Like to check in every so often to update on the evolution of practice and results. The practices have resulted in an infinitely evolving expression of bliss-consciousness (to use Yogani’s term) manifested via an individual body mind. I like this story because it's a demonstration that diligent spiritual practice produces commensurate results, and AYP did what is was supposed to.
Practices: Twice daily 5 min SBP, 12 min DM. “Just sitting” in the Zen style.
Non-dual Self-inquiry-around 5 months of self-inquiry where it became so fascinating that I shut-off all social activity and would just spend all day exploring self-inquiry on the weekends, rush home from work early to do it etc, pretty fanatical.
The primary force-Bhakti, very, very intense Bhakti. For a long time when I was younger I considered two options: Terminate my body-mind (suicide) and return to my home in formless Spirit, or relentlessly pursue enlightenment. Nothing could be more important to me than this search has been. As the awakening deepens however, it expands to include a loving, gracious and grateful embrace of material existence, with all its blessed sorrows and difficulties. Also went to
Gnan Vidhi, you can look it up. I feel that it erased some karma.
Non-dual:There's been on/off non-dual awareness for a month or two now. 50% of the time non-dual I guess.
At some point in July/August there was a fairly dramatic “Realization experience” in which I experienced that I absolutely was not the Body/Mind known as Josh Anderson. I experienced that in fact, that body mind is just a constant, impermanent flux of sensations and visual images, arising within timeless, formless awareness. The mind conceived a permanent self out of this constant impermanent flux, but in fact, that conception was erroneous. It was blissful, but the clarity soon became occluded. At this point, self-inquiry intensified to the point of me rarely wanting to leave home except to purchase food and bottled water. I also went on retreat with Rupert Spira which caused a kundalini awakening type experience and non-dual/unity experience. Since then, the clarity of this knowing has continually increased, it’s like a concentric series of waves, much like waves caused by a pebble dropped in a pond, flowing through the body-mind and into its habitual ways of perceiving and thinking and feeling and acting.
So abiding effects are as follows:Non-dual perceiving: Historically, there has been the sense that an I/ME (the subject, the body-mind) is perceiving a world (the object, other people, things, places). There exists the sense that there is a “Me” who is the perceiver, and a “Not-Me” which is the perceived. Via the increasing clarity of realization, the process of perceiving has gradually been alleviated of this subject/object division. As the sense of there being a Me / Body-mind subject of experience dissolves, everything experienced (from sense perceptions to thoughts to emotions) is just perceived as a constantly changing, impermanent flux of experiencing playing out on the only permanent aspect of experience, the unchanging screen of Awareness. So life itself is just a flow of sensing, seeing and hearing occurring without a separate perceiver or a personal context/self. Caveat – this non-dual perceiving is felt and seen as clearly the case 50 to 60% of the waking hours. The window is not totally clear so to speak, so I continue with practices.
Dissolution of fear and anxiety in all shades and forms: Fear and anxiety arises from the sense of being a personal self, because “bad” things can happen to a personal self. It can be judged negatively, it can lose stuff including its life, it can fail, it can suffer etc. When one no longer feels oneself to be this object and psychology - a physical body and mind, but instead a timeless, formless, awareness within which all forms, including this psychology and object body arise and disappear, that fear gradually becomes unhooked.
Dissolution of judgment/anger: I used to cultivate being non-judgmental as a perceived virtue, which was good. However when in the state where perception is alleviated from the dualistic mis-perception of self/other, it’s actually impossible to judge other people, because there’s no sense of being separate from your perception of them. Therefore life is just lovingly free of even the slightest judgments about other people.
Dissolution of sense of separation: Life being lovingly free of the sense of self/other. This isn't the same as Unity (I'd describe Unity as a heightened state of oneness), it's just an absence of feeling separation.
Dissolution of time and space: This one has been interesting, only started to be clear this weekend. So far the dissolution of time and space is clear maybe 3% of the time. There’s normally the sense that I, a physical object (a body), am moving through a physical space, through a linear progression of time. Instead of this, one feels that I, timeless, formless, non-local yet omnipresent awareness am experiencing an ever-changing impermanent flux of experiencing flowing through me. I am intimately one with this experiencing, that seems to be a world of time, space and form, yet I myself am timeless, formless, non-local.
I’ve felt some love and gratitude, but I think mainly this awakening has affected the chakras around the head. I’m not talking about an intellectual understanding, this has been very, startlingly experiential, an awesome, joyful experience of grace. But I don’t think it’s completely penetrated the entire body mind. There is some outpouring of love to all-beings, and there’s a great letting go of grasping and fear. But intuitively I feel this awakening has only touched the tip of the iceberg, and so am more diligent than ever in commitment to practices, retreats, self-inquiry and spiritual study. For example, the old conditioning still arises and I still act from the fear-based, judgmental separate self sometimes/often.
Conclusion: Thank you and much love to Yogani and everyone, and my non-dual teachers, Rupert Spira, Greg Goode etc. who have helped me a lot. I feel blessed to have had close personal interaction with Rupert, and by e-mail with Greg, before either of them turns into the next Adyashanti and has thousands of followers. People talk about mystery, grace and luck with awakening, maybe it’s so, but I'm not so sure, if you're prepared to die for it, nothing is going to stop you. It can be made to seem by neo-advaitans like there’s no action that can be taken to initiate realization, and in fact, there isn't any such thing as realization, because there's nobody to realize anything. As far as I’m concerned, this is complete nonsense. I took a prescribed, systematic route, and did exactly what I was told, in a formulaic manner. Yogani told me to do spinal breathing and deep meditation twice a day, so I did so unfailingly. I engaged in obsessive self-inquiry at the point where inner silence was deep enough for it to have an effect in my direct experience, rather than be just an intellectual exercise. And it worked. There’s no mystery there and I'm certainly not some special spiritual person who was gifted, just a confused and unhappy soul who used to suffer a lot, and who now is hardly suffering at all. There was just a perfect sequence of cause (diligent spiritual practice & inquiry) and effect (results).
I actually wrote a 6-page PDF to clarify this method of investigation and if you feel like it, it's share on my 4shared account at
http://www.4shared.com/folder/OOlrPRZ2/_online.html
