The Book Of Fire

July 1, 2011

Q: “My mind is always creating difficulties.  What should I do?”
MM: “Give me your mind without fear and I will transform it. When the heart suffers, it is easy to transform its suffering into joy, but when the mind creates and lives in a fantasy, it is extremely difficult to change it.  So be very careful.  Do not let your mind become your worst enemy…Train it to be awake.  Train it to be lit up with spirit.  Make it a servant and not a master.” Mother Meera, Answers Volume I

It’s summer BlockBuster time!  Recently, my one true friend, Baby Ed, took me to see one of the latest reincarnations of a Marvel Comics creation, The Green Lantern.  Now, most of us aware of spiritual pursuits have observed – all the way back to J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings trilogy – the esoteric, mystic principles described on those pages, only thinly veiled.  Deeper than even the political philosophy that is the foundation of much of the best “science fiction”, it is ancient alchemy that is clothed in the garb of “fantasy” and “imagination”; these frequencies and codes speak directly to the unconscious knowledge of the human soul, if the conscious awareness has become separated from the eternal Truth.
No doubt, I’m always up for good science fiction – I can get escapist fun, and be expanded and elevated at the same time.  This summer, I’ve noticed a real intensification and focus to the translation of the mystic teachings in our vacation fare – they are a little less silly.  Less trivial and aimless.  Like the drilling of a well, I have witnessed a plumbing to greater depths of actual metaphysical work, with a feeling of serious intent. Take Green Lantern, for example – looking past the requisite spandex suit and mask, we are presented with many core axes of yoga.  The lovely Ryan Reynolds is the protagonist who takes us with him, as he falls unwittingly into the worlds of spiritual forces beyond his comprehension.  We are beside him as he is introduced to the basics of the science of Consciousness: how mind is the projector/creator of external (and internal) experience, how the formless power of will is the omnipotent force that drives and directs this mighty engine to manifest limitless configurations in energy.
Most important, we are reminded, warned – in Green Lantern, Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings – the unfathomable dangers of falling into slumber, succumbing to the sloth of ignorance of these eternal principles of the inner Reality.  We believe we can afford to sleep, right up until the moment we are crushed to death by the Laws of Consciousness.
Well, by my figuring, the crushing is well underway – that’s for certain.  The only question yet unanswered is, really, who is going to be swallowed up by the waves….and who is going to remember themselves?
Have fun at the movies, folks!

Junipur over and out

June 1 2011

“In all that is done in the universe, the Divine through His Shakti is behind all action but He is
veiled by his Yoga Maya and works through the ego of the Jiva in the lower nature.
In Yoga also it is the Divine Who is the Sadhaka and the Sadhana; it is His Shakti with Her
light, power, knowledge, consciousness, Ananda, acting upon the Adhara and, when it is open
to Her, pouring into it with these divine forces that makes the Sadhana possible.  But so long
as the lower nature is active the personal effort of the Sadhaka remains necessary.

The personal effort required is a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender, –
an aspiration vigilant, constant, unceasing – the mind’s will, the heart’s seeking, the assent
of the vital being, the will to open and make plastic the physical consciousness and nature;
rejection of the movements of the lower nature – rejection of the mind’s ideas, opinions,
preferences, habits, constructions, so that the true knowledge may find free room in a silent
mind, – rejection of the vital nature’s desires, demands, cravings, sensations, passions,
selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the
true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital
being, – rejection of the physical nature’s stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy,
pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, Tamas, so that the true stability of Light,
Power, Ananda may establish itself in a body growing always more divine;
surrender of oneself and all one is and has and every plane of the consciousness and
every movement to the Divine and the Shakti.”  The Mother, Sri Aurobindo 1972

I confess I am in a mood today, fighting a growing desire to depart this blog-writing.  What am I going to say that will accomplish in the soul of Man what the transcendent greatest sages, such as Sri Aurobindo, has failed to?  How will it help anything for little me to rant, complain, sounding more like a pedantic, pretentious, do-gooder-on-a-soap-box every day?
This is what I have learned in my recent sojourn on earth: if a spirit has either lost all memory of the continuum of its existence in eternal Consciousness – and with that, the certain knowledge that it will experience, in awful fullness, the causal seeds it sows in the dream of Time – or the spirit has abandoned, in an infantile tantrum, all care and responsibility for its effects on itself and others in the universe – nothing in the written or spoken word will re-create that love in the void of soul.

For me, there are no other subjects.
So, later, out there – or not.

Junipur over and totally out

Easter 2011

Technically, this blog is for May 1 – but I happen to be writing it on Easter Sunday, and it seems fitting.
The immaterial, weightless nature of the soul is all but forgotten now – the truth and immediacy of it – so real discussions about our bondage are sort of redundant.  The facts of the states of dreaming, waking, and the river that yawns between them have been reduced to the banal, and casual, by the world-mind.
In some cultures, they say to speak a thing, to give it a name, renders it powerless.  Today, the New Age is the consensus of common knowledge about all things spiritual; without our noticing, the banality of mind has “owned” the concepts.  In stealth, it has erased the doorways to the inner chambers of power.  We are lost.
In The Bardo, I recount a story of a seminar I attended in my youth – where many seeds were planted about the lost mystical world; at the end of the talk, the mysterious speaker looked out into the audience with a piercing, unblinking gaze and said: “In the endgame, expect paradox.”  These words burned into my mind, lingering indelibly over 30 years.  The paradox, to which we are unknowingly oblivious now, is that our daylight, “wake” reality is, in Kali Yuga, the deepest descent into unconscious slumber possible by the human spirit – and that to actually awaken into Consciousness, we must regain access to the realm of “dreaming”.  The paradox is that the whole map of our many lives – the births without number into time, countless thousands of events, inflections of experience and feeling, deaths – are dangerous dreams of binding, hypnotic power.
There are microscopic degrees of sleep (and conversely, of awakening).  The mortal insidiousness of abject slumber is that of a coma; there is no memory, no knowledge of the source of one’s existence.  There is no receptivity or registering in the soul-body of the profound magnetic pull of the “true North” of the Causal plane.  Much less is there motive for the immense striving required for emancipation.
But back to the paradox: we know all about this now, right?  Thank God we’re not in ignorance of the light like the poor brethren that were our forebears.  We are the New Age, the enlightened tribe, and know that lofty, bright radiance of transcendence is our birthright.  We can just sit here and bask in it, enjoying our beatitude.
We are lost.  If you doubt me, measure yourself against the axiom enunciated by Gurumayi Chitvilasananda: “Leave the circle of Time, and enter the circle of Love”.
Are you in Time?  Are you, in daily life, bound and nailed to the cross of space and Time?

I rest my case.
But the Far Shore exists.  It is more real than you are.
And it is waiting for you.

Junipur  over and out