One Mind: One Substance

The approach of tantric science to the project of enlightenment is unique from some other well known enlightenment strategies.

Tantric philosophy & practice begins and ends with your body.  It starts and finishes with the SENSATION of your body.  Why?  Because a primary tantric principle proposes that your body--everyone's body--is a microcosm of the universe.  

Furthermore, tantric science believes that in fact, all manifest reality is composed of energy, and the nature of that energy is vibration.  This means that everything we experience--all that is possible to experience--is composed of vibration.  A dynamic, creative symphony of vibration.  
 

For tantra, dynamic reality is not an illusion or born from some kind of ignorance of a transcendental reality that is somehow more real that what we all experience each and every day of our lives.  Rather, manifest reality and transcendental reality are one and the same.  As the ocean's currents are one with the ocean, so are the immanent qualities of our experience of reality one with the perfectly silent and still ground of that reality.

The tantric philosophy and practice that comprises the perspective of The People's Ashram believes that all the diversity of the universe can in time be traced to, and experienced as, a single Original Vibration.  A sort of cosmic big bang in the form of an original Sound uttered by an originating Voice. Tantra names this original voice, Shakti.

Imagine an orchestra with ten thousand instruments.  A thousand violins, another thousand cellos.  A thousand bassoons and french horns.  Imagine this ten thousand instrument orchestra playing a symphony--something grand like Beethoven's Fifth.

Then imagine that the conductor brings the entire orchestra to a point where each and every instrument is playing one note--the same note.  One moment, a seemingly infinite diversity of sound--the next moment, a single, tremendously powerful note.

This is like the goddess, Shakti.  Shakti is the Mother of all the universe, of all creation.  Shakti is also named, Kundalini.  

Shakti is so enraptured by her love-making with her husband, Shiva, that she cannot help but to cry out with one long, ecstatic sound.  From this single note uttered from the rapturous joy of Mother Shakti comes all the infinite creative manifestation that is our universe.  Shakti is the primal sound from whence comes everything in space and time, for the note itself is not different from Mother Shakti, herself, who is not different from husband Shiva.  Shakti is the substance of the cosmos, from the dust of exploded stars to the stardust in lover's eyes.

Because all of manifest reality comes from a single frequency of vibration, tantric science has developed strategies whereby an individual can begin to recognize that the sensations of his or her own body are in fact, non different from that original Sound uttered by Mother Shakti.

Tantric disciplines, such as yoga asanas, pranayama and especially, meditation, use the sensation of one's own body as the starting point for developing a fuller and deeper awareness of the nonduality that is our own consciousness.  Thus, the tantric path to Enlightenment suggests that one begin by attending to the 'grossest' or the most superficial of physical sensations and move toward the subtlest, finest sensations.   We may then, by the Grace of the God and Goddess of us all, reach that point where the most exquisite sensation is recognized as the divine substance of silent stillness.  This is the event that has of old been described as the ascent of Kundalini through the subtlest channel, the madhya nadi, of the central channel, Sushumna, to pierce the thousand petaled Sahasrara, the blissful throne of Shiva.

The most powerful means for achieving the realization of one's essential unity with all of reality is the awakening of that frequency of spiritual energy often called Kundalini.  We shall further explore what is called, Kundalini, in our next post.

One Mind: One Space

It is possible to experience a world bereft of the illusion that "I" am here and "you," (and the world), are there.  When the mind becomes free of its constant activity, when we begin to experience a quality of meditation that is effortlessly silent and still, we may arrive at the heart of who we truly are as human beings.

What really allows a human being to be who she is?  What causes us to know ourselves as a distinct self?  


It's all kind of a matter of space.  What's near and what is far.


Our thoughts and sensations are very near.  They are intimate. 


Our perceptions of the world, of its persons, its trees and leaves and things generally, are less intimate.  The interior where our thoughts occur and the exterior where the beings of the world are seen seem to be two different places.


So what happens when the proximity between what we experience as inside and outside of our minds and bodies appears to equalize and eventually, begins to altogether disappear?  What happens when we begin to perceive that the substance of our thoughts and feelings and emotions are not so different from the substance of clouds and rocks and sidewalks and houses?


Here is a promise: eliminate your mind's addiction to its constant need for self-identification through compulsive and repetitive mental and emotional activity and the boundary between what's in your head and what's beyond will begin to fade.  If you are faithful and diligent, all distinction between an inside and an outside will disappear.


You will begin to identify not with mental content as the source of your identity, but rather with that pure and perfect experience of silent stillness as the ground of your being.  You may begin to perceive that this silent stillness is actually a kind of light that illumines everything that is possible to experience.  

One day it may simply occur to you that the light that allows everything in your mind to stand forth and be recognized as anything at all is the same light that reveals the world that is supposedly apart from the sovereign interiority of your mind and body.  A Light that allows all beings of every kind to stand forth and be recognized as Belonging. 

