By way of introduction...
After thorough consideration over the past several months, it seemed to me that this would be the best place for me to begin. Since a brief email correspondence with yogani last June 2012, I have been reluctant to participate in the forums due to sensitive and problematic issues. Nevertheless something kept nagging at my heart to do so. And thus I was in a quandary. What to do? Where to begin, how to begin, or even to begin at all?
So here is the first post and hopefully it will become apparent why it felt most comfortable to post in this thread, as opposed to elsewhere or starting my own thread.
When I found this site, I had been searching without success for some support and explanation of the circumstances I found myself in. So I poured my heart out to yogani. Well then what happened is that I clammed up. It was probably due to a combination of things. I was terrified of sharing my experience in any type of public forum, was extremely confused, was just beginning to find my way out of a sort of nightmare scenario, and wanted to at least appear discrete and sensible. At this point I have to laugh at the way I framed my resistance.
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My story begins with a super major samadhi I had in the summer of the year 2000 in which I not only experienced the OM sound/vibration, but I became this current. The samadhi was intense for several hours and altogether lasted maybe 3 or 4 days. What had precipitated the samadhi was very specific.
I had been reading and studying I AM THAT with Nisargadatta Maharaj. One passage apparently catapulted me into the samadhi... Page 175, chapter 39 'By Itself Nothing Has Existence'. He had been saying that what we take for real is merely a reflection of the real. Then he had issued the challenge - why have consciousness focus on the reflection, why not focus on the real itself? haha. yes. but....how to do this?
Well...on that day in the middle of August 2000, I just went with my longing. My copy of I AM THAT looks like it has been through a war. It is my most cherished book, I am always in it. I had extremely intense longing and it became like a boat to carry me across the river...I imagined using every fiber of my being to obey Nisargatta's suggestion and was subsequently delivered into the depths of OM. It was marvelous. But I quickly forgot about it. As I had learned not to cling to samadhis no matter how ecstatic and blissful they are.
Since corresponding with yogani, I began to recall the experiencial history of my spiritual path - objectively trying to get a handle on my rather weird energy by tying it down to a timeline of dates and experience. After much due diligence, it became obvious that the energy fluctuations and weirdness - it all began with this samadhi. Up to that point, my life had been relatively quiet and manageable.
This is a long post but there is one more thing to address. When I was 8 years old it was quite natural to engage in "who am I?" and neti-neti. It ended up with an out of body experience, which I found could be repeated upon demand any time I wanted over the next few years. Much much later when I found my guru Ramana Maharshi in a pamphlet in New Mexico, it became very clear that Ramana has been my guru for at least the last few lifetimes and perhaps longer. As nearly as possible, I am constantly engaging in self inquiry as the foundation of my consciousness. It constitutes a kind of ongoing meditation which I may have been doing all my life since infancy.
Mods, please feel free to move this post if you feel it should be elsewhere.
