body/mind vehicles through which we, as beings of consciousness experience life.  Due to the capacities of our brains we have further developed increasingly complex social structures, as well as, medical, social, information, entertainment and military technologies. 

Do you remember the dark ages before the internet, cell phones, military drones?  It is amazing how the rate of change in our world has accelerated in recent times.  These technological developments have both positive and negative impacts.  Surgical procedures are improving constantly improving our quality of life.  On the other hand more and more children are developing health problems related to a sedentary lifestyle where they sit for hours playing video games.  Agricultural science has sought to find new ways to feed our expanding species population but has also has detrimental effects on our health through the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, genetically-modified plants, etc.  Our technological progress over the last century has left us with serious consequences in terms of pollution, overpopulation, resources depletion, and the threat of nuclear destruction.  There is hope however that we can learn from and correct these imbalances as we continue to evolve both in terms of increased technological sophistication and inwardly in terms of spiritual or consciousness evolution. http://youtu.be/BltRufe5kkI

Consciousness evolution is about expanding our awareness and our sense of self beginning from our ego-centric survival concerns.  As consciousness develops it moves through stages from ego-centric to universe-centric.  As Peter Merry writes, “Each emerging stage – from ego-centric to ethno-centric to world-centric to universe-centric – transcends and includes the previous ones, thus widening its awareness and embrace, identifying with ever more of the universe, and therefore able to feel compassion for an ever expanding circle of life.” (2009, Evolutionary Leadership)  It is through this evolution of consciousness that we will be able to survive on this planet. 

On the surface we believe ourselves to be individual selves out to achieve our own needs and desires, on a deeper level we are all interconnected, not just with one another but with the planet and the universe as a whole.  As Albert Einstein famously put it, “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Does our technology help us to expand consciousness?  If we are fixated on media consumption, it is apparent that it does not.  Instead it keeps us locked in narrow concerns, fears and an obsessive need for electronic stimulation.  On the other hand we see some of the social media helping to promote cross-cultural friendships and familiarity.  People often complain about the low level of commentary on Facebook, however, I am continually in contact with friends who are maintaining positive attitudes, posting relevant information and concerned with spirituality.  Our inner consciousness determines how and why we use our technology.  Do we use it, or do we let it distract and manipulate us?

Yoga meditation is an inner technology.  It is a means of becoming aware of our own unconscious mental constructs and seeing beyond them.  Ultimately it is a means of going beyond thought into stillness and silence where we are attuned to the infinite.  It enables us to engage with the evolutionary energy of the universe, called kundalini within the yoga tradition.  By awakening to this energy within us we can accelerate our own consciousness evolution.  It seems crucial that we utilize inner technologies along with the development of outer. 

In Tantric terms the energy of evolution within the universe is called Shakti and is seen as the Divine Feminine aspect of creation.  The deep universal consciousness is known as Shiva, the Divine Masculine.  Evolution proceeds harmoniously when these two are in balance, when the outer corresponds to the inner.  The whole process of evolution is the reunification of consciousness and energy, Shiva and Shakti.  This is the process of awakening and liberation.  God lives in and through us.  We are the universal process of evolution.  

What is Kundalini?

All Sadhanas in the form of Japa, meditation, Kirtan and prayer as well as all development of virtues, and observance of austerities like truth, non-violence and continence are at best calculated only to awaken this serpent-power and make it to pass through all the succeeding Chakras beginning from Svadhishthana to Sahasrara, the latter otherwise called as the thousand-petalled lotus, the seat of Sadasiva or the Absolute separated from whom the Kundalini or the Shakti lies at the Muladhara, and to unite with whom the Kundalini passes through all the Chakras, as explained above, conferring liberation on the aspirant who assiduously practices Yoga or the technique of uniting her with her Lord and gets success also in his effort.

– Swami Sivananda Saraswati

Among those of us who are involved in yoga practice the concept of kundalini may be very familiar, so familiar, in fact that we rarely pause to consider what it is we mean by this term.  On the other hand, some readers might be new to the term and wondering what we are talking about, sometimes I wonder if anyone knows.  Some of us have had a certain experience of this energy but still it remains mysterious.  Kundalini is intricately related to the mystery of consciousness it seems; a mystery which challenges scientific categorization.

