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.