Karl

It is no business of mine if they are searching for that which does not exist. I wish them well in their quest :-)

If, on the other hand they say they are searching for that which they already are, then surely it's impolite not to point out they are most certainly exactly what they are looking for. Unless that isn't what they are really looking for, in which case perhaps I should just point out the unicorn. :-)

I call that "information overload".  Eventually it all starts getting mixed up.

 

Duality and non-duality are mental concepts but they can be related to the realms of Tao if done cautiously.

Eventually it is seen for what it is :-)

There is no need to relate to any realms.

If you hold in your hands a ball, then you hold a ball. If you then proceed to look for a ball, then I can only point out the obvious. You already have a ball. Am I then a fool because you insist there is no ball ?

If you tell me there is a magic, multi coloured unicorn hiding under the bushes at the bottom of my garden, then what do I care? I was never looking for a unicorn. I am happy for you that you enjoy it.

I think you are wasting your time.  Karl is a new member and I think he should sit back and read some more, instead of trying to discredit various cultivation methods as fancy beliefs and etc.  Very simple minded.  I think all the discussions should be stopped if someone is claiming to know what is the non-duality state without knowing what is a samadhi.

I only wish to discuss, to engage to seek reality and dispel fantasy and fear. I have no need cultivation methods. I have read far too much already, many thousands of books. I filled my mind up with words to remember, all concepts.

I know and accept my intellectual poverty, fallibility and lack of developed rationality. I learned to become a lover of reality, to begin developing the tool of reason which I had left to rot in some corner of my mind whilst I fantasised other worlds. I have learned to tend it, to accept the pain and effort it extracts, to cherish and maintain it at all costs.

I do not live in truth. I search for reality. Like a squirrel testing for a rotten nut. Neither am I enlightened, non dual, dual or any such thing. I have not been on a path, because there isn't one. Reality is the only goal and then I began to see for the very first time what I had hidden from myself for years. To see what a flower looks, smells and feels like without the mental hash and fantasy.

That is what I will sit down and discuss with you. A shared love of reality. To see the world as it is and not through the clouded lens of false ego. To engage directly and fearlessly with reality.

This isn't true - humans can function without conscious awareness - I have given examples already of Poonjaji creating other physical bodies - bilocation - without knowing he was doing so - or the college of Phra Achra Mun in Thailand - levitating without knowing he was doing so.

 

As soon as he became consciously aware he was levitating then his body dropped back down to the floor.

 

So there is "direct perception" as it's called in yoga - it is psychic knowledge and this is done with the ego through the pineal gland.

 

The pineal gland transduces qi information or qi-shen information and then turns that information into conscious awareness - or into the manifestation of  qi energy in the body.

 

The mind in the yoga tradition is Menes as in menstruation - the lunar psychic energy.

 

The real spiritual energy is the formless awareness as the source of light - I call it the spacetime vortex.

 

But the irony again is that a person can manifest abilities from the spiritual source without being aware they are doing so.

 

So the question raised in the OP is can a person be aware of their spiritual abilities - without it being a psychic ego trip - the difference between shakti as spiritual abilities and siddhis as direct perception of the mind.

 

Now realize that neither of these things are left-brain conceptual awareness.

 

For example when I practiced tantra I could read a book while in full lotus and at the same time being having mutual climaxes with females - at a distance. So my left brain conceptual awareness was reading the book while my pineal gland and right brain direct perception was having mutual climaxes with females.

 

Now the two were mutually complementary in that the climaxes cleared out lower emotional negative blockages that otherwise could hinder mental focus. To have a strong mental focus for speed reading your mind can not be "possessed" by lower emotional blockages - which is to say to have a thought circling in the head based on an emotional blockage of anger, fear, sadness.

 

that is what makes tantra different is because lust is a lower emotional blockage and so obviously in a psychic mutual climax there is that thought of desire but since it is an internal climax it actually reduces stress instead of increasing stress which is the ultimate effect of ejaculation.

 

But in nonduality training instead of consciously sublimating sexual energy - the person represses the sexuality - and indeed represses all conceptual thought of the lower emotions - represses it by logically inferring it's all based on the I-thought and so just the I-thought should be focused on.

 

This is called the "direct path" because you turn the left-brain conceptual thought around to its source - so you still have left-brain focus but the only conceptual thought is the only self-transcending conceptual thought - the I-thought itself.

 

The I- thought has no signifier and does not signify anything - and so it is the key to transcend the dualistic structure of phonetic-based language.

