Happy 2006 Card (re-edited from earlier)

I re-wrote the earlier Happy Perehelion card as a Happy 2006 card, which is really an excuse to once again explain my favorite easy exercise for achieving bubbly, ecstatic body bliss states, the first step towards 24/7 relaxation into peace.
I put it together from a Bay Area Kadampa Buddhist postcard (I edited the mouth into a smile, and overlaid it with the Eight Auspicious Signs shown as one combined symbol that I also found on the Internet.) To this I have added the following greeting and commentary:

The graphic shows The Eight Auspicious Signs placed on the Buddha’s face. I have assigned them the following non-traditional meanings that will be further explained below.

Explanation of The Symbols on the Buddha’s Face
The Treasure Vase of fulfillment of all spiritual wishes (resonated trachea on inhale)
The Lotus as the Buddha’s spoken teaching (resonated mouth-soft palette on inhale - OM or KAWWW)
The Endless Knot as the resonated septum
The Golden Fishes as the activated left and right nose channels (flaring nostrils)
The Dharma Wheel as the Great Aspiration (pause on the inhale - AH)
The Conch Shell as the Third Eye Awakening)
The Victory Banner as permanent achievement of relaxed no-mind (blink!)
The Precious Parasol as the dissolving into full body bliss (HRUNG!)

Wishing all of you Spontaneously Pure, Self-Refreshing, Temporary Illusory Pristine Awareness Embodiments a festive absorption into the light in 2006.
Explanation of The Eight Descriptive Words
Spontaneously: Because your naturally perfect state of buddhahood is occurring to you right now, effortlessly, despite whatever flotsam and jetsam may be clouding your view.
Pure: We all surf, consciously or not, on the wave of the NOW, while thoughts of the past and future continually dissolve into the primordial purity of total presence (the supreme ordering principle that fashions everything in this universe).
Self-Refreshing See the Purr-Snarl exercise below.
Temporary: Obviously our embodiment is temporary, at least in this particular body.
Illusory: Even this pristine witness buddha-self, although capable of evolving through many levels of heavens and paradises, is ultimately illusory. Total absorption in Nirvana (Source, the Unmanifest) remains the ultimate goal -- and can be achieved while still embodied according to the Buddha’s teaching.
Pristine: This awareness, untouched by cause and effect, good deeds or bad, shines with the pure light of consciousness-love-bliss.
Awareness: In the center of the embodiment sits the witness self, watching the passing show.
Embodiment: What we all currently are experiencing planetside as ‘witness selves in the flesh.’
The PURR-SNARL Exercise
based on the Vajra Mantra
(smiling, throw the head back as far as possible in the sky-pointing gesture. For more info on this gesture, see www.raysender.com/tflutter.html
Inhale “OM” (sounds more like “KAWWWW”)
Snore-inhale thru mouth and flaring nostrils, resonating all nose-mouth-soft palette, throat and tracheal tube.
Pause very briefly on top of inhale: AHHH
(or think it silently)
Exhale through mouth with gargled French ‘R’ and tracheal rattle: HRUNG!
Blink whenever a thought does not just keep drifting by, and it will skedaddle. (MRI research and Tibetan yoga suggest consciousness shuts down when we blink)

Explanation of the PURR-SNARL
Your trachea that brings air to your lungs is a solid tube. When you purr/snarl, you are resonating your trachea along with parts of your mouth and nose. The main artery, the aorta, enters the heart just in front of the trachea. Blood being thicker than water, and water an excellent transmitter of vibrations, blood carries the tracheal resonance all the way to the capillaries in your fingers and toes. Total body bliss up to your tolerance level is possible. To increase your tolerance level: how well can you stand being tickled? (Wiggling your toes helps increase your tickle tolerance,)

The main mistake I think we westerners make with the Tibetan instant enlightenment (Mahamudra/Dzogchen) teachings is to think, “Oh, if we’re already enlightened, the hell with meditation. Let’s go bowling.”

But you have to be swimming in unbelievable bliss before you’re enlightened. I believe this bliss-body experience can be achieved easily with the Purr-Snarls described above. Twenty to thirty Purr-Snarls and you should start feeling very, very good! How does it work? To explain again, you are resonating your trachea, the tube that brings air to your lungs. The trachea sits right behind your main artery, the aorta, where it enters your heart. The buzz you’re creating buzzes your bloodstream, all the way out to the tiny capillaries. This gradually dissolves any lateral bands of tension in the body, so the more often you do it the less tense you feel and the faster you will achieve feeling very good, right up to your bliss tolerance level.

