• Home
  • About
  • The Minotaur Myth

  • Zen Fits
  • It’s Martini Time
  • Reflections on Eckhart Tolle
  • Buddhas in your Landfill
You are here: Home / Archives for Baba Muktananda

The Guru and Christ Principle

October 18, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Getting the Guru (an eastern function) and the Christ (a Western function) to hold hands and dance is a creative act of consciousness itself. The merging and union of Eastern and Western ideas, myths and paradigms IS a creative act, a evolutionary act that is the birth of Consciousness itself. Consciousness is Evolution, creative change. When Consciousness ceases to be creative, when it stops exploring, it tape loops like a dragon eating its own tail, until it exhausts its self and dies.

This is what the Buddha was talking about when he saw Old Age, Sickness and Death and began his quest to find a way out of this tape loop. In our culture we believe old age and exhaustion of our treasure of energy is inevitable, and so we give into it, clinging to the few left-overs from our youth as best we can. We believe it is normal to wan, to waste away, turn brown and fall from the tree of life.

No…that is a belief system induced by a culture of Time and Thought. This is a myth of Time and Creation misplace in the past. The obvious truth is—if you were to look—is that Creation is always already Now…and you are IT!

This IT, this Creation Principle is the Guru/Christ connection. You cannot know it as an object; you can only BE IT. You can’t know creativity; you must be creativity. You can’t know yourself; you must BE yourself. There has to be a shift from Time to Now. Time is a Trap.

I’m currently reincarnating Baba Muktnanda, my old guru from the late 70s, not as a memory, not as a person or thing or event, but as a creative principle of the Heart. When Jesus says I and the Father are One, he is describing a creative function where time and Now meet. This is an active meeting, a creative meeting like two lovers meeting. Eternity is in love with time; the universal is in love with the particular. The abstract is in love with the concrete. When they meet shit happens.

But as long as we frame ourselves in time with a time ruler that measure everything as past of future, the Now is immeasurable, and because you can’t measure Now with a time ruler it does not even exist. From the banks of time, from our cultural view that sees everything in time, NOW or Present Moment does not exist at all. We can’t see it or know it…because we have taken out stand on the bank of the river of time, a still point, an abstract view point that does not get wet in the actor river of life. This separation from the river of life is felt as anxiety.

If we read the teaching of Jesus without the filter of Church and myth one will directly fall through this whole in Culture, through the known/time into the living presence of this life as it is flowing. When the Christ is a transcendent function that is our own heart, that that teaching becomes the access point to our own evolution and escape from the dragon eating its own tail, anxiously chasing its own salvation in time. We can’t know Christ as our timeless heart principle unless we surrender time and its constructs. Our very social-ego is a construct of time. Let this be the fuel for the funeral pyre.

So what is the Guru/Christ Principle or function? What is the function of the river of life? We cannot know unless we jump in the river. The river is the unknown. The bank of the river is the known.

In the 70s I was fortunate to have known and surrendered to two Rivers, Swami Rama Ramkunj and Swami Muktananda. Both rivers kick started the evolution of my consciousness. I seriously doubt I’ll meet the likes of them a gain. That section of our history, the 60s and 70s seems to have been a magical opening where these Eastern Masters (good and bad ones) could slip into our culture and plant their seeds.

Surrender is necessary for evolution, and like Forest Gump said, a box of chocolates that you never know what you are going to get. Our greatest fear is letting go of what we know, or the Known. Now is the Unknown, that is why culture and church bends us away from this funeral pyre of the unknown. We stay safe in the known, even though it is a crown of thorns.

Filed Under: Ideas Can Create A New World Tagged With: , Baba Muktananda, Christ

Baba Muktananda Returns

October 17, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

This talk was an outing for me, a coming out, so to speak where I put my Guru’s picture on the wall and say Live With It. The babble in my mind (Who do you think you are?…What will people think…Isn’t this rather conceited?…People will think you are in a cult.) Even my wife “puts up with me.” I have absolutely no one in my immediate world that understands what I’m doing. There is a tremendous gravitation that pulls us back into the known world, a world where people know you. We all go through this in one way or another.

To whom are we loyal? We have a choice. We are either loyal to the external world of society/friends/family and our own conditioning OR we are loyal to something unknown, loyal to our potential. We are either loyal to staying the same, and swimming in the quiet anxiety, or we are loyal to our true nature, and we don’t know what that is.

We confuse life with death. Life as we know it is death, not life; life as we don’t know it is death, our true life.

And so I put my Muktananda pictures on my wall. And I invite the living principle of life—that divine urge to give in to our potential—in the form of a picture of Muktananda back into my life. And so I give birth to myself, again, and again…because the pain of being unborn is too much to bare.

So here I am at 80. What is this frog voice crying in the gloom, What shall I be? I do not stop at the cemetery wall and the tombstone that reads what I have been. I am not done with this life and its adventure. Even though I am restricted to a small town in Virginia, my journey is within now. But not within as if there is some space within, but within through the mundane everyday life of a retired person whose big adventure is going to Walmart.

