Christi said:
No offence taken at all David. I was simply pointing out that your accusations against me were without foundation. I don’t take offence against unfounded accusations, only against well-founded accusations
Tip: if someone makes some conciliatory gestures, that's a good time to go into maximum-grace mode and not try to grab further capital. I don't think it's fair to me to say I was making unfounded accusations. They were neither accusations, nor entirely unfounded. It's more complex than that. And you certainly were offended-- the black-eye emoticon and the stern lecture are always good indicators. But I've already dwelt as much as I want to on the matter of presumed accusations and their falseness. Back to the matter at hand.
Christi said:
There is a process of development in spiritual practice, which is pretty much the same for everyone. Everyone goes through similar stages in roughly the same order, and expands in very similar ways. So there is a line by which we can track our own progress and that of others.
I would say, not really, particularly what I have colored in blue. There is one question about whether it is true at all that everyone goes through the stages in even roughly the same order, and even if so, further questions about our ability to know what this order is. A major clue here is that different people from different traditions will 'order' people entirely differently, according to what their tradition has told them that the order is. For some it is 'grades of samadhi'. Because of the human tendancy towards confirmation bias, people in those traditions will become dead certain that that order is the way things are.
We still have some way to go in developing the model into a fully functional coherent model, but I see that as the next major step in the development of understanding the process of human spiritual transformation.
Yes, I would agree with that. When the model develops better, I would also say we'll discover that it wasn't at all as simple as thought in the sense of providing a 'level' for a person. Some kinds of development are likely to be independent -- it may be in some ways like tuning (independent) keys on a piano -- and not quite as simple as that either -- the keys may not all be quite independent. And I think it will be understood then that people like Krishnamurti were not 'the final flower' at all.
Even if you could do it as accurately as you think (and I don't think you can), I don't think it is a good idea to 'rank' other people on the forum, to 'place' them in terms of spiritual development or purification. You may observe Yogani (whose knowledge of yoga I think you view as being greater than your own) clearly avoiding that kind of presumption. Better to confine that kind of thing to people who have consented to hand the guru role to you. Avoiding it here will be more helpful to everyone.
I said:
And how can one interpret oneself as becoming superman, and not be inflated?
Christi said:
This is probably the biggest potential difficulty with AYP, and one that has been brought up before. It has been solved throughout history by the traditional Guru/ disciple roles. When people are fully surrendered to a Guru, and do everything they are told, it is very easy for the Guru to instil humility in the disciple when it is needed. In AYP there is much less of a Guru/ disciple role and so that benefit is largely lost. Yogani seems to be placing his hopes in the power of the cultivation of silence to bring about humility. It is early days, but I would say that so far, in the vast majority of cases it seems to be working well. It certainly isn’t a sure thing though, as history has proven many times, and we all need to keep our guard up.
The real deficit in the guru-disciple system with regards to humility is that there isn't much to keep the guru in a state of humility, and in fact, there is much to knock him out of it. (Cue in a long parade of 20-th century illustrious guru-narcissists.) And there's the rub, with AYP and all, in which you are your own guru.
I have offered a more modern solution to this problem. It's simple -- we simply understand that we are not becoming superman after all. If we have any egoic dreams of being the star of the yoga circus, we see the circus for what it is, and we give those dreams up. We have a more proportionate view of what enlightenment is, and of what we are becoming as enlightenment arises. We understand that our 'gurus' and those great yogic public figures were not superman either. We come to understand the mechanisms whereby our images of these people are inflated, and what we are really doing when we dream of being like them.
Key to it all is that we understand ourselves in a realistic, non-inflated way, and likewise those we aspire to be like, and likewise we know the limits of the yogic culture in which we are immersed. We must live in the truth about ourselves and others and our relationships should be based on that.
Yogani seems to be placing his hopes in the power of the cultivation of silence to bring about humility.
Inner silence will help with this problem for sure, but, as you say, nothing presents any guarantee. Inner silence will help in the same way that good diet promotes resistance to diseases -- but good diet is never a good reason not to remove plague-rats from one's house. And it's becoming increasingly clear to me that the expectation of becoming superman through enlightenment is a metaphorical plague rat, that people cherish and want to keep as a pet. That much beloved spiritual figures before us have kept and cherished as a pet. The expectation of becoming a sort of superman is probably the biggest hook for narcissism imaginable. (Can anyone imagine a bigger hook? If you can, tell me. ) Would the truth really contain an enormous hook for narcissism? Look for the answer to that question inside your soul. Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free, as they say.
This more correct view of enlightenment and people, without the great hook for narcissism, is a foundational stone for anyone on the journey without a guru. ( Maybe it's not as fundamental if one has a good guru, but I think the truth is always better. ) It actually becomes more critical as the yogic journey really starts to get underway. If not much is happening, there isn't much happening to get inflated about. Remember those words, 'The stone the builders rejected has become the corner stone'. At some point it becomes too late to fit this corrective stone into one's world-view (without much pain and turmoil); there will eventually be too much emotional investment in the illusory self-image and dropping it will be too painful so it will be retained -- who wants to let the cops come in and flush the drugs down the toilet when the party has 10,000 people in it and is really buzzing? Better to flush the drugs down the toilet before the party really gets going. Too many yogis have fallen in one way or another, and it's time to take a cold critical look at the stilts they got up onto and whether we should really be so enthusiastic to get up on them ourselves.
This stuff has been brewing in my mind for years, and I've just started to articulate some of it properly. Sometime I'll organize it all into a coherent message.