A world exists because everything in and of that world 'belongs' to that world.  A tree knows that it is a tree and behaves accordingly.  The tree can only know itself at all because it recognizes itself as belonging to the world in which it lives.  A world of atmosphere and sunlight, of ground and gravity.


Self-recognition is possible because a single Light allows all things to recognize themselves as belonging to the whole.  Thus the fact of our nonduality is responsible for our duality.  We find ourselves apparently separate from other beings only because we belong to a whole that is illumined by a single Light that allows for all things to reveal themselves, to stand forth and be present.  To be 'present' means to belong.  There is truly no such entity as an 'alien' insofar as any being is capable of being perceived.  If we can see it, it belongs to us, to our world, to our single, unified Self.

One Mind: One Time

What truly does it mean to "thin" the mind of its content?  Certainly, it means what the words communicate: less content, less activity.  Does this mean that the simple fact of 50, 60 or even 90% less mental volume is alone responsible for the quality of conscious experience we often refer to as Enlightenment?

The answer to that question is--well, yes--but there's more to it than simply volume of content.


What is the nature of the content of our personal consciousness?

It's funny that what for us is so intimate and familiar, the activity of our own minds, also succeeds in escaping our understanding.

Consider time.



How much of our mental activity concerns itself with time? Think for a moment of all the ways in which we obsess over time.  Its like a disease, a cancer.  We can't let time go.  Regret over the past and fear for the future are like a cancer that eats away at our present.


We replay, rewrite and reinvent memories ad infinitum.  Over and over.  Out of control.  Events from long ago, what happened at work yesterday, someone's rude tone of voice just moments ago.  How things should have been, what we ought to have said, how we could or should have done things differently.

We are equally addicted to expending huge amounts of emotional energy anticipating the future, trying to control what cannot be controlled, influence what is beyond the horizon, worrying whether this happens and not that, or that rather than this.

Think about this and you will agree.  We are addicted to time.  We are enslaved by our investment in time.

So we begin to let it go.  We chant mantras to disrupt customary patterns of thought and emotion.  We perform pranayama while waiting in traffic, waiting in the grocery line, watching television, walking the dog.  We dedicate our lives to breaking every pre-established pattern of thought and breath and physical response to stress and tension.

We use the day to prepare for meditation.  We use our meditation to prepare for the day.  We awaken early to lie still and perform breathwork and release all tension before meditating.  In the evening, we meditate and retire to bed where we lie still and perform pranayama and release our physical tension.

In time, our meditations, once so busy and full of waves of thought and emotion, slow down.  Moments begin to lengthen.  Intimations of silent stillness plant roots in our awareness.

We notice that while we meditate, time seems to move in sequences of attention.  For awhile there is only mantra.  Then a review of our work day.  Then a discussion with our son or daughter.  Then mantra.  Then the discomfort in our legs.  Then what time is it?  How long have we been meditating?

But with grace and effort, we are able to still the constant movements of the eyes, we are able to release the tensions in the ears and our knees and our backs no longer ache after fifteen minutes, a half hour, two hours.

The time comes when we recognize that behind and between and above and below every thought and sensation there exists a sameness, a stillness.  We focus our awareness on this sameness.  We bathe in this sameness.  We luxuriate in stillness.

We begin to see that this sameness, this somehow stillness, never changes.  Once you recognize it and begin to see that it never ever changes, it changes YOU.  This is because you realize that silent, still, velvety-delicious sameness is in fact responsible for there being a YOU at all!  Every thought, every event, the entire historical chronology of your life--the whole sum of what you thought was what made you You--wasn't and isn't.  You recognize that the you that you are and always were is this magical, mystical sameness.  You realize that there's never been a moment in your life when you haven't been aware of this sameness, that indeed, you can't think of who you are without seeing this sameness that you are in front of your eyes.


There is a timeless You that makes the time-full you possible.  


It is rather like a screen, white and unchanging, whereupon your life, your thoughts and emotions and relationships, hopes, dreams and tragedies all play.


But it is more than just a screen or a background.  When, in our meditations, we begin to sit and effortlessly gaze upon this undifferentiated and perfectly motionless screen, our lives are permanently transformed.  We see that time and timelessness are one, we see that self is one with Self.  We understand that we and God--that Selfsame wholeness that is at once our self and our universe--are one.


We rise from meditation, go to work and return home only to perceive that the entire day has transpired in a single, unbroken moment in time.  We move from meditation to a workaday life so saturated by the lush stillness of a motionless present that the day transpires as if a single, unbroken moment. 


The foundation of our awareness, the substance of our personhood, is as a vast lake of crystal pure stillness.  Life cascades around us in so many waterfalls, yet the deep and abiding tranquility of the lake of our consciousness remains still and quietly joyful.

Thinning the Mind

Among the first steps we can take to regain the sovereign topography of our own minds is to thin the volume of content generated by our minds

By simply reducing the amount of content our minds experience, we can effectively alter how we experience the world.  

