Bindi

"Invisible Ruach or Pneuma manifesting and interacting with Resurrection participants in Russia on August 1, 2008."

I have noticed an association between 'giving up' followed shortly by 'awakening', can anyone explain the mechanics of this?

I've been thinking that Prana might be better understood as equivalent to jing>Qi>Shen produced in the dantians which is used to clear and fill the channels, and that kundalini only needs to be raised when the route to Brahma nadi has been established - it's use then would be as an immensely powerful stream of energy directed along a narrow channel, mixed with very refined Prana, and perhaps being instrumental in generating or developing the spiritual body and the higher chakras in some way?

I think a big problem here is the placement of these various chakras. I have seen guru chakra referred to as at the forehead (eg. swamij, swami rama), I read through some of swami rama's page here http://www.that-first.com/show/article/swami-rama-on-the-guru-chakra/ it was quite interesting regarding this topic and the value of the chakra at the forehead, whatever its name. AFAIK Brahma nadi is associated with crossing a void between chitrini nadi which has been established in the central channel up to forehead level and the chakra at the forehead. One of my main issues with the forehead is I think it is the place where kundalini needs to be brought, not that it is the end of the path. I suspect the spiritual body develops from here as opposed to out of the crown, and that spiritual body would involve chakras above the head.

Spotless, could you describe how this 'energy body' feels now since the columns fused?

The relation of Prana to kundalini is an interesting one. In a sense I agree that prana does seem to be a stepped down version of kundalini, but there is a property in working with prana not 220 volt kundalini that kundalini doesn't seem to have, and that is the ability to fill the main nadi's from Ida and Pingala to brahma nadi with 'prana under pressure' that persists beyond a meditative state. Sushumna when filled with prana under pressure eventually breaks into the more central vajra and chitrini nadi's, arriving finally at Brahma void/nadi. Brahma nadi is the ultimate aim according to this perspective, which as far as I know doesn't rely on experience of nirvikalpa samadhi, though it does rely on kundalini rising in the end through Brahma void/nadi. Ultimately Brahma nadi as a destination seems to be at odds with the beyond the crown destination that you have presented, which seems to be more associated with nirvikalpa samadhi. Maybe these are just two different paths, and never the twain shall meet? Yes, which seems to be borne out by the reports of those who have experienced kundalini rising in the West.

I think these issues regarding sushumna and the crown are fundamental, and I have spent quite some time trying to understand it. Piercing the sahasrara chakra I am satisfied will result in an experience of nirvikalpa samadhi. To pierce this chakra, I also think kundalini must be necessary. I believe that the nature of kundalini is to ascend, and the crown represents the shortest distance between ‘shakti and shiva’. So in this sense nirvikalpa samadhi makes a lot of sense. But the net result seems to tend towards a disembodied spirituality, where the body is more of an inconvenience than anything else. I believe energy is meant to be drawn in through the crown, but not that consciousness should exit out of the crown, even though nirvikalpa samadhi can be experienced if it does.

I find the explanation that the pineal and pituitary are brought into sync temporarily quite interesting, where does this idea come from? Yes maybe nirvikalpa samadhi may be transferable on a temporary basis in the presence of a Self realised person, but I think there is still an issue with too easily naming the state felt in the presence of many a guru/teacher who is not Self realised as nirvikalpa samadhi, which might be better named an experience of clarity or bliss or shaktipat or kundalini or some such thing. This also leads on to the question of is Self realisation a prerequisite for being able to transfer an experience of nirvikalpa samadhi? Could this be an example of being able to transfer on a temporary basis the state which someone (in this case Ramana) has achieved: But is this experience nirvikalpa samadhi? Are the granthis somehow entirely bypassed in a temporary experience maybe, as opposed to temporarily undone? Kundalini can be brought up sushumna temporarily, yes maybe. But does repeatedly bringing it up sushumna temporarily lead to permanency, which is related to the issue of impermanency of nirvikalpa samadhi. Does repeatedly bringing kundalini up sushumna actually fill sushumna with Prana which would then allow kundalini to reside there permanently? It’s interesting that nirvikalpa samadhi is associated with kundalini piercing through the sahasrara chakra. My view is personal on this but I think piercing the sahasrara chakra is itself a false aim, I still hold the view that kundalini should follow a route up to and then down from the crown without piercing Sahasrara chakra at all and on to the forehead. Maybe there’s something about nirvikalpa samadhi that I disagree with on a very fundamental level. Maybe I like Ramana because he does seem to have a similar fundamental reservation about the value of piercing the sahasrara chakra, though he of course sees Sushumna as ending in the heart. “the Kundalini Sakti … rises through a nerve called the Sushumna, the Sushumna is… a curve. It starts from the solar plexus, rises through the spinal cord to the brain and from there bends down and ends in the heart… If one concentrates on the Sahasrara there is no doubt that the ecstasy of samadhi ensues… [but if] he passes down from the sahasrara to the heart through what is called the jivanadi, which is only a continuation of the Sushumna… when the yogi has reached the heart, the samadhi becomes permanent. (From Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, talk no. 616) That makes sense, and this admonition does resonate with me.