It is through this ground of the mundane, through this everyday mind that the adventure begins. Your adventure is not somewhere else, but in your everyday present moment, for it is there in the concrete existence of your body and immediate world that you must stand and from this diving board make your leap. You being your adventure by accepting with your heart where you are, and from that acceptance you will know what to do next. If you leave or if you stay does not matter as long as you make your move from wholeness.

We don’t understand Guru in the West because our reality map has no place for it. Guru doesn’t fit our perceived reality so we interpret Guru in terms of our material reality, so it must be suspect. The effect in people must be caused by something external and that is this guy who says he is a guru. To be the effect of an external cause is to be held hostage for some malevolent force. It just doesn’t fit out map, period.

And yet those who have experienced the effect of an enlightened being, spiritual master, guru, saint, Siddha yogi, whatever we call them in different cultures cannot be denied as fantasy or heretic or as some pathology. Our western psychology is hammer that sees everything as a nail Our psychology sees everything as a pathology that does not fit our map of “normal.” But what is our normal is a pathology? Ever think of that?

Guru is not a person, place or thing. Guru is an active creative principle, a Verb, a function that is a relationship designed for transcendence. When you enter into relationship with a teacher or model of your field, you are going to transcend you known boundaries. Guru is the model for the spiritual field and the transcendence of the physical field and our attachment to form, to death, for it is form that dies. When we attach to form, physical or mental, we attach ourselves to death and we feel anxious. Dread haunts us.

A guru or master is a person who had done the work of giving up attachment to form, and so when you meet such a person you have the feeling that he is inside of you as well as outside. There is no boundary. He is pure action, and that action is always in relationship to you. Whatever he does is appropriate to you, to what you can handle. Guru is your potential in flesh and blood. This Guru Principle takes whatever form you need to break out.

Filed Under: It's Martini Time Tagged With: Baba Muktananda, Siddha guru, Siddha Yoga

The Scent of Baba Muktananda

July 26, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

                                GOD DWELLS WITHIN YOU AS YOU.
This “koan” Baba Muktananda always said and posted on the walls of his ashram makes no sense from the objective view of simple location, which is our common sense worldview now. God (a thing) dwells inside (location) as You (another thing)….totally illogical and incomprehensible. But a koan is a koan because it is a can opener given to you by the master. You have to use the koan to open the can of simple location, the whole space/time grid, and free yourself from this tin prison.

Siddha Yoga was a mythic teaching with the Guru as the Self, the mythic One that has no second. Baba presented himself as the embodiment of this mythic One, always point to his guru above his head, and so this great chain of guru to guru was the lineage of direct transmission of Original Source to a reincarnation of Original Source of Face in time. This was the mythic story that held Siddha Yoga together, and in which the transmission from Baba to followers took place.

The question is what the cause is here. Is Baba the simple cause of the transmission, or is it the conditions created by this mythic story the cause, with Baba being the activator, the trigger. Did Siddha Yoga create the conditions for this speeded up evolution of consciousness, for that is what Siddha Yoga was: the conditions that created a space where your evolution could leap over the obstacles created by the conditions of the world.

One cannot cause your evolution through personal effort, but you can create the conditions in which awakening can occur. I think the dark side of Siddha Yoga (everything has a dark side) was that people would leap over their evolutionary stages in one jump, have a dynamite spiritual experience, but their everyday mind was not able to hold the energy, so you might have a prolonged period of dysfunction as one went back to plug the holes in one cup so. you could hold the energy of a higher stage of evolution. This was my story.

But there is no right or wrong here. Spiritual awakening needs an experience to kick start it, and then that enlivened evolution is what is needed to return to the mud and clear the water.

Siddha Yoga under Baba was a combination of circus and holy roller revival, where in the safety of the tent you could bark like a dog and roll down the aisles like a ball. The. energy was so intense that fuses were being blown everywhere, unable to handle the load. Baba was the Third Rail. If you touched it, you would die, but, like the kid sticking his tongue on the frozen pipe, you could not resist touching it.

In the 70 is experienced two type of Yoga: the yoga of effort and the yoga of grace without effort. The first yoga had a teacher and raja yoga master, and it was about doing disciplines, of burning away the dross, getting loser and loser through the lubricant of more yoga. When that failed me, I migrated to the yoga of grace under Baba. Here I felt I could get the transmission of grace I wanted without having to earn it. Here love was unconditional where in the other yoga it was conditional on the quality of your disciplines. All you needed was a good look from the guru.

In the 80s I left both yogas (Baba had died) , having found that both left me essentially where I was when I began. I had miles yet to go before the ice of resistance melted. Life is a melting and a flowing. Siddha Yoga and all the rest is just the intentional warming; there is no end.

I’m reminded of the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha when talking about the conditions created by Siddha Yoga. The Buddha said that if you want to activate the first three truths, you have to create the conditions that will activate them spontaneously, which is the 8 fold path. Siddha was the conditions that activated the Shakti and gave you the needed free energy to jump to your next level. But here the path was pathless.