 

It's just that advaita nondualism does not define this in terms of complementary opposites, instead it's taught that the I-I awareness rises out of the right side of the heart. This I-I is then the embodiment of infinity as formless awareness - a contained symmetrically logic of infinity - a tautological structure.

 

Whereas say for Milarepa when he was in deep samadhi then his energy was increased or fed by the cosmic goddesses - the dakinis - so it was still a tantric relationship - and we could say that formless awareness itself is a female source of infinity - and so the complementary opposite dynamics are preserved to the end. I call this the female formless awareness or in Taoism - the Emptiness is the Wu Chi - the mystery of the valley - that is again this secret right side of the heart.

 

The key here is that even the yuan shen visions of the astral realm are not the goal of this training - nor is using the energy by the mind but in reality since the yuan qi is the focus as the goal of the path - then this energy will overflow and affect reality as much as other people also tune into it.

 

And so someone like Nisargadatta - I do not trust his training at all. Poonjaji said that Nisargadatta had the correct philosophy but he did not manifest any shakti energy - the same with Krishnamurti. So while Nisaragadatta may have had some results in his training - if he had really achieved the sahaja samadhi state then the shakti energy would have manifested naturally.

 

The thing that has to be realized is that the mind is very weak on its own - that is why the kundalini energy is necessary and so the body has to be purified. Otherwise the mind will just stay in the conceptual realm - only when the qi energy is built up does the mind have the power to really stay focused.

 

And so we can say that the mind - the spiritual ego also includes the astral realms and the yuan shen energy - and for it to have power - for it to manifest shaktis - then that yuan shen spirit light has to return to its source in the Yuan Qi energy - and this recharges the yuan shen - it actually increases the light energy.  that process will manifest shakti in such a way that it will inherently heal and balance blockages because it resonates from the source of reality. It doesn't matter if the mind had the intention of healing or not - all that is needed is the intention to go into the Emptiness and when in the Emptiness the mind is not aware of what takes place but when out of the Emptiness the mind is made aware and the answer is given and the healing occurs.

 

The unified triad is then never an isolated consideration - is it the ego doing it? There is no escape from the mind in the sense that the Emptiness will manifest into the spiritual light as mental insight or prajna - even though it is still not conceptual consciousness or words in the head. By the time of words in the head then it is the yuan jing energy - the physical energy - or as the unified triad - the tamas, rajas and sattva. In other words - these are temporary states of energy but yet they will eternally cycle as complementary opposites, as long as the Emptiness is maintained as the intentional focus of the practice.

The human body can function without conscious awareness, we do so in deep, dreamless sleep when we are said to be unconscious. There is nothing contradictory there. That is not the argument.

Awareness and consciousness does not exist apart from the physical body. You are saying it is prior to the body and therefore prior to physical reality and so existent apart from reality. That is clearly illogical. If there is nothing to be conscious of, then there is no need for consciousness.

We can rabbit on all day about the 'I' thought. It is only an expression of conscious self awareness. In deep dreamless less sleep there is no 'I' thought yet the concrete reality of things continues to exist regardless. Awareness is present, but not consciousness. There is nothing special here either. That's exactly how we experience it. When we are conscious we get direct perception and conceptual thought.

It's quite difficult to try and explain that which is most obvious. It's as if you are saying that it couldn't be that obvious and so you have to imply some complex concepts which better suit what you want to believe. Its as if you wish to paint the Lilly or Gild gold. To create your own version of reality instead of observing what is real.

The problem is that if you deny reality then the false conceptual reality will eventually conflict. If you believe that the red traffic light signal is green then you get into a road accident. It does not matter how much you convince yourself it was green because reality has given the signal it isn't to be messed with. This causes suffering. You can go an entire lifetime believing your own story which is in conflict with the facts.

If you convince yourself a man, unaided and in full contradiction to physical laws; levitated, walked on water, or was in two places at the same time, then you are denying reality. If you say you are dual, non dual or any other such thing, then you deny reality. You must accept reality first, but you can only do so when you have the capacity to determine it, if you deny that capacity then you remain with Alice in the rabbit hole. Know the rope from the snake. There isn't any trick to it. It's the natural state.

Whether one can function in non-dualism comes down to whether it is possible for a person to function outside the realm of the intellect mind or thought. The mind itself will say that isn't possible because to admit otherwise is to create cracks in its dictatorship over your reality, which is pretty much the default position of the vast majority of humanity, because they live primarily in their minds it is assumed that it isn't possible to live in any other way.

