As we go through life listening to the yammer of our own angry minds, jealous, wanting, suffering, immersed in material concerns, constantly irritated at others, living in a state of blame and reactivity, we attract misfortune. Is it any wonder? What we are we attract. I struggle with all this myself so I went to study with teachers who offered Mind Tech. I'm going to give you the full course now, you don't have to get that recording machine or notebook or pay the guy the fifty bucks.
They taught the following: " GET into the quiet attic in your MIND. Don't enter into the crashing waves of thought; don't listen to that yammer yammer of the pounding surf until you're in fright all worried and tense. Be in constant silence, in peace, then SURF THE still, smooth top of the Mind’s wave, using the wave's immense power to lift you and carry you to shore."
While I'm still in the cold wet salt a lot of the time, wrestling with this art of emptiness, --- and frequently believing in the phantom dangers around me, which make me defensive and thinky, I will share with you the tips I've studied, read or heard.
The prime initiatory step toward what teachers Gurdgieff and Ouspensky called "conscious evolution," is inner silence. When there is inner silence and non-reactiveness to any of life's frights, you will attract that state of ease that Olympic athletes enjoy, and you will become a winner at life.
The next step in consciously evolving is to stop eating animals that feel fright or suffer. Their meat is filled with hormones of angst, principal among these are veal calves and baby lambs, as they're babies, torn from their mothers. I might add fish, who die long, asphyxiating deaths unless you caught them and dispatched them the second they hit the deck.
Regarding other meats, I heard a Tibetan Llama say, "four hundred people eat a cow, that's not a lot of bad karma, as it's split 400 ways, but a shrimp cocktail is a holocaust." So be mindful of what or who you're eating, and start with diet. Eat tofu with mushrooms at Chinese restaurants, cheese enchiladas at Mexican. Coleslaw at the deli with a slice of turkey breast and between meals, snack on high protein raw almonds. Always keep a double fistful of almonds soaking in water to loosen the astringent skin. You peel the skin off and eat the nut. Full of Protein, calcium, iron. Eat salads, tons of dark green (not white) salads taken with the 'beefsteak on a tree' avocado and pumpkin and sunflower seeds and homemade buttermilk dressing so you get protein, calcium and minerals galore.
Next, don't buy (let into the house) or seek out sugar-based foods as sugar depletes Vitamin B, wears out your pancreas, causes aging. At parties, eat a crumb or two and leave it. Avoid chemical foods, Nutrasweet, (melts your nervous system, causing MS) or additives which cause arthritis, damaged brains. So much for healthfood.
Next, study YOGA, not to get fit; for that we have aerobics. Yoga is essentially a magic, metaphysical system for creating a specific state of highly oxygenated but relaxed consciousness.
The word "Yoga" is Sanskrit and means 'yoke', the reference being to the wood bar used to link oxen to the plow but the implication being that one can link oneself to God.
In ancient times, being in "God consciousness" was thought to be worth something, as mental powers went with it. Today, most people dream of an Amex gold card, not a more powerful or Godly state of mind. In an age of pursuit of earnings, can many modern citizens be interested in Yoga, even if does promise powers of mind which will lead to money?
Seeing the many Yoga classes that have sprung up in every suburb of L.A. where I live, it would seem that attaining consciousness is a priority, at least to movie stars looking to be their radiant best and attract jobs.
What is radiant best? It is a bliss state that isn't affected by life's constant threats. It's like being in an insulated cockpit with delicious muzak around you, having all your dials at hand and from which we can land this cumbersome 747 life of ours with grace, seemingly against the laws of physics, but really using those laws.
The Yogis of ancient India said that in order to discard the usual frantic, tense 'headset' and live in a GOD-state of awareness and joy, it was necessary to discard the tyranny of the brain. The brain, they said, was a wonderful slave but a tyrannical master. Well think of it, this box between your ears is going, going at you all day long, keeping you pretty upset and defensive and fearful. It's a warning alarm ringing during your every waking hour. Who can fly a plane with that thing on?
These ancient, wise men exhorted seekers to 'get in charge of the box, stop beings its servant; stop the mental yammer,' and just go about your life in your true, infinite wise soul state.
These teachers prescribed Yoga to teach the brain to stand still and be silent. Or, as they described it, 'to kill the brain.'