Less mental volume produces a more peaceful consciousness.  It also offers a quality of clarity and lack of general busy-ness that provides a more positive environment for making decisions and choices.

In time, reducing the mind's volume of content will allow the aspirant to enjoy a simple, natural form of meditative experience.  He will discover the capability to sit for long periods of time and enjoy effortless silent stillness.
Along with this deepening experience of "no-mind," the meditator will emerge from meditation with a subtle, yet profound and serene joyfulness.  She will discover that she is happy for no other reason than just being alive.

He will also begin to recognize that mental content--no matter what variety or degree of emotional significance--may not, in fact, be the true ground for his personal consciousness.  She may begin to recognize that all mental content, marvelous as it can often be, is simply the creative and repetitive impatterning of energy.   

Energy, matter, is the substance of our being.  However, when we begin to quiet our minds and relax our bodies, we may begin to comprehend that all energy emerges from a single unbroken frequency that is the Mother of all creation.  In the tantric tradition, she is often referred to as Kundalini. 

When our minds become sufficiently quiet, we may perceive a single primordial frequency.  Ancient meditators recognized that a very still and quiet mind is able to hear a subtle tone.  This subtle tone was named OM.  The source of the OM is the experience of a frequency of vibration so subtle and pure that only when the mind and body begin to surrender all other tensions and distractions can it be perceived.

When the quiet, meditative mind listens intently only to this OM, soon the relaxed body will begin to feel a profound resonance.  The sensation is as though one's body were a single, taut string on an instrument.  When the OM fills one's consciousness, it feels as though a divine hand is drawing a bow across this single strand.  This ecstatic vibration resonates throughout one's being. One cannot emerge from this quality of meditative experience without being transformed.  It is an unforgettable kind of experience, and one that the meditator will seek to experience again and again until that particular quality of transformation becomes a permanent aspect of one's awareness.

In our next post, we'll discuss some strategies and practices that will assist us achieving greater awareness of the silent ground of our conscious experience.

WHY ENLIGHTENMENT?

Imperialism is alive and well in the 21st century.  

It exists wherever hugely powerful institutions vie for the right to colonialize the consciousness of the human being.

Political systems, institutional religions and multinational capitalist entities all compete to dominate the bodies, minds and activities of every human being on our planet.


Our minds are structured from birth to respond to the appetites of the so-called "free market."  Our bodies are being appended by devices created by the marketplace that demand our attention, our compliance, our obeisance.


Technology no longer exists simply to improve the quality of human life.  Science almost exclusively serves its profit beholden masters.  Lacking expectation of profit, the institutions of science and indeed, the institutionalized support of knowledge & culture for its own sake, fade into memory.


The human being alone must reclaim the sovereign terrain of personal consciousness.  We must not allow the oligarchs of capitalism, the tyrants of religious extremism and the political agendas of nation-states to colonize away all hope of a personal consciousness that embodies the human being's constant search to freely learn, grow, consecrate and perpetuate minds and bodies that are capable of exploring the entire topography of human potentiality.

 Enlightenment exists as an extraordinary gift for persons to explore, cultivate and develop the art of human being.  Enlightenment can be both a pursuit and an accomplishment that allows an individual to act in the world with the greatest possible freedom and independence. 


Certainly, the word "enlightenment" can indicate differing expectations and outcomes for particular traditions.

In several ensuing posts, I will explain how I am using the term enlightenment, and what it means for the project of reclaiming the sovereignty of personal and transpersonal human consciousness.

For me, enlightenment is nothing less than a fundamental reversal of the foundation for personal consciousness. Typically, we believe that the content of our minds and the events of our lives constitute the nature of personal identity and provides the ground for human behavior.  We believe that the content of our minds, emotions, feelings, sense of personal history, beliefs, opinions--even our awareness of time as a chronological phenomenon, establish the foundation for our "personalities."  We believe that our sense of well being, how we feel about ourselves and the world, is the effect caused by our mental self-perceptions, our personal feelings about the events of our lives, our successes, failures and everything else that dominates the space of our personal consciousness.

Meditation and the various disciplines of tantric and yogic science can be instrumental in developing and establishing a quality of consciousness that is grounded not in activity, but in silence, not in temporal chronology, but in absolute stillness.  It is possible to establish silent stillness as the predominant character of personal consciousness.  

This new ground of dynamic emptiness initiates within the space of the mind a profound quality of unconditional contentedness.  We begin to realize that all personal and social activity play on the stage of this perfect ground of tranquility.  When our personal consciousness plays upon the stage of absolute silent stillness, no longer are the events of our lives, our relationships, our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, the determiners of our personal satisfaction.  When our minds and bodies are grounded in profound relaxation and stillness, we are free to act with a quality of freedom unequaled by any previous experience of personal being.


And this is only the beginning...