 

But if you go beyond the mind then you have what Nisargadatta Maharaj calls "direct experiencing" where there is no separation between the experience and the experiencer, I believe people like Nisargadatta spent the majority of their awake lives in that place and would talk to people and interact from that place, there may be times when old conditioning took over and times where the dualistic mind is needed to take over but overall I believe those people who are considered "awake" are like the reverse of most people in that their default position is non-duality and occasionally lapse into being controlled by dualistic thinking. While for most of us it is the other way around in that we are "dreaming" or in other word living in our dualistic minds and occasionally get a glimpse of the real reality which is non-dual.

 

To "awaken" is to make a permanent shift out dualistic thinking to some extent, if it were only a temporary thing then it couldn't be accurately compared to waking up out of a dream. In my opinion to have samadhi experiences isn't the same as waking up, it is just a means to put a crack in the vase. 

No human functions outside the mind, or without intellect, if by that you are referring to conscious awareness. Reality is reality, there is nothing more to know or learn about it, except to test for it. Conscious awareness is self. If I'm 'aware of myself' then this-I suppose- might represent an idea of dualism, because there are obviously not two selves, but that's just conceptual thought. 'I am aware of this body, chair, cat, thought' is direct perceptive conscious awareness. It is impossible to relapse into dualism because we aren't dual. We made it up, just as we made up non dual. They are not concepts that we can apply to self even if we can create them, they still do not stain the self.

Actually Karl I'm glad you have detailed what you think is nondualism because I think this is exactly the white male Western enlightenment problem in the meditation scene.

 

Ramana Maharshi says that the first stage of practice is mental concentration, to repeat I-I-I over and over not as a mantra but as mental concentration.

 

So but he says that it just the first stage of practice and in actuality you focus on the source of the light - and he said if you focus physically it is on the right side of the heart - even though nondualism is beyond physicality - so he calls the right side of the heart the pinpoint into formless awareness or the Self.

 

The thing is that this exactly corroborates Taoist Yoga: alchemy and immortality which states that the right side of the heart is the source of the Yuan Qi.

 

So the connection to the heart is actually best achieved by the focus on the feeling of compassion, kindness, happiness.

 

But to see the light internally means that the yin qi has been built up enough to increase the yuan qi which then increases the yuan shen, that originates on the left side of the heart.

 

So mental rumination is a left-brain dominant conceptual exercise - it is not even real meditation which first starts with mental concentration and then goes into light visualization as samadhi. But the focus is on the source of that light through the Yuan Qi which can not be seen but is felt as awareness that guides the energy.

 

The problem is the western male enlightenment scene turns advaita vedanta into what is called neo-advaita - which is just a kind of self-affirmation practice - it is not even real meditation - but it's very easy for Westerners to turn meditation into a psychological therapy kind of thing. Master Ni, Hui-ching talks about this problem in the West also - but even in Japan this happened with Zen as Master Nan, Huai-chin points out.

 

I have this problem also - because the mind rebounds into opposite extremes - so just a bit of enlightenment experience then rebounds the brain into vast left-brain conceptualizations. It's very easy for people to dream up vast conceptual schemas - as Yogananda says the white man gets  a taste of enlightenment and then has to write a book about it. But in reality that is only just the beginning of meditation. As Vivekananda states Nirvikalpa samadhi is just the beginning of meditation but in fact most people never even reach it. Or as in Taoism - to get to the  Emptiness you need to first fill the lower tan tien with yin qi energy and so you do see light but only when light is seen externally are you then tapping into the nondualist reality.

 

So that is a good physical measuring - seeing light externally means you have enough third eye heart activation to create enough yuan qi - yuan shen energy so that the light travels outside the skull. But in actuality even this experience can just be the yin qi energy that is connected to the yuan shen - what's called the "heart's fire" - in Taoism. So that energy has to be stored up continuously - and that is the downfall of tantra is that it reverses this storing up process. The yuan qi is used up and turned back into yin qi which then travels out of the skull via the pineal gland - and so it creates a Ghost Immortal which as I said is also a type of nondualism - it's just a low level, considered the wrong path or a big mistake in the training. So yeah I made that mistake - which as I said is a mistake in tantra practice which is dangerous but also very fast in results.