Caught in the material world of stress and conflict, we have no fee energy for transition. Our energy is all tied up in our struggle with the world. Siddha Yoga and the Guru was like the free energy of the sun or the wind. You had all the energy you could handle when hooked up to this source.

Looking back I can see now how I created Baba as my center, for during the 80s where ever I went in search of that mystical grace, I would unpack my little Guru Altar with Baba’s picture, a candle and some incense. The Guru was portable so I could move about always keeping my center intact. But as I moved through the 80s this center in the form of Baba began to crack up like the TV image in a storm. I threw all Baba’s pictures, even the wooden sandals I had him bless for my center in Virginia..threw it all in the dumpster. I was in free fall now.

When I discovered Zen in the. 90s, I discovered the commandment: if you see the Buddha, kill him. There is no external center in physical or mental form. If you are attached to one, kill it. Even though I had a real master nearby, Swami Sri Swami Satchidananda , I had no interest in hooking up with another one. The devotion and surrender I felt for Baba would not come back. Perhaps it was the dependence that would not come back.

I don’t know when it happened, when I found my center, when I became Center Leader of my own life, for there were no more big jolts of energy once I left Baba. It was a gradually boiling of the frog so it doesn’t know when it is boiled yet.

In the morning I cook our bacon on the grill, and if I turn the heat up, the bacon burns very quickly; if I keep it low, the bacon cooks evenly. Baba was a high heat grill. But burnt bacon is too crips and breaks easily, I like the sound of bacon cooking. It is here I have found my ground and my center…in the sounds and smells and touch of the present moment. ( I don’t write this to get into an argument over eating meat. I use the bacon metaphorically).

Perhaps Baba in my life was a spine cracking soul adjustment. There was plenty of Snap, and then for awhile I felt great. But then my old world posture return, or never went away, and the adjustment failed for there was nothing to support it. The old world returned. Our collective world holds us in place, so spiritual adjustments can’t hold against the inertia of the material world. We have much upstream work to do, must flowing against the current of the material world in order to created the mental strength, the discernment needed to hold the spiritual adjustments. As the ego/world collaboration weakens, the spirit begins to hold.

Baba gave me the sense that he was absolutely detached from the American world, or any material world for that matter. Even though his ashram was like a palace, he was aloof..and yet he was totally present. This contradiction generates a tension: totally detached; totally attached, both at the same time. Here I believe is the source of his energy. Like a battery that holds the positive and negative energies in a container, neither one nor the other dominating, this tension of opposites, the Two that is One, generates tremendous energy, free energy that you can use to turn on your own light.

Holding these opposites together as One in the person of Baba, the energy was the creative energy of life itself. This energy snapped and popped around Baba. Little poofs of light went off around him as he walked through the world, indifferent to what he was causing around him. He knew he was not the cause, so he didn’t take credit for the “miracles.’ He often said in his talks that he was an actor.

Baba is a tuning fork for the music of the spheres. His teaching has no form fundamentally, so anyone can tune to his sound even though his body is not found. Baba strikes the fork and the vibration carries through all that were vibrated by him. And yet it is not Baba that makes the sound, for this is the universal sound of your own soul.

Filed Under: ZEN FITS Tagged With: Baba Muktananda, God dwells within you as you, Siddha Yoga

The New Consciousness

July 9, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Oh what a martini when you mix the gin of “Meditations on Eckhart Tolle” quotes with the vermouth of your everyday mind. Today’s quote:

_______________________

“At the heart of the new consciousness lies the transcendence of thought., the newfound ability of rising above thoughts, of realizing a dimension within yourself that is infinitely more vast than thought. You then no longer derive your identity, your sense of who you are, from the incessant stream of thinking that in the old consciousness you take to be yourself.”

_____________________

At Martini Time at Happy Time yesterday, I talked about my second marriage as a metaphor for Transcendent Awareness, and this Tolle quote picks up Ariadne’s Yarn and takes us out of the labyrinth to thought into the clarity of a mind that is free from the tyranny of thought.

Filed Under: Buddhas in your Landfill Tagged With: Baba Muktananda, Eckhart Tolle, Second Marriage, the New Consciousness, Transcendent Awareness

Ed is a Zen Writer and story teller who finds insights in the truth of his life in everyday mind and events. Learn more

Live without future

Search

Connect to my Facebook Pages

Archives

Top Posts & Pages

  • Pride and Joy
  • The Minotaur Myth
  • Thy Will be Done
  • The Zen of Inception
  • Walk off the Pirates Plank
  • Turn the sock inside out
  • I and the Father are One
  • Trump, the Romantic Hero of the South

Subscribe to My Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 65 other subscribers

Awaken Insight Meditation

AIM is a website where I share my Dharma Insights in my everyday mind. My daily experiences are metaphors that point to the Truth that is One. Paths are many, but the Dharma is One. I invite you to walk with me on my journey. I also invite you to enter into creative dialogue with the post, for then we push it forward and get some traction in our life.

The Minotaur Myth

Copyright © 2021 · Lifestyle Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in