What if your bliss tolerance level is set too low? (For most of us, it is.) You will need to increase your ability to tolerate more bliss. I do it by stroking my face around the nose and mouth with my fingertips or a ribbon or something - anything that gives a light tickle. If it makes you shudder, and triggers what I call 'The Shoo-Fly Reflex' (you shiver and want to tweak your nose), try wiggling your toes. You don't want to de-sensitize yourself to the tickle, but just increase your capacity to hold it without going over the edge into the reflex.

So here’s hoping for a much more peaceful 2006 than the year we were just finished! As the Zen folks say, “Nothing is better than nothing!” which I guess is the opposite of the famous Chinese curse -- that is, hoping for “No news is good news” instead of “May you live in interesting times!”
“So what happened in 2006?”
“Oh, nothing. We all just lived happily on the planet.”
Peaceful and Happy Lives to All Beings!
Want a downloadable copy?

Outside the Paradigm

All my friends are dropping hints that they don't like and don't read blogs, so I guess these thoughts are just for me. I have, however, opened up the comments window again since blogger.com has put a spamblocker on the comments window. Well done!

I'm very grateful to Her for bringing me various exercises that allow me access to what in Buddhism might be called the first Jhana, or on my recently devised scale to correlate between different spiritual traditions, I can coast at about 40 renas, an acronym for 'rapture-ecstasy-nirvana attributes' (unless I come up with a better explanation), named after a co-aspirant whose classic question in 1967 "How much bliss can you tolerate?" got me pondering the scale that John Gowan developed and I then added to. For Gowan's chart, see:
www.raysender.com/gowanchart.html
and for an explanation of the Buddhist absorption (Jhana) states, see:
www.raysender.com/jhanas.htm

The home-grown exercises that keep me at 40 renas include: (excuse me for repeating myself for the umpteenth time on this blog, but it's all I really want to talk about)

resonating my trachea (purring). Or think of it as the Vajra Mantra 'OM AH HUNG' if you prefer Tibetan. OR if you want to think of this as the everlovin' death rattle, that's okay too. "A death rattle a day keeps the coroner at bay."

uvula-soft palette nursing. What babies do in deep sleep, and they're pretty smart.

snoring (if we're in nirvana in deep sleep, then if I copy what I do in deep sleep, I can begin to access that state while awake).

blinking to 'swat' lingering thoughts - and as mentioned earlier, EEG research shows that consciousness shuts down for an instant when we blink -- and that blinking is used in the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition to break attachment to consciousness 'states.'

Also, flaring the nostrils slowly and smoothly on the inhale. I find this keeps me using deep, relaxed breaths whenever I stray away from them.

Anyway, all this is to answer the "what if you washed up on a desert island and only had your naked body as a resource against terminal boredom" question? You can only have so many orgasms in one day, right? And that post-coital glow -- it wears off quickly, that is unless you keep snoring/snorting afterwards.

Mix briskly and.... Wow! Do I really NEED more? I'm topped off quite nicely, thanks at 60 renas. I'll have to work on my bliss tolerance more, and

(not return for another incarnation unless I want to)

My 'With the Current' Current Daily Routine
I wake up, do my two hundred uvula sucks before I levitate out of bed, which gets me up to 55 renas of bliss, stabilize at 50 during the cappucino ritual whilst singing an assortment of anthems ("Way Down Upon The Swannee River," "My Country 'Tis of Thee," "A Piece of Peace Apiece" to "The Sheik of Araby" tune). Dance with our terrier Riqui during the last one, which he always enjoys.

Then sit down to read my e-mail, whilst purring eight to the bar. What else?

A nameless goddess recommends that I write up all my Harmless Exercises in one slim volume and leave it on coffee tables. I guess it could include: uvulizing, purring, snoring, flaring nostrils, breathing from the, er, rear end, smiling with the chin muscle up, blinking to swat thoughts. What have I forgotten? I now fall asleep with my hand crossed in front of my face so that the knuckles push my cheek muscles up into a smile as I drift. Takes me back to the womb -- (singing) "Carry me back, to Old Virginity..."