With the greatest respect this just sounds like gobbledygook to me, just a complex illusion. SRM was playing a game, he was a mischievous old goat. He told people what they needed to hear. The more complex the illusion makers mind, the more complex must the solution appear to be. In effect we make an imaginary key for an imaginary lock. We are just self, there isn't any getting to, dissolving or any of that stuff, but if you must believe there is, then that's the solution that seems must be required. It isn't one technique or one particular way to see there is only self-there is no reason why it can't be instantaneous because it never was anything else.

Any results or progress are just imaginary. Find out who is the one experiencing the results. SRM said to some that the must try and remain in the 'I', but then you see he was saying what was needed to that person. How can you stay in the 'I' when you are nothing else but the 'I' . I dont believe he made such an blatant logical error. All he ever really said was 'be as you are' which is funny because how can you possibly be anything else. How can one even ask the question 'who am I? For who is the one asking the question :-)

You are right that this has turned into a big therapy industry, but it always was the case in India, because it made money, or provided some living for a popular guru. Many want salvation, nirvana, heaven to exist here, now, or after. It also created collectives and a control mechanism around which men could be yoked and obedient, now it's a leisure industry thing.

I agree with the OP but then he did refer to Shankara nondualism. All my rants were focused on other types of nondualism - what I call sound-current nondualism - but I don't think these are really "other" types - I mean I do think that the Shankara methodology works - or as taught by Ramana Maharshi - the vichara of self-enquiry.

 

I'm just saying in that traditional advaita vedanta teaching Shankara did insist on the practitioner being a Brahmin monk renunciate and I did find a book of Brahmin priest rules saying that there had to be a 3 day purification if even eye contact was made with a female.

 

I highly doubt that strict standard is followed nowadays by Brahmin priests as monks practicing advaita - but for example Ramana Maharshi practiced nonstop for 9 years in samadhi - and even refused to see his mom.

 

So yeah there are other means - I would say any successful spiritual practice is gonna hit the Emptiness as Oneness or nonduality reality - through nirvikalpa samadhi in the yoga tradition - or as I read in the Theraveda tradition it's called "Achievement of Cessation" from a week long fast in samdahi, much the same as achieved in Taoist training.

 

But for the original human culture - this training focused on the males in puberty fasting for a month doing trance dancing - in solitude from the females.

 

So yeah - that was the nondual training from 70,000 BCe up to today - and indeed the civilized spiritual traditions did begin developing 10,000 years ago - and I realize that is what most people focus on while ignoring most of what happened before say 2000 years go - and so we have what - 68,000 years neglected. Do the math - the original human culture represents the longest and most successful nonduality training - it was required for all the males, not just a certain elite group.

 

So yeah there are other traditions to be sure. I'm not even saying don't practice advaita vedanta but just be aware of its context - for a person to really be successful it was required to be vegetarian, to have very strict solitude from females, and other caste-based cleansing practices, and again the DNA evidence documents these castes were rigid starting 2000 years ago - and also these castes are more white skin based with a West Asian origin for the upper castes - the Brahmin castes.

 

So yeah there's other nondualism philosophies - but nondualism as a term is really a product of phonetic language philosophy with an inherent symmetric structure that is dualistic - and so the philosophy is very paradoxical because the means to practice it are within a context that goes against real nondualism.

 

People don't want to have to deal with that - but it is inescapable - the material world is difficult to escape. Indeed to be very spiritual requires pretty much full-time commitment - and purification practices. Most people need to work and be surrounded by other people who could care less about spiritual training. haha. On the contrary most people are fixated on the opposite of spiritual training and so to train in that environment is very much the opposite of what advaita vedanta required.

 

It is a mind yoga meditation practice - the other types of nondualism are different methodologies - and arguably again any successful meditation practice is really nondualism but that kind of waters down the original use of the term and the context in which is it presented. I'm just saying that context has been redefined in light of the new DNA analysis - and I guess my own analysis on the limitations of symmetric math tied to phonetic language, which is the context that nondualism is taught.

 

It's a great teaching to be sure - it just needs to be understood within its limited context. I would say spiritual training as a whole should be understood within the context of the practical terms in which it can be pursued.

 

For example I was reading a Hugh B. Urban analysis - saying how for the Vivekananda society most people could not afford to join - it was too expensive but there was probably some other issues involved. Anyway so the more poor people who wanted to join were forced instead to practice tantra which was not as pure and therefore not as successful. I realize tantra is a loaded term with many different meanings - but I'm also taking from experience in regards to tantra. At some point in the training it has to transition into the more traditional focus of nondualism.