Recently a friend noticed my body shaking at points during meditation practice.  I assured her, “It’s just kundalini.”  In one sense this is sufficient – it is enough to know that these symptoms are normal.  At the same time we don’t have any precise understanding as to what this is all about.  My particular symptoms may seem insignificant, but what we are really talking about is the evolutionary potential itself.  We are particular aspects of an unfolding process which started 13.7 billion years ago according to the most recent calculations.  In fact, we are the advancing edge of this process, as far as we know on this planet.

Kundalini challenges us to extend our thinking beyond the ordinary categories of mind/matter, consciousness/energy, emptiness/form.  According to Tantric science, we are more than our bodies, more than our rational ego-minds.  We are vehicles of the unfolding energy of a universal consciousness.  We are microcosmic aspects of a macrocosmic process and potential.  The universal process of evolution is happening in and through us.  At the same time we have the choice to temporarily resist this process, to hide in our static world-models and cling to the past.

I think one of our biggest problems is the tendency to reduce kundalini to some kind of measurable something; in other words, an attempt at spiritual materialism.  According to the tradition this energetic potential resides within the causal domain.  The causal domain, or anandamaya kosha, is a proto-material, proto-mental dimension of reality.  It manifests itself within our material and mental realities but it originates beyond both.  Kundalini is at the core of our beings as conscious entities. 

The causal domain relates to what physicist David Bohm called the “implicate order.”  He created this term to describe a hidden order of reality from which our apparent reality “explicates.”  It is a unseen order of being.  The kundalini tradition assures us that we are intimately connected with this deeper dimension.  In fact we are vehicles through which it is expressed.  This not a predetermined, mechanical process however, the way that it is expressed is up to each of us as individuals.  It is not a predetermined but a stochastic, or interactive process.

In Kundalini Tantra, Swami Satyananda Saraswati states, “All life is evolving and man is no exception. Human evolution, the evolution which we are undergoing relentlessly, both as individuals and as a race, is a journey through the different chakras.”  We tend to think of the chakras as kinds of invisible organs inside our bodies.  Instead we might think of them as quantum fields of potential which are both actualized and waiting to be actualized.  We and our worlds of experience are held within our chakras as well.  Swami Satyananda states, “As we evolve towards sahasrara, outer experiences come our way in life, and inner experiences come to us in meditation, as different capacities and centers awaken progressively within the nervous system. This occurs as energy flows at higher voltages and rates of vibration through the different nadis in the psychic body.” 

We can say that everything we experience is an aspect of our state and level of consciousness, and that state and level is based on the chakra in which kundalini is activated.  The inner and outer dimensions of our experience are correlated.  This is an essential feature of integral theory as formulated by Ken Wilber.  As consciousness evolves through the agency of kundalini our outer world of experience evolves accordingly. 

We cannot divorce kundalini from any and all spiritual practices.  Whether we are practicing prayer and meditation, ecstatic song and dance, dedicated works, compassionate intent, or kriya yoga; everything is both a means of awakening and an expression of where we’re at.  Within the Christian tradition kundalini has been equated with the Holy Spirit, albeit controversially.  However, the comparison is valid.  Kundalini, like the Holy Spirit, can come to us with intuitive wisdom and guidance and open us to new fields of perception through our prayer and devotion to God. 

    Ultimately, there is no resisting the force of universal evolution.  Some writers have equated the chakras with the various levels of developmental psychology.  To some extant this seems to be valid.  One writer associated the chakras with the Ericksonian stages of psychological development.  Ordinary development however seems to represent micro-stages within the first three chakras.  The kundalini tradition tells us that we have untapped and unsuspected potentials within us.  We are capable of siddhis, i.e. psychic superpowers.  Before we awaken these though, we need to discover our own deepest humanity; our innate wisdom and compassion.  Without them we have no future.