What about Physical Exercise?
I take Riqui for a walk every day, and do a meditation whilst walking. If I'm walking TOWARDS the sun, I concentrate on an I-THOU dialogue with IAOUE, the Sun in my animist mythology. Walking with the sun on my LEFT, I walk side-by-side with IAOUE as my male friend (MITRA in Sanskrit). Walking with the sun BEHIND me, following my shadow, I blank my mind and allow IAOUE to take me over and experience the planet through my perceptions - the 'Thou Art THAT' experience. I project myself into Riqui, with IAOUE on the other end of my leash (standing in for the Golden Thread that projects from us all the way to the sun). I do not, however, copy Riqui's proclivity for peeing on every tree in sight. Walking with the sun on my RIGHT, I walk with IAOUE as female friend/sister/mother: DEVI-HRI-MA-PRAKRITI-ADITI, the local node for the Mother of Galaxies -- actually She is All Names, the Great Cow Goddess VAK, the Sacred Udderance, as She manifests first from the unmanifest. We bulls are just an afterthought -- just a mother with a prolapsed uterus (penis), howling at the moooon.

IAOUE (YHVH) is a breath mantra - such a great idea to name the Creator after the breath sound, so that we all die with YHWH on our lips. (I think I written about this before, and also how 'Allah' is a heartbeat mantra, so we sound God's name throughout our lives.) The ancient Middle East argument then is:

"God is breath!"
"No, God is the heartbeat!"
"No, God is breath, you son of a camel!"
"No, God is the heartbeat, you flea-bitten heretic!"

And so it goes. Of course the two names combine nicely as
INHALE: EEAHHHH
EXHALE: WE-HEH-AH-LA-LA-LA-LA

But then the evening news would be so boring! Happily For Ever After never kept anyone turning more pages. (YAWN)

Conversations With Master Phil

Phil wrote:

Ramon, you had me laughing for sure [with previous blog entry]... Are you having problems with some Advaita types? hmmm

I wrote this in 2003, but have been reading a Dzogchen (instant enlightenment) Yahoo list and something reminded me of it, so I posted it.

...I think we are born in a state of Bliss/Nirvana and lose it plugging into our bodies and learning to cope. Nothing to let go of, if you tell yourself you are bound to something and need to let go of it then you are bound. I have no problem. Give up giving up, transcend transcending all seems like good advice to me.

Yup, good stuff, although I think because of our 'education' and 'life experiences' we have to first make the effort to achieve 'fixation' on our chosen object of meditation before we can totally relax everything. At least that's been my experience. Voluntary blinking seems the easiest path to no-mind fixation these days for me.

But my problems commences with reincarnation, if reincarnation is an illusion, why do I have such strong past life memories and what's the point of reincarnation if we are all supposed to learn how to escape it?

I'm not sure I'd call it an illusion as much as a dream state (is there a difference?) that our witness self (pure awareness) is experiencing for reasons that may be out of our ken at the moment, or for the reason you express below.

Enter Sri Aurobindo. We are providing maturing souls for an evolving species and there is no escaping reincarnation. hmmm. Problems there too, number one being, is it such a positive message? Integral yoga holds that the reason all the world's religons have legends and beliefs in a golden glorious future - heaven on earth, the Kingdom of God - is that we are evolving towards it and manifesting it ourselves. It paints a positive view of the future, and right there warning lights go on. Am I attracted to this philosophy just because I want to believe something positive or????...

(Ducking the question) I ran across this quote from the Buddha. It interests me because it gives a _physical_ exercise to deal with intrusive thoughts. This instruction echoes the phrase "Shut firm the mouth" in Tilopa's instruction on Mahamudra, which I also take literally (the 'firm' part). Quoting from the Vitakkasanthana Sutta: The Relaxation of Thoughts as found at
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/canon/sutta/majjhima/mn-020-tb0.html

In the same way, if evil, unskillful thoughts — connected with desire, aversion or delusion — still arise in the monk* while he is attending to the relaxing of thought-fabrication with regard to those thoughts, then — with his teeth clenched and his tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth — he should beat down, constrain, and crush his mind with his awareness.

*I prefer the translation 'waif' or 'beggar' for 'bhikkhu' instead of 'monk.'

Anyway, I still think that voluntary blinks are an easier path to no-mind, but I'm also interested in this approach. Heh! Your valve chatter may vary depending on oil levels.

Advaita Vedanta says the body is like a clay pot and the soul, the air inside the pot. Break the pot and you can't tell the air that was inside the pot from the rest of the air. So the soul merges back into God after death, nothing to attain to, nothing to let go of. I am not the doer, I am the witness of it. Its sweet and simple, but one shouldn't become attatched to any philosophy too strongly.