 

Yeah as I typed this I actually found a pdf of Hugh B. Urban's Tantra book - 2003 edition. He's got a few tantra books.

 

Anyway as I referred to him earlier in the thread he says how nondualism is the ultimate commodity fetish now - I think this is true for late-capitalism. It's a great irony - we should not be afraid of the paradoxes involved in that tradition. My position is music - very basic music - is what unifies humanity and there is a nondualism aspect to sound - and I think studying this via Ramana Maharshi has been a personal fascination for me.

 

So he dismisses Nada Yoga as a nondual practice because he says it just creates a dull trance and the person loses the will power to continue going into the nondual state - to push the Nirvikalpa samadhi even farther.

 

The thing is that what Ramana Maharshi says may be true regarding the ordinary approach to sound but then Ramana Maharshi says that Mouna Samadhi is the highest level of samadhi - literally silence samadhi based on an internal listening process.

And if I understand the gist of your post you are postulating the very idea of dualism/non dualism is a paradox. That's correct. We have to start thinking in paradoxes first. In other words we are attempting to break the stability we have built through mental habit by destabilising everything. This is partly what Nada Yoga was attempting to do, but it has a dulling effect-only to be expected if one deliberately negates everything. Self inquiry instead asks the logical question-who experiences it-which is a positive proactive action which works the mind as opposed yoga nada which is passive negative.

Meditation prepares for the more advanced practice of self inquiry. There is all this stuff about single pointed etc, but it's really about training the mind to ask the question and stay on the question without excessive concentration or multiple thoughts arising. It's teaching the mind to play games to end the game it's playing.

It's really breaking acquired conditioning, anti hypnosis, breaking the trance. The words used are just part of the game and are not real but have to be adopted as a presupposition in order to get traction. The mind likes stories, it will accept them as readily as a starving man takes food. One story can be used to break the other stories, but only if we are convinced that the underlying message in the story is true. Even here I'm making up a story on top of another story-none of it is real, but you have to believe it is in order to see that it is not :-)

It's not a question of dual or non-dual

Nature, it is more about if we can drop subject-object framework (and duality) and function in this world? Stemming from a discussion with my friend about whether we can remain in nondual absorption state and still function in the world...towards that somewhere on this thread there is a small discussion on what are the samadhi states...experiences...

I expect SRM would say to find the one who experiences this duality, subject/object framework :-)

Apparently you understand more than you admit to.

Once I believed I had a dual nature, but I was wrong about that. Maybe the question is better phrased ' why do we imagine we have a dual nature ?'

Already I feel I have made a good decision by joining this forum. :-)

Definitions have become a recent fascination for me. It's good to see someone attempting to resolve the definition of 'real'. It is true that language, time and translation have combined to make much of these ancient philosophies beyond our understanding. We can only hazard a guess at what much of it actually meant. These days people tend to use the translated ancient terms haphazardly. Words are used undefined. The result is mysticism and superstition. There is mimickery without clear understanding and little attempt is made to discover the definition behind the words.

A word such as Brahman could just as easily be aether, without clear definition it serves as nothing more than a kind of totem for the ignorant to hawk around and on which they rely to shore up a faulty belief system.

I recently came across two examples 'moving silence' and 'beyond the mind'. I pointed out the silence usually described the absence of sound and therefore, to then give that absence the quality of movement was highly dubious.

I don't understand 'dual self' and 'non dual self'. There is only self. Pure and simple. How could anyone be anything else ?

I have been an AYP practitioner since 2008. In the last few months I have subscribed to a course on Aristotelian logic and have been studying both the trivium and quadrivium.

If anything focuses the mind it is the study and practice of logic. However it has lead me to question many of the assertions used in AYP practice. I have discovered that there is very little latitude to question the logic of these assertions.

I was one of the moderators of the forum, but found that I could not continue doing so as it seemed I would be effectively censoring my own posts. It was impossible to have an open discussion without heated defence of the terms being used.

I remembered a few past members who had moved across here for similar reasons and noticed that the thread on AYP remained stubbornly active and that participants seemed far more questioning and pragmatic.

Whilst I will continue to remain a member of AYP and believe it does have an 'early worth' ( certainly for me it is unlikely I would have begun any form of serious practice without it ) it seems I've reached the limits of its usefulness and am unable to subscribe to the acolytes fashion with which it seems to be defended.

Perhaps here I will find a more conducive home for airing questions and advance my practices beyond their present condition.