Love, Attachment & Nonattachment

Yoga says no to detachment. Do not avoid situations in life or even in yourself, but learn to accept the existence of the things that are around you. Once you have accepted them and know their nature, then it is possible to become non-attached. The word 'non-attachment' does not really exist in English, but it exists in Sanskrit in the form of vairagya, meaning to to be free from attachment, without rejecting anything. It represents a state of mind that is continuously observing the nature of events and is unaffected. Non-attachment can easily be developed provided we can expand our awareness to see the reality behind things.

-    Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati

http://www.yogamag.net/archives/1999/fnov99/anda.shtml

Nonattachment, or vairagya, is an essential aspect of yoga practice however few of us in the West really get it.  When I talk about it with classes it often sparks a reaction – anxious questions and debate.  I think this is partly due to our lack of understanding of the term but also the depth of our unconscious attachment.  On one hand people often feel that nonattachment equals detachment; a cold, unfeeling approach to life.  On the other, here in our consumer society we feel our very identity is threatened by the idea of nonattachment.

 This is partly true.  From the Yogic perspective our sense of “I” or ego is connected to the twin snares of attachment and aversion.  The yogi cultivates nonattachment as a means of diminishing the ego.  It is a means of switching our allegiance from the unreal to the real.  In order to evolve as spiritual beings we need to expand consciousness beyond our self-centered perspectives.

The question has come up as to whether there is something “wrong” with the attachment a parent feels for her child.  The attachment bond between child and caregiver (okay, mother) is essential to the wellbeing of a child and the failure of this bond can affect the rest of his or her life.  There is certainly nothing wrong with this.  We are so prone to feel guilty about our natural needs and desires sometimes that we completely misinterpret these instructions.

What happens, however, when the mother or child clings to the other beyond the appropriate developmental stages?  Then development can be impeded, conflicts arise and deep emotional disturbance can result.  Children need to “leave the nest” at some point and we as parents need to let go.  It is not that we don’t love them but we don’t cling to old form of the relationship.  Nonattachment means understanding that nothing in this world is permanent.  We have to know when to go with the flow.

As adults we develop various attachment relationships.  We all want to have others in our lives that we trust and feel secure with.  True psychological health requires that we develop our own sense of inner security.  Without it we are not able to have truly healthy adult relationships.  In this sense relationship issues offer us a mirror into our own unconscious fears and desires.  Spiritual growth requires that we can experience, tolerate and learn to love solitude as well.

It can be difficult at times to distinguish between love and attachment in our adult relationships.  When we confuse one for the other, though, the relationships can become stagnant and hinder the higher stages of adult development.  In The Path to Love, Deepak Chopra offers three comparisons which can help us to distinguish love and attachment:

“Love allows your beloved the freedom to be unlike you.  Attachment asks for conformity to your needs and desires.

Love imposes no demands.  Attachment expresses an overwhelming demand – “Make me feel whole.”

Love expands beyond the limits of two people.  Attachment tries to exclude everything but two people.”

Love in this sense might be much more of an ideal than a reality in our lives.  The spiritual path requires that we learn to see ourselves somewhat objectively – honestly and fearless, but with compassion at the same time.  It is a process of growth not of self judgment and condemnation.  This in fact is the essence of true vairagya.

In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali defines two stages of vairagya.  The lower stage is defined as freedom from the craving for sense objects.  It is an inner state of equanimity – again something that we in the West rarely experience.  The higher stage of vairagya develops when attachment has been transferred completely from the outer world to Spirit.  When we are truly awake spiritually there is no inclination to become attached to anything and unconditional Love flows spontaneously in all directions.

Inner Peace

World peace must develop from inner peace. Peace is not just mere absence of violence. Peace is, I think, the manifestation of human compassion.

-    H. H. The Dalai Lama

We all long for peace.  Even the most violent among us are simply acting out inner pain and seeking relief, however so unknowingly.  On the deepest level we are all seeking to return to our Source, to unity, to love.  On the surface, however, it may not seem like this at all.  The bottom line, though, is that we all want to love and be loved. 

As we look at the world through our senses, through the electronic media and through the filters of our own mental conditioning, we might get a different picture. Violent crime is the substance of the nightly news.  It might be hard to realize but all that we see “out there” in the world is really a projection of what is inside of us.  Please pause and take a breath before you react to this.  That is a start.  When we start to take responsibility for our own consciousness, we can start to change the world.

