Nisargadatta Maharaj -
Silence
No particular thought can be mind’s natural state, only silence. Not the idea of silence, but silence itself. When the mind is in its natural state, it reverts to silence spontaneously after every experience, or, rather, every experience happens against the background of silence.”
Abhinavagupta (c. 950 – 1020 AD) was a great teacher of Kashmir Shaivism. In the second chapter of his work Tantraloka, he describes fullness as follows:
The principle of highest self-revelation is a synonym of fullness. […] It is full and complete in all respects. Full is always full. This fullness is beyond the related cause and effects of the universe. It is not an object of contemplation because there is no contemplator, and vice versa. It is unworshippable as there is no worshipper. It is neither mantra nor the reciter of mantra nor the deity for whom mantra is recited. It is neither initiator nor initiation nor initiated. This type of state is called fullness and that fullness is Mahesvara, the highest Lord full of all glories.
Hafiz
Come Dance with Me
“Every child has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don’ts,
Not the God who ever does Anything weird,
But the God who knows only 4 words.
And keeps repeating them, saying:
“Come Dance with Me , come dance.”
And
For no reason
I start skipping like a child.
And
For no reason
I turn into a leaf
That is carried so high
I kiss the sun’s mouth
And dissolve.
And
For no reason
A thousand birds
Choose my head for a conference table,
Start passing their
Cups of wine
And their wild songbooks all around.
And
For every reason in existence
I begin to eternally,
To eternally laugh and love!
When I turn into a leaf
And start dancing,
I run to kiss our beautiful Friend
Carl Jung describes an encounter with the Native American chief Ochwiay Biano (“Mountain Lake”) of the Taos pueblo in New Mexico in 1932:
“I was able to talk with him as I have rarely been able to talk with a European,” Jung recalled…
Chief Mountain Lake: “See how cruel the whites look, their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted by folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think that they are all mad.”
When Jung asked why he thinks they are all mad, Mountain Lake replied, “They say they think with their heads.”
“Why of course,” said Jung, “What do you think with?”
“We think here,” said Chief Mountain Lake, indicating his heart.
Rumi
Oh Beloved, take me.
Liberate my soul.
Fill me with your love and
release me from the two worlds.
If I set my heart on anything but you
let fire burn me from inside.
Oh Beloved,
take away what I want.
Take away what I do.
Take away what I need.
Take away everything
that takes me from you
...
Neither I am me,
nor you are you,
nor you are me.
Also, I am me,
you are you
and you are me.
We have become one
in such a way,
That I am confused whether
I am you,
or you are me.
This famous poem by St. John of the Cross from The Ascent of Mount Carmel expresses the spiritual dialectics of all/nothing (todo/nada) very well:
To come to enjoy everything seek enjoyment in nothing.
To come to possess everything seek to possess nothing.
To come to be everything seek to be nothing.
To come to know everything seek to know nothing.
To come to what you do not taste go to where you taste nothing.
To come to what you do not know go to where you know nothing.
To come to what you do not own go to where you own nothing.
To become what you are not go to where you are nothing.
If you linger somewhere
you will never conquer the whole.
To come wholly to the whole you must leave the whole.
And if you come to where you can grasp the whole, have it without wanting to have it.
For if you want to hold fast to only something of the whole, so you will not have your treasure purely in God.
Yogananda’s Description of Samadhi
Paramahansa Yogananda describes his blissful intimacy with the universe that was revealed to him as a boy by his guru, Sri Yukteswar. After a tap on the heart by his master, Yogananda’s vision of reality become forever changed:
My body became immovably rooted…Soul and mind instantly lost their physical bondage, and streamed out like a fluid piercing light from my every pore…My sense of identity was no longer narrowly confined to a body…The whole vicinity lay bare before me. My ordinary frontal vision was now changed to a vast spherical sight, simultaneously all-perceptive…All objects within my panoramic gaze trembled and vibrated like quick motion pictures. My body, Master’s, the pillared courtyard, the furniture and floor, the trees and sunshine, occasionally became violently agitated, until all melted into a luminescent sea; even as sugar crystals, thrown into a glass of water, dissolve after being shaken. An oceanic joy broke upon the calm endless shores of my soul. The Spirit of God, I realized, is exhaustless Bliss; His body is countless tissues of light. A swelling glory within me began to envelop towns, continents, the earth, solar and stellar systems, tenuous nebulae, and floating universes. The unifying light alternated with materializations of form, the metamorphoses revealing the law of cause and effect in creation…The divine dispersion of rays poured from an Eternal Source, blazing into galaxies, transfigured with ineffable auras.
Ramana Maharshi shares his experience of (temporarily) dying, in which he had a direct understanding of the location of the Heart Center:
I had been saying all along that the Heart centre was on the right, notwithstanding the refutation by some learned men that physiology taught them otherwise. I speak from experience. I knew it even in my home during my trances. Again during the incident related in the book Self-Realisation I had a very clear vision and experience. All of a sudden a light came from one side erasing the world vision in its course until it spread all round when the vision of the world was completely cut out. I felt the muscular organ on the left had stopped work; I could understand that the body was like a corpse, that the circulation of blood had stopped and the body became blue and motionless. Vasudeva Sastri embraced the body, wept over my death, but I could not speak. All the time I was feeling that the Heart centre on the right was working as well as ever. This state continued 15 or 20 minutes. Then suddenly something shot out from the right to the left resembling a rocket bursting in air. The blood circulation was resumed and normal condition restored. I then asked Vasudeva Sastri to move along with me and we reached our residence.
- 11/03/21 - 22/03/21: for this retreat - 50% discount on the course fee
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