Hi TI, your post was so very long and had so much detail it fairly overwhelmed me at the time, but I have gone back and re-read it just now and I can just wrap my head around parts of it. One thing that stands out to me from your quotes is the level of achievement necessary before ever attaining nirvikalpa Samadhi. This is really the alternative issue in this debate. For example in "Merging With Shiva Gurudeva states that "When the kundalinî rises into the realms of pure actinicity, the pineal gland and pituitary center are activated. When these two centers are activated simultaneously, the forces of both of them merge, bringing man into nirvikalpa samâdhi. Therefore, the aggressive odic force merges with the passive odic force, in perfect balance, and the actinodic power of the sushumna current comes into perfect balance, poised with the kundalini force” and “finally working out the various karmic binds or holds in the lower odic force field with the help of the guru, he attains complete Self Realization, or nirvikalpa samadhi” I find it very hard to believe that all of those claiming to have attained the state of nirvikalpa samadhi have first brought the sushumna current into perfect balance as well as worked out all the karmic binds. By the same token, I doubt that everyone who claims the experience of nirvikalpa samadhi has brought kundalini up sushumna to the level of the pineal and pituitary glands, which would also as far as I know entail having resolved the two lower granthi’s. If this level of achievement is a prerequisite for the state of nirvikalpa samadhi, then far from being a dead end, I would see nirvikalpa Samadhi as in fact a brilliant and inevitable state of achievement towards the very end of the path. So very likely the problem is in the definition, where states associated with trance as well as the perfectly balanced states referred to by Gurudeva are all incorrectly named nirvikalpa samadhi. Out of interest, can you reconcile the position put forward in the quotes in your post with Ramana’s opposite position on the value of nirvikalpa samadhi?

Perhaps inner nature could be related to the chakra level or dantian level at which you routinely operate from - the three sections of the brain could be loosely mapped onto the 7 chakras and the 3 dantians, the reptilian or instinctive brain to the LDT and the lowest 3 chakras which would be related to fear, anger and desire, the Limbic section with the MDT and the heart chakra, concerned with feelings and emotions, and the neo-cortex section with the UDT and the upper chakras, concerned with higher order thinking, creation, manifestation, imagination, awareness, development, objectivity, empathy and consciousness.

From what I can gather Isis started in response to civil injustice in ?Syria, Shia’s were being summarily executed and Isis formed to protect the Shia minority. So initially Shia were treated as sub-human by Sunni’s who controlled the government. And then they didn’t stop, their fight with the Sunni overlords extended to a fight with the American overlords and extended further again from there. My point being I gather Isis started as a response to the group they identified with being attacked. So they are freedom fighters in their eyes, fuelled by a religious precedent in the name of Allah. And then they became a successful cult that attracted the disenfranchised and violently inclined, so the violence spiralled out of control.

I read that most of humanity operates at the lower chakra levels, from the root to the solar plexus, and spirituality is trying to bring consciousness and energy to the higher ones. But there are also chakras below the root chakra that operate when more or less what we would call criminal behaviour occurs. “They are known as atal, vital, sutal, rasatal, dharatal, mahatal, and patal. Animals also have chakras, and in the instinctive frame of consciousness, these are the seven chakras which are activated.” Operating from the very lowest of these allows people to kill others with impunity. I think even if this is done as part of a cult, the individual would carry that karma.

We are defined by the post-hoc explanations that we generate to make sense of the world around us, as this split brain study demonstrates, but this false reasoning would stop if both hemispheres could stay conscious at the same time, which I gather is very likely what's happening when the UDT is developed.

I wanted to say the right time to surrender might not be for many decades if at all in this lifetime, but it sounded a bit pessimistic. I reckon Chuang Tzu can lead the way though, the right time to surrender might not be for ten thousand years

Yes, the right goals and the right hard work, and the right time to surrender should then be clear as day (probably many decades from when the first goal was set).

Is the aim of daoism also the aim of neidan? If daoism is a 'spiralled return to our original True Nature', is the golden/immortal body considered our true nature? Or is it a different aim completely?

Bud, I don't relate to your non-critical no-mind philosophy at all, TBH I would prefer to be shot in the head than to submit to it, I think you can count me as a lost cause for conversion.