As the brain is practically all we know and is the seeming locus point of our universe, from which we see all, know all, function from and toward which all reality seems to be directed and from which all reality seems to emanate, the brain seems to be the lord of everything. The thought of it being an enemy and there being a need to shut it off, ---is somewhat confusing. It confuses the brain at least, for the brain is simplistic, robotic in nature and very literal. The brain doesn't 'get' subtleties. It understands black and white, yes and no, gain and loss. It understands certainty, not 'trust in your soul's wisdom.'
The brain is a bi-nominal machine like a computer, divided into four, basic survival functions:
1.) an Ego which stuffily believes its own life script about who one is and what one deserves.
2.) an apparatus for logic which is supposed to be effectively working on current time but which is usually out of stride with 'the now' and is heavily bogged down in regurgitations, memories and cud-chewing of yesterdays as well as fantastical and greedy plans for tomorrow.
3.) the brain is a receptacle for emotions which functions more like a washing machine in spin cycle whirling us into highs and lows, suds and bleach, weep and toil...and in the end, we find ourselves dyed brown with the dark crud of its load and lastly,
4.) the brain is a mechanism that interprets the sense world. Due to this last---it has a passion for sensorial pleasure. Yes, the brain tends to quickly become hooked on pleasant levels of sensation even if they're toxic and shun unpleasant sensations even if they're beneficial. Some friend the brain is!
You think not? Well tell me then, how come the brain is always getting addicted to harmful substances, not to mention people causing us to make bad choices, lose energy, lose time, leak our powers and passions every which way? The brain is half sensuality and half ego and none of it friend!
One wonders; if one were to discard our brain, who's obviously our worst enemy, what else is there here in the room? Wouldn't our personality go too? Probably, but only the acculturated games which weren't very authentic in the first place but which we got through acculturalization, repetition and rote learning.
Hopefully, there is a deeper, more real us, which would come to take the superficial identity's place. To find out how much more we are, we have only to make the brain's four functions (four furies is more like it), come to a stop. Then, the deeper thing that we are manifests. The so called 'divine' spirit within us flowers, slowly at first, but as life interacts with it, the essence expands. Ultimately, the expanded essence makes beneficial changes in our life and relationships. Finally our spirit becomes manifested sufficiently to make the Divine Spirit above really notice us. Before we reach such a level, we are just caterpillars asleep, hiding from birds on a branch in the shade, chewing on leaves, asleep. Maybe we have lofty potential but nobody knows it. After we go through some mysterious change, our destiny would be to sport all the colors of the rainbow, swoop through the air and drink nectar for an eternal summer so it's worth it to make the effort to weave our chrysallis and stop being a worm!
Appreciating that a butterfly state is what Yoga promises, might we not want to attempt such a transformation? But in mundane terms, how exactly does one still the brain? And where is mankind's silent cocoon? The answer is --- any discipline that stills the mind makes the soul manifest and makes the worm turn into a butterfly. The brain is the main thing that keeps us stuck in the 'limited us.'
Yoga isn't the only discipline that stills the mind. Mantra, prayer beads, Zen meditation and immersion tanks like those seen in Bill Hurt movie, from the 70's, 'Altered States' (written by Paddy Chayefsky ) all work.
Lately, costly bio-feedback gismos have appeared, that you slip over your head, which read brain waves and train the brain to be still by ringing bells when you think. They all work. But Yoga does it at no cost. You can sit on the floor right now and start doing a perfect yoga set, from any free, library book on Yoga, however the very precise nerve-stretching and oxygenating methods of Yoga postures do something else.
They will also activate the vital energy (called Kundalini which supposedly resides in the spine,) and send it out to activate the chakras, the different centers on the spine, so that the kundalini can rise to zap the brain and pineal gland with a subtle lightning bolt.
The Pineal gland is very mysterious stuff. Scientists tell us that it is made of rod-and-cone tissue just like the eye's retina, created by nature for perceiving light, but it's stuck in the middle of the skull where no light enters. So what is it? An inner eye of some kind? A vestigal eye used by our pre-Cambrian ancestors to tell what season it was? The Hindus said this was 'the third eye' and told us that when Yoga activated the Pineal, it would secrete a certain brain hormone and one would have visions. So it turns out it's more like an inner t.v. set or inner eyesight which runs on serotinin.
An activated Pineal gland may be what we're looking for when we search for that infinite part of ourselves---the visionary, dreaming, philosophy-creating soul or spirit, at least so said the Ancient Hindus, who called it the 'crown chakra' or 'top wheel.' Can we trust these gentlemen? They seem to have been very perspicacious in other things. In books written 4000 years BC, they exactly described the atom and electron as being the basic building block of the micro-cellular world. If aliens or non-corporeal people didn't advise them, they obviously did it with some kind of inner sight.