In A Gift of Change Marianne Williamson writes, “Who we ourselves become, how we grow and change and face the challenges of our own lives, is intimately and causally connected to how the world will change over the next few years.  For the world is a projection of our individual psyches, collected on a global screen; it is hurt or healed by every thought we think.”  When we buy into a belief system, or BS, based in fear, separation, jealousy, greed, lust, etc. we separate ourselves from our true selves, from love.

I used to enjoy attending meditation retreats with Chagdud Tulku Rimpoche, a teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.  He would often reiterate that we have to change inwardly before we can fix the world.  He would say that trying to develop peace in the world, before looking into yourself, is like looking into a mirror and trying to wipe the dirt off your face by wiping the mirror.  Sometimes we end up in a state where we think that if everybody else would just change things would get better.  I’ve been there – over and over.  Change, however, begins within each of us.

Meditation is the key to inner transformation, the key to inner peace.  Peace, joy and love are our own true nature.  When we can relinquish all of our BS and rest in our own Self-nature we have found a way beyond pain and suffering.  We have found a way out of our BS.

Nothing Is Real

Things are not as they appear to be,

nor are they otherwise.

-    Lankavatara Sutra

Within our minds we like to believe that we know things definitely; that we have captured “reality” within our thoughts, concepts and beliefs.  Actually nothing could be further from the truth and nothing could be more futile.  We seek to know and understand a “reality” which can only ever be a construct within our minds.  The fact that a cultural majority favors one fabrication over others is notwithstanding.  Our real problem is that we seek know things outside of ourselves without truly knowing who we are. 

Now if you are new to this line of inquiry, I apologize.  You might be saying, “Hey, I am so-and-so and I live such-a-place and I’m married to so-and-so and I do such-and-such for a living.  Or it could be some variation on these; perhaps you are unmarried and unemployed.  All of these are just definitions of ourselves within socio-cultural categories.  As much as we believe in them and are emotionally attached to them, they are not actually real.  In fact they are extremely ephemeral.  It just takes one good crisis in life to upset the whole house of cards. 

Who are we ultimately?  Who is the real you; the real me?  To truly answer this question we have to go out of our minds.  The fact is that many of us are trying to do this all of the time.  We know that we are missing something, that something is fundamentally amiss.  We use illegal drugs and alcohol, prescription drugs, sex, gambling, shopping, video games, television, online social networking, etc. both to search for that something and to distract ourselves from the vaguely insistent anxiety that lurks just below the surface of our awareness. 

Even religion can be a distraction.  As long as we believe that “God” is an imaginary being “out there” we are looking in the wrong direction.  “The entrance door to the sanctuary,” wrote Islamic poet Rumi, “lies within you.”  Of course, he was hardly original in this statement.  Mystical poets and seers throughout the ages have been trying to tell us the same thing.  The ground of being is not to be found in things but within ourselves; within our essential being.  God is within us.  S/He is who we are.

This perspective runs throughout the Upanishads which are the source of the Yoga Vedanta philosophy.  The Kena Upanishad states this quite clearly:

"That which makes the tongue speak but cannot be
Spoken by the tongue, know that as the Self.
This Self is not someone other than you.

 "That which makes the mind think but cannot be
Thought by the mind, that is the Self indeed.
This Self is not someone other than you.

 "That which makes the eye see but cannot be
Seen by the eye, that is the Self indeed.
This Self is not someone other than you.

 "That which makes the ear hear but cannot be
Heard by the ear, that is the Self indeed.
This Self is not someone other than you.

"That which makes you draw breath but cannot be
Drawn by your breath, that is the Self indeed.
This self is not someone other than you."

(Easwaren, 1987)

In other words, the essential being is not an object which can be known through the five senses, nor through the mind.  It is the “knower” who experiences through the mind and the senses.  The term “The Self” can also be translated as God.  The Self is not at all our ego personality.  The ego is an aspect of the mind and the senses.  It is basically a self-referential thought construct.  Remember, the real Self can never be an object of thought.  In order to experience it we have go out of our minds.