I'm with you and A.V. all the way! We all dissolve into God after death, so what's the big deal, you might ask? Well... unless you recognize the flash of brilliant white light at the moment of death and merge into it, there might exist the possibility of falling into one of the various heavens -- at least that's what the Tibetan Book of the Dead teaches. Now I think that the Bodhisattva Vow is just heroic and beyond brilliant, and that when we experience certain absorptionlevels there arises the spontaneous urge to share with / teach others. But frankly, I'm getting my ticket punched after this first and last incarnation. I really think that my http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifpurpose /job / whatever-it-is that I'm here to demonstrate is that you can do it all in one lifetime - survive war, bombs, murder, loss of family, abandonment, a weird but privileged childhood, go bohemian, go beat, go zen, go radical Christian something, go screw up big time as an adult, experience poverty level hand-to-mouth, flounder around ruining relationships, go animist, go hippy, go shaman, go crazy and still emerge from it all like a pooch emerging from a tsunami, shake off all the accrued karmic mud and find a life with wonderful wife and three great sons that will allow me to pursue buddhahood or something close to it -- all in one lifetime! -- not on any particularly defined path but more by dancing my own dance across the sunlit meadows of Mt. Meru. Amazing! I ascribe my modest successes to having had a conventful of sisters praying for me daily on the Hudson River outside NYC for 30 years, and nesting happily in David Spero's sahaja samadhi for the past three years. Talk about lucky! Gratitude definitely overrunneth my cup!

Sri Aurobindo was one of the most brilliant minds of his era.

That is true, and I respect very much his achievement -- and his positive view of the evolution of the human spirit. But a great deal of his writing I believe only favors his own sadhana and is of no direct use to others. How many Morningstarian communards attempted to read my copy of the "The Synthesis of Yoga" and just couldn't hack it? I mean, what the fuck? If it wasn't for Satprem's "The Adventure of Consciousness" that put Aurobindo into some sort of absorbable format, we would just have been stuck
with some sort of Cambridge University colonial-wanna-be-as-smart- as-those-upper- class-English-twits lecturing himself into nothingness.
One thing that has always annoyed me is that nowhere does Sri A. ever explain in detail how he achieved the silent mind in three days in that hotel room with his yogi teacher. This is the only paragraph he ever wrote about achieving the silent mind, and frankly it's useless unless you're born a Pablo Casals of Contemplation.

"In a moment my mind became silent as a windless air on a high mountain summit, and then I saw one thought and then another coming in a concrete way from outside. I flung them away before they could enter and take hold of the brain, and in three days I was free. From that moment, in principle, the mental being in me became a free Intelligence, a universal Mind, not limited to the narrow circle of personal thought as a laborer in a thought- factory, but a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of being and free to choose what it willed in this vast sight-empire and thought-empire."

Sri Aurobindo quoted in "Sri Aurobindo, a Biography & History" by S. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar p. 260

There is a tradition in Zen Buddhism that if the student does not surpass the master, the master is thereby dishonored. I believe this - or at least that if the teacher cannot bring the sincere student up to his/her own level of achievement, the teacher has failed. In my opinion, Sri Aurobundo failed to do this with everyone (as far as I know) except Mother Mira Alfasa, and probably she was already on a higher level before they began their relationship. Who manifests first? SHE does!

Doing a doughnut wheelie in this discussion, here's a quote from a Carthusian monk sent to me today by a woman who started as a Catholic contemplative and now is a Tibetan Buddhist:

To live by God alone and for God alone, that is the heart of our secret and the true essence of our solitude... To wish for nothing else, to know nothing else, to have nothing else, but God and God alone; “to be nothing else, so that only thou be God,” to quote the profound words of a contemplative soul;... Every other care beside this one and only Love is superfluous. Anything that has no part in the infinite self is too small for the human heart.
There are not many souls which have the power to recognize the beauty of the Absolute... Rare are the souls intrepid enough to acknowledge all their weaknesses, to acknowledge their very nonentity. Rare are the souls which really dare to be nothing, and which, in that very act are humble enough to be content to be divine.... It is not possible to formulate a “theory” of this kind of life or to express in words its essence: it is too simple. “To love,” “to live in naked reality” - that is all that we can say with human words."

This expresses very well the 'neti-neti' / bhakti path, which has been the basic Christian approach and works very well, although it is of course the excruciating Via Negativa, the crucifixion of the ego. Having experienced this path quite fully in my early twenties (via baptism preparation at the Bruderhof), I still prefer the Via Positiva (dissolving into THAT-ness) which the hippie/psychedelic experience teaches and which does not get hung up on the suffering aspect.
I still wonder what the original Christian experience was that allowed them to march singing into the Colosseum to meet their deaths in the mouths of wild animals. I think it had to do with the original baptism experience. Baptism I think was more or less unique to Christianity - at least it certainly was not part of Judaism - maybe John the Baptist copied it from somewhere - or brought it from the Essenes. But basically I believe it was a near-death by drowning experience - the baptizer
clapped his hands over your nose and mouth and held you under until you stopped struggled. It took a bit of skill to know exactly when to haul you up and not have you cross over permanently. But I think only an NDE of this sort can explain the strength of belief of these folks.
By the way, my ex-boss the Presbyterian minister across the street agreed with me when I told her this, so I guess it's kosher in the seminaries. Curiously, the NBE seems to have mainly survived as a method for dunking witches until they confessed (and then allowed to drown) or currently in CIA secret dungeons as a torture method (tying the prisoner to a plank that's dunked over and over again). I wonder what sort of NBE's these poor people experience and how it changes their belief system.