The heyday of metaphysical studies seems to have begun about then when the Rig-Veda was written. (Like their Bible). The Upanishads came a few thousand years later, then the Bhagvad Gita and later the Ramayana. These are the principle metaphysical books of an Hinduic, illuminated age.
During the West's 'Transcendental Theosophist' period in the 19th century in England and New England, these ancient books were studied. Writers like Annie Besant, Madame Blavatsky (whose favorite saying was "slay the brain for the brain is the slayer of all,") Gurdgieff, Ouspensky and Ramakrishna were in style, instructing students in the central ideas of Yogic philosophy, which we've given you here.
Between 1860 and 1919 groups formed all over the world to advance what was called "the work" which could only be done with the aid of "school force." The books were complex and uniquely suited to a more sublimated, intellectual era.
In the mid-twentieth century, in another, 'later' sixties, a simpler more spontaneous, hands-on approach to soul studies appeared. No reading or homework but lots of field work. Psychdelic drugs appeared and at Harvard and Woodstock, a generation started doing Yoga. Teen-agers were thrown into 'altered states' which they likened to God consciousness, perhaps because LSD and cannabis had stunned their brains. Psychedelic mutations lasted for limited amounts of time)---an hour for pot, maybe l0 hours for acid, but in those hours, seekers abandoned the robotic brain apparatus and felt divinely inspired, connected, ecstatic, totally loving and tuned into what they felt was a birthright state that LBJ, Nixon and their parents had conspired to deny them. They demonstrated against everything, but quickly plopped back to earth with hangovers, blood sugar in trouble and the munchies driving them to fudge and hamburgers.
After a few years of that kind of tripping the trippers were unfit to trip. Indeed, old psychedelic-using flower children complained that the highs weren't as high because the machine was getting burned out. Another section of the 60's seekers, copied the Transcendentalists. Being bookish, they read all the ancient texts, the manuals on consciousness and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and discovered the scientific, physiological and metaphysical factors with which they were dealing. They read that those same ecstatic states could be produced by oxygenating the brain while you stilled it, producing vivid day dreaming. They guided the kundalini up through the spine to the Pineal gland doing stretches, deep nostril breathing and breath 'locks' (inhale, lock the muscles of the diaphragm then tighten the lower body so blood is forced into the head.) These were Kundalini Yoga methods, and very advanced. And they worked. Even first time yoga students could duplicate the bliss state. Some of these students avidly turned to ancient texts for clues to the nature of the universe. Life was a school for souls with an impeccable teacher, KARMA, who meted out exact response to the soul's limited ethics and limited 'service' and limited mindfulness. Read 'total selfishness and physicality.'
The academic seekers read other books, codes for living, written by Buddhists, Taoists, Confucians and as they did, they found that higher levels of wisdom began to dawn on them, in the post-yoga class, enhanced mind state. Some of these students even found themselves with new abilities to write philosophy themselves. It might be useful for us, as dwellers in a material age, to study at very least the system of doing Yoga, if not all these texts.
Finding a good yoga class has never been easier. Go to the nearest metaphysical, new age or occult book store and examine the bulletin board and giveaway magazines. Ask the store owner. Go to health food store, find classes on bulletin board there. If you're low income right now, you can always ask the teacher for a SPECIAL rate. Then, take notes on the exercises at first class; so that you don't need to repeat the class, you can do it at home, alone.
When
you do, get ready for the adventure of your life: Cosmic Consciousness.
THERE are KUNDALINI YOGA classes in most cities in the world. Click there, find your country. First time is free. Remind
the teacher of how YOGI BHAJAN always did it.
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Our 'POSTER-BLOGGER' is ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ, Los Angeles Writer, Researcher, Humorist, Ombudsman, Futurist and Astrologer. Catch up with her websites TRUTHS GOV WILL HIDE & NEVER TELL YOU, also The FUTURE, WHAT'S COMIN' AT YA! FRUGAL LIFE STYLE TIPS, HOW TO SURVIVE the COMING GREAT DEPRESSION, and Secrets of Nature, HOLISTIC, AFFORDABLE HEALING. Also ARTISANRY FOR EXPORT, EARN EUROS....* Anita is at astrology@earthlink.net ). Get a 15$ natal horoscope "my money/future life" reading now + copy horoscope as a Gif file graphic! No smarter, more accurate career reading out there!
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