Hi Christi,
quote:
Christi wrote:
For me, this helps to explain the quantum leap in the transition between what we call ordinary consciousness (identification with the relative self of the mind), and the realization that our true nature is the absolute, or supreme self (the awake state).
Your explanantion reminded me of the following from the book
Sexual Energy and Yoga by Elisabeth Haich:
"This state is activated by manifested in man's consciousness by his becoming more awake. He begins to live! Only now does he notice that hitherto he has hardly lived. He did not live, he merely vegetated, his life was a farce. He breathed, ate and drank, even worked, but he always had the feeling that he did not participate in life - that he had no share in it - everything seemed to him like a dream, usually like a bad dream. He was not there now. He was not awake.
Now man begins to come alive, to grow conscious, to liberate himself from time and space. He begins to feel the fire of life within himself. Now he suddenly understands what Christ meant when he called some people 'dead' and some 'living'.
One can only speak in similes: expressions like: 'being awake', 'growing more conscious than hitherto', 'to come alive', and so forth, are substitutes for a non-existant more adequate vocabulary. The best way of putting it is perhaps as follows: however convinced we may be that we were awake, conscious and living, we nevertheless only awake through the higher frequencies of creative power, and see then that we have been neither awake, conscious nor living, but that we have vegetated and led an unreal life.
Just as, while we are dreaming, we are convinced that we are 'awake' and 'living', in our dream-visions, and we only realize that we have been dreaming when we 'wake up' to our normal consciousness, in the same way we only realize that we have hitherto led a dream-life - a shadow-life - when we gradually waken through the effect of the 'dragon-fire'(transformed sexual energy).
When we experience this 'awakening', we cannot understand how we ever believed that we were awake and living.....We live in an intensified and sublime state. This state is not one of hysteria and paroxysm. On the contrary, we are in an intensified, clear, lucid, spiritual state of consciousness, and are much calmer than before....In the spiritually elevated state, our calmness, control and objectivity are in comparably greater than previously in the normal state. Precisely because we are 'here now', we are 'with ourselves' to a much greater extent than we would ever have thought possible. In the spirtually illumined, awake state we are calmness, self-control itself. We are our own master, our own Self. That is true presence of mind, which we can sustain continuously as normal consciousness beyond the period of meditation. In this state we have no conscience, because we have become the conscience itself.....
The truly spiritual states are very easy: one is simply
here now! And completely awake, as awake as the clear light of the sun! This bright light is experienced in a perfectly clear, transparent conscious state of being as: I AM! We do not even think these two words, we are that without thinking words!
One is so closely bound up with the present that the thoughts, always linking past with future, cannot penetrate this continuous present. One automatically disconnects one self from time and space.....
We must try to rise from the stage we are at. That is the most important thing of all.
To rise.
quote:
Christi wrote:
For Jesus, everyone in the world was so asleep, that they were effectively dead, until they woke up and would, in his words "become Sons and Daughters of God".
Haich says that this is the phrase the Eygptians who created their original culture used to refer to themselves.
I am in a kind of curious state right now(I know I am not alone). I know what it is to be awake(not completely but significantly more than normal). I know that I am not awake or less awake. So I am kind of awake in my sleep.
I know what I need to do to become awake again and even more than before. It is just a matter of 'time' and practice. I am OK with that.
The thing is that, what is real for me is real, it is not unreal. To think it is unreal, and that it doesn't need to be dealt with, is not at all practical. Therefore, it is real. I am real and my experience is real, even tho from another perspective it may truly be unreal. Doesn't matter. From my perspective, it is really real. Incredibly real. It had better be real. I have to pay the bills.
When that perspective changes, it will still be me, but with a different perspective, in a different state of consciousness, not a different me. My experience is always real, I am always myself, even if I am not completely myself and things can be more real than they all ready are, and somebody else experiences it this way and tells me that it is so. Or I have experienced it to be so, and have a memory of it. I have to accept things as they are, to deal with things as they are, from my present state of consciousness.
So I can except, conceptually, that my life is unreal and that my present self concept is a fiction, but but it does not have real world applicability for me and I do not experience it that way. When I experience it the way you or Yogani or Nisargadatta or others here experience it, then that will be real to me.
quote:
Christi wrote:
It means that yoga clashes quite badly with postmodern relativism, which is the meme that we in the west are struggling to rise out of. For one who is awake, there is only one reality, which is always true, and any perception which is not based in That, as That, is ignorance (avidya) and has no relevance to Truth (satya). That is why Nisargadatta can say to someone: "Everything in your world is not real".
I am not familiar with the concept of post modern relativism (would you give me a definition?) and I do not presently experience reality from the perspective of the Self, so I am presently doubly ignorant.
quote:
Christi wrote:
When we identify with the mind, as a limited contracted amalgam of physical, emotional and mental processes, our whole world is unreal, and everything in it is unreal.
But to me, what I experience presently is real and is God. It will never not be, even tho my experience of it may change and become more complete and truer.
I think these words from "Light on the Path' somehow apply:
"1. Kill out ambition.
"2. Kill out desire for life.
"3. Kill out desire for comfort.
"4. Work as thse work who are ambitious. Respect life as those who desire it. Be happy as those are who live for happiness."
Again, paradox.
Best, yb.