Meditation is a means of going beyond mind without going completely crazy.  Or maybe it is more of a safe way to go completely crazy.  When we are able to relax deeply while retaining our awareness we can go deeper into the mystery of consciousness; a mystery that can be labeled to a certain extent but never fully defined.  Science has become interested in consciousness in our time but struggles because it is not within its scope.  While science searches for truths in the physical world, spirituality searches for truths of consciousness.  Each has its place.  Science is a wonderful methodology for investigating the physical world; meditation is a time honored methodology for investigating the inner.  The Self, though, is neither inner nor outer, it is both and neither. 

This Self is not someone other than you.

Karma, Nonattachment and Surrender

Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

-    Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Karma” in its basic sense, means “action.”  The universe is a vast field of activity from the subatomic vibration of superstrings to the whirling of galaxy clusters.  Somewhere in the middle is the realm of human beings and our actions.  The Law of Karma tells us that every action produces a reaction.  It is similar to classical physics but goes a little deeper. 

From the yogic perspective action is not just occurring in the physical, material world but in the mind as well.  Our actions in the world begin as thought-seeds in our minds.  Often we are not even aware of them though until they take form in our lives.  The experiences in our lives then create more thought-seeds in terms of memories and desires. 

We are born with karmic seeds already planted from past lives.  There is an almost infinite store house of seeds within our unconscious known as karmashaya in the Yoga Sutras.  This “reservoir” of karma is rooted in the five “afflictions:” ignorance, ego, attachment, aversion and fear of death.  “As long as the root exists,” Patanjali tells us, “it will come to fruition as life experience.”  This experience can be either painful or pleasant depending on our past actions.

Karma is not “fate,” however.  While we may have little choice but to suffer through some our past karma in the present, our current actions influence our future karmic outcomes.  Through the practice of yoga we can address the root of karma itself – ignorance.  Ignorance in this sense means unawareness of our true nature as divine spiritual beings.  The flip side of ignorance is ego – false self-identification.  “The ego is like a virus in the computer that attacks the core system,” writes Marianne Williamson.  “It seems to show us a dark parallel universe, a realm of fear and pain that doesn’t actually exist but certainly seems to.” (1993, A Return to Love)

Without ego karma would have no effect upon us.  We suffer the effects of karma because we are attached to and identified with the ego.  It is much like watching a film where we get so caught up in the drama that we laugh, cry or jump when the main character is going through happy, sad or frightening experiences.  It’s entertaining but at a certain point it is nice to be reminded that “it is just a movie.”
 

This awakening occurs in our lives through the practice of nonattachment, or vairagya.  Nonattachment doesn’t necessarily mean renunciation.  In fact the outward renunciation, of possessions for instance, without an inner release of emotional attachment is ineffective.  As Patanjali explains, “When an individual becomes free from cravings for the sense objects he has experienced, as well as those of which he has heard, that state of consciousness is vairagya.”  We can develop this state of consciousness through observing our own emotional reactions without identifying with them.  Sometimes this not easy!

It becomes easier when we develop an attitude of surrender.  Whether we believe in God, a Higher Power, the Tao, etc. is not important.  When we recognize that there is a greater power, a greater order and intelligence working in and through the universe and us, we don’t have to stress out over the events of life.  On the contrary, everything is happening exactly as it is supposed to and we are exactly who and where we should be.  This doesn’t mean that we stop working, just that we are connecting to greater resources of wisdom and power than we usually realize. 

Nonattachment and surrender are aspects of Karma Yoga, the way of selfless activity.  When we practice Karma Yoga we are working with positive intent while observing and letting go of emotional attachments.  It is meditation-in-action.  Through Karma Yoga we can uproot negative karma and undo its effects.  In this way we accomplish the true purpose of this life; not to make money or even accomplish great deeds, but to express our essential nature.  To quote Marianne Williamson again, “The key to a successful career is realizing that it’s not separate from the rest of your life, but rather is an extension of your most basic self.  And your most basic self is love.” (ibid.)