End of today's rant! Thanks, Phil, for revving me up! (valves a-chatter, and reaching for the 'oil can.')

Reviving a 2003 Rant on Pseudo-Advaita

Thought I posted this here a few days ago, but where is it?
I've had this rant up on my website for a while, but just today
posted it to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Way-of-Light/

The Advaita Merry-Go-Round 3-2-03

The whole ever-recurring put-down by the Neti-Neti Advaita Knitting Society of any re-entry 'vehicles' into The Manifest, (once essential Nothingness has dissolved us, and we seek no more, and the light dawns that Nothing needs to be 'done' or 'undone' or 'understood' or 'realized'), begs at least one basic important consideration.
This consideration can be studied at almost mind-numbing length in the writings of Sri Aurobindo, who covers 'Her Descent' in "The Synthesis of Yoga," more directly in "Savitri" and to the point of intellectual pain in "The Life Divine." But however much these books may overdevelop the basic details, the fact remains that SOMEONE is manifesting. And She who manifests first is, of course naturally, Aditi, Parvati, The Divine Mother, The Blessed One, The Beloved, Kali, Isis, Ah-Unh. or whatever gracious name you wish to use to evoke the Mother Creator of Everwhere. I like to call her "Great-to-the-tenth-power Grandma Hattie," although I worry a little that it may seem disrespectful. But it does at least cover all eleven dimensions of Her Manifest-station.
Your Sedate Zerotudiness can sit in a puddle of nothingness forever and wait until She comes along and changes your diaper. Or you can help Her out by wiping your own metaphorical ass, getting off and/or on it as you prefer ('Yee-haw!') and riding out to tilt at some of the very prominent windmills that are cropping up like poisonous toadstools everywhere. (Who is talking?)
There's nothing G10-Grandma Hattie loves more than a good adventure yarn with EVIL _almost_ winning out before all her little heroes come riding over the ridge on their Mad Max steeds-of-preference (ass, donkey, caballo, Rocinante, various flavors of vehicles) as the Kosmic Kavalry charge, to PEACE on all those slimy toadie types who think they're entitled to gobble up all the ________ (fill in the blank with your own goody-of- choice.)
It's all just their Goddess-thirst anyway, so fill-em-up with high-octane bliss out of your hose/sprinkler/soaker/ light sword/asspergillum of choice until their bliss-tolerance capacitors pop their buttons like those temperature gauges they put in Safeway turkeys. Is little Georgie W. done yet (soak-soak)? He's getting sort of soggy and smiley, so put him down for a little nappy-nap.
Ultimately, whatever it is that realizes its basic nothingness must re-manifest again as SHE. Or, at the very very least, 'on Her lap' because everything we 'do' is what She does through us. This eliminates a lot of those 'rank' problems upon which even enlightened 'gurus' seem prone to waste their precious bodily fluids. It's not your fault, dearies, because pyramid schemes are built into the species. But once G10-G'ma arrives, we're all automatically flat on our faces -- no discussion necessary because the bliss factor is so impressive that it just presses us to her bosom in a Big Mama mega-wipe-out hug! Pluff! Woof! Happiness! Joy! She's HERE!
As She once said so succinctly, "What go 'round, come 'round." And that includes your own hobby horse on the OK Corral's Carousel, Sweetums. And, joy, joy! There are enough brass rings to give everyone a free ride! So, "Mount up! Time's a-wastin' if you wanna be in at the final De-Now-Moment-oh."

A more sober approach to the topic by the Master Aziz Kristof can be found in The Dangers of Pseudo-advaita. I would quote it, but have been requested to withdraw all Aziz quotes (Aziz seems to have gone into seclusion, stopped teaching and closed his website. This I consider regretful inasmuch as his writings are amongst my favorites. You'll just have to look for his books on used book websites - highly recommended: ENLIGHTENMENT BEYOND TRADITIONS: The Complete Inner Map of Spiritual Awakening. Also THE HUMAN BUDDHA, which seems to have become rare and expensive.)