I have found this thread to be quite useful, as it has led me to confirm to my satisfaction that the work that is necessary to be done to advance on the spiritual path cannot be done in the state of nirvikalpa samadhi. Whether I have experienced this particular state or not may be entirely irrelevant to my goals, and I choose to concur with Ramana on this - that it is in fact unnecessary, no matter how exalted or how mysterious or how ineffable and unutterable this state may be.

I can try. In my experience, dreams are primarily concerned with disentangling the mind from all unreality with their often merciless truth, to me they are a perfect mirror of our emotional dysfunction and false ego self, and in various ways a perfect guide towards the ‘ocean’. If there is a disparity between my conscious thought and a dream, I accept the dream’s version to be more real (as long as it has been correctly interpreted), and work to align my thinking with the dream’s version of reality. If I ignore the dream's version of reality, then my mind makes the decision to accept my false ego self's version of reality. I currently believe that dreams are actually formed in Ajna chakra, and are like small packets of information from this source which has always remained connected to the ‘ocean’. I see the seeming distortion of dreams as being the distance the dream message has to travel between Ajna and our conscious mind’s ability to comprehend the message. When this distance is lessened by our conscious mind/consciousness moving towards Ajna’s way of seeing, dreams tend to become less distorted because the conscious mind and its ability to perceive actual reality has been correctly cultivated. Also as this distance lessens, Ajna can start to communicate knowledge and actual reality directly when awake. So basically what I’m saying is that it is the conscious mind’s wrong thinking and subsequent distortion that causes the problem with dreams, not the dream’s problem, so ‘dream-like’ is a misnomer, as ‘dream-like’ can more truthfully refer to actual reality.

Personally I would prefer to blame neo-advaitan teaching rather than belief in souls.

I remember coming across the ability to play with size perception in school at around 10 years old, and I actually cultivated this distortion of perception to relieve the boredom I felt in class. When I was 12 I had a dream of a catatonic ‘crazy’ old man and woke up to hear the words ‘he is me’. In terms of shattering my simple conscious concept of reality this was a cracker, it ripped apart any simple certainty I had about who I was, and forced me to start questioning this level of reality. After that dream I couldn’t help but start to subconsciously identify with this other me, and it left me grappling with concepts that were overwhelming at the time and pretty much ruined my ability to live a normal life. So, it was an actual dream that introduced me to the concept that my sense of who I was in this world was limited and unreal. And I would likely argue from this dream and other useful dreams since that dreams are a truer version of reality than my waking perceptions. I certainly agree that our perceptions and conscious thought are limited, but to my way of thinking it is insulting to the value of dreams to call unreality dream-like in a pejorative sense.

When I came across Sri Chinmoy’s description of nirvikalpa samadhi, what he described basically sounded like an unnecessary waste of time to me, therefore the title of this thread. My assumption was that he had indeed experienced nirvikalpa samadhi, but if he hadn’t then of course my initial conclusion will be incorrect. From your understanding, is his experience and Ramakrishna’s not nirvikalpa samadhi? Could you point me to a description of nirvikalpa Samadhi from a trustworthy text, if a genuine description exists. Maybe this term, like many spiritual terms, is bandied about by people who believe they have attained something but have no idea of the reality of the term. I would accept that as a reality, I see it happen to many terms and concepts, but I would like some baseline from which to be able to judge these things, as I have never experienced anything approximating this state myself.

I think in the state of nirvikalpa samadhi Ramakrishna who gave this analogy did feel utterly dissolved and not able to be reconstituted. He says "I was for six months in that state of Nirvikalpa from which ordinary mortals cannot return." In the salt doll analogy he says "Then who was to come back and tell the ocean's depth?" His experience of nirvikalpa samadhi seems to be equivalent to your concept of sahaja samadhi, as he states "It (the salt doll) became entirely one with the water of the ocean" in reference to nirvikalpa samadhi and you state "knowing you are the entire ocean" in reference to sahaja samadhi. When a cup of sea water is removed from the ocean and left in the sun, after a while the water will evaporate off and there will be only salt left in the cup, which can be re-fashioned into a salt doll.

Gee, we really don't see eye to eye, I would have chosen that one as one of the worst. It doesn’t seem to capture the spirit of samadhi well at all, for a start he creates a distinction between nirvikalpa samadhi and sahaja samadhi which by all accounts doesn’t actually exist, as the two states are considered to be equivalent apart from the impermanency of nirvikalpa samadhi. And secondly he creates a building in which to posit these two distinct levels. Isn’t samadhi about dissolving?

Ramakrishna’s experience of Nirvikalpa samadhi, quite an interesting read: