Life Searches and Paradigm

At the heart of all matter, is atom. Within that are sub-atomic particles. Going deeper, there finally is nothing but Void left. Quantum physicists, in researching the nature of matter, found this. In this Void, they found Life. They found all the spiritual laws manifested instantly in this depth, and they found physical laws being broken by Nature itself.

What was supposed to be was not. Instead, it was found, the observer and what he expected to observe, influenced, actively, what the stuff there appeared to be. The quantum physicists' highly precise equipment failed to produce a constance in their measurements of this depth. They found Nature hiding a part of Her, openly showing her liveliness instead.


In my own specialized searches, I have had not a lot of other mental distractions. In the same field, sure I got side-tracked, but hanging on to the path I eventually reached a ideological vertex. A revelation that connected the dots. In my searches I've these Vertexes.

When I examine these dots connecting, some of them are not exactly vertexes. There is no single point where all the ideas converge. But still, they are all connected, and if it's to stay in my mind all the time, these connections, I'd go mad with knowing them. 

I realized that these connections do not have a vertex. But they all make a single paradigm that makes sense of everything I know. It gives me a way to go, and a map of sorts to refer to. This paradigm, this model, is a higher intellectual level. No more am I dealing with individual ideas, blind to the road ahead in my visualization. I am working with an entire paradigm, and my spiritual practices can get flexible as I know what back they are standing on.

My paradigm connected all my searches. The numerological and other future prediction systems studies reached a Vertex and they all pointed to the Archetype, The Leader, The Writer, and The Teacher. My Spiritual search and ramblings led to the revelation of my Holy Grail--and the deeper understanding of the Holy Grail, the point of all points, connected to all my other searches.

The understanding that the Void lives in the Present makes me able to find magic in playing, on my guitar, the same thing on and on, again and again, even when I'm boxed in and can't get out of the rut of playing those same phrases repeatedly. The knowing of The Void is what makes me believe that if I play the same song tirelessly again and again, magic will happen as I improvise on it, even one note, one beat, to make it more filled with passion.

That amidst the same old everything, the everexisting Nothing can give seed to another new thing. And becoming that much more connected to the source-nothingness, it will be imbued--itself, and imbue others with--the deeper magic that there is.

The Leap of Faith(flow-of-consciousness)

If one were to question my belief about immortality of the soul, what would I say? If I were to honestly face with the possibility of an end of consciousness, then?

I'd have to take it, of course, but until I am animate I'd want my animation to be pleasant.

But if I were to ask that skeptic, or honest philosopher, how can you be so sure you are conscious, anyway? "I think, therefore I am"? What if thought is naught but inanimate matter, ringing off of space? What if you are not aware of sound, but just are the sound? What if awareness is not awareness, but matter?

That is untrue, the other might say... I am not sound, I am a perceiver of sound. Because I can perceive, I am.

But approaching the scrutiny of awareness and thought is a muddled-up deal. It is like measuring something with itself. You scrutinize thought, but have a hard time taking notes because the notes are first and foremost in the form of thought.

The Success Algorithm: On the thoughtless state of mind required to achieve short-term goals

When one seeks to better any aspect of his/her life by paying heed to the state of mind s/he approaches it with, there is to be found an important system in our cognition that is responsible for our behavior to a large extent. This system is the interaction between thought and focus.

It is necessary to understand that when seeking to achieve something there is a perfect balancing point between these two that present the best chances of success. It is like an algorithm of interaction.

In knowing this point and understanding it one must first know the characteristics of both thought and focus, characteristics that influence their workings strongly. Thought is capable of sequential logic. It is capable of dwelling in the past and the future. This latter characteristic makes thought both friend and foe.

Focus on the other hand is a part of divine intelligence. I am referring to true focus. True focus is actually proper awareness. It is not contrived, like 99% of us are used to understanding it as. It is effortless and natural; it is always in the present moment, perceiving and observing. But this true focus is clouded by thought. If and when awareness is thoughtless and in the present moment, it begins to demonstrate its true power.

In the beginning of any project, one must use thought to make a plan on how to accomplish its goal, for only thought can live in the future. The problem for most people lies in implementing it. The ideal way to carry out a plan is to not overthink it.  At step 1 of the algorithm is the use of thought to plan the project. At step 2 is the use of true focus/awareness to carry out the plan. That is all.

But most people ruin step two of the algorithm. They think too much instead of relying on the divine guidance inherent in true focus/awareness. By thinking too much, they open the gate to frustration and the will to give up. They reduce their efficiency by merely focusing on the wrong things instead of the task at hand. They block the channel for divine light.

On doing any work, one must always focus on the present moment. This, besides increasing chances of success, helps us achieve the higher human purpose of enlightenment by acquainting us with the original focus/awareness. At first, the recurring character of thought plays its toll. But as one feeds on more and more divine light, one begins to connect with one’s inherent will power, and the ability to control thoughts rigidly is gained. One achieves the noble emotional characters by dwelling on the divinity within: awareness.

It is in fact true that success requires mental and emotional mastery. But all those different programs and books that take these aspects on separately are merely dogs barking up the wrong tree (or the half-tree?). Once one begins to achieve the higher characters, it becomes clear that all those programs and books were referring to different aspects of the same state of mind. All those rules to follow finally dumb down to this two-step algorithm.

The Original Way of Being

I used to believe my spiritual awakening took place in my thirteenth year, when I found that video on the internet about making Psi balls. It excited me with the discovery of a preternatural world around the real me, invisible to the eyes. The seed was watered, it sprouted, the journey begun.

But that was not the case. The metaphor is wrong. The mission was…to solve a puzzle. The first piece had already come into my life before that incident.

Vipassana. The meditation that Gautam Buddha left behind. I’d learned the breathing meditation, but had soon developed an aversion to it, due to what things it promised in words: serenity, emptiness, peace of mind by silence of thoughts. I…channeled poetry. A heart full of turmoil and mind full of words prodded the Greater Force to puke some. I did not wish for those to go away. I imagined an empty mind, full of boredom. Halo effect.

Instead I sought the meditations that Paramhansa Yogananda had spread around. Hong Sau, the third eye meditation. The real deal. I always loved the word Hedonism; now like a green plant making its own food I manufactured my own drug to induce ecstasy.

On paper it seems so simple. And so does it seem when I seek to remember all I did. And so does it seem when I seek to remember all I did. All else is irrelevant now. But it was not then. Four years full of unfocused, excited bustle. To reach the present plateau.       

      

Let me break the chronological flow of relevant history and tell you first the climax.

Get on the internet and check: www.ananda.org. Try and find the meditation it teaches. That is my holy grail. But only logically, on paper. The Revelation came from many different places and took a form of a thought-archetype in me.

The word thought-archetype is, like Jung’s classic archetype, an ideal. However, unlike Jung’s archetype, which is essentially an unconscious personality made of totally congruent traits, a thought-archetype is a spring of similar ideas. It is an abstract form of ideology. A person with a specific thought-archetype can identify if an idea comes from it, but most probably cannot say how. 

1. As I remember it, the first thing that helped build this spring is the book “You are the World” by Jiddu Krishnamurti. So, I found that book and inside was a series of talks he delivered at various universities. They did not even have topics at the beginning of each transcription. But I read the three talks at Brandeis University, some of the talks at the University of California, Berkeley.

Here is what got to me: Observing. Krishnamurti was clearly self-realized in his lifetime of talks; he knew Superconsciousness. He spoke of an urgent need of “the vast space in the brain in which there is unimaginable energy”. So he was imparting some ideas about that state.

One seeks to look at oneself with accumulated knowledge about oneself, and from there learn something new about oneself. That is impossible. The Conscious Mind, its colored eyes, its symbols of encryption and decryption, for every thing. That limits us. In order to learn, we have to be free of this and observe everything as is. Observation without the prejudice of thought.

When one is aware of inattention, then there is attention. That is what he says. In his third talk at Brandeis, he spoke of meditation. The word has been stereotyped as Zen monks sitting, shut-eye, absolutely straight and unmoving. India and Asia have monopolized it. Then he says that meditation is not a retreat into a room, an escape from reality. It is not a fragment of life. Abruptly he moves to “must be” and “cannot be”, perhaps he was reaching realms of information he could not divulge to the uninitiated. One must be sensitive and intelligent, capable of logical, sequential perception that is in no way neurotic of distorted, and must be disciplined. He goes on to say that Discipline is not an act of drilling but learning, that the very root of the word means “to learn”. In these words he is explaining what can be explained in words regarding the Way.

I began testing this state of awareness. I put aside the old pattern of a few months of inspired meditation routine and then naught. From all else he said, and my own small experiences with the importance of thoughtless activity in order to achieve goals, I just did the thing. Observation. I did not try to think about it end-to-end, all the possibilities, trying to fit other practices in that period of inspiration. I was not doing sit-down, full-on, meditation, those days. I did not plan to. I just assumed an observant awareness.

2. And then I was watching David Gilmour play his song “Marooned” on the internet. I was also reading the comments, and then there was one that asked readers to go to truthcontest.com if they wanted to find the “Truth”. It was a unique concept. A competition to find out the Ultimate Truth, with no winner. There were three entries. I read the one the comment suggested: The Present.

We are awareness. Anything that we do happens in the present moment. We cannot change the past, and total absorption in the future is fruitless. “Time is a series of present moments moving through space.”

Consciousness is a many-layered thing. In the same stream of consciousness, there is a part that thinks thoughts, words. The conscious mind. However, we are too much absorbed and identified with the thoughts to be truly aware. We need to know and realize that there is a part of us that hears these thoughts. The Soul.

This was the most important information that helped to give me understanding of what I seek to explain. I tried to be aware of my real self with this true direction and could discern, finally, a place within me that was entirely devoid of all impression, all thought. The pure, untainted awareness that eternally, inflexibly, observes and observes. To the extent that we fail to acknowledge its presence. The very consistency of its quality makes it possible to believe that it is eternal. True consciousness is as consistent in its quality as an inanimate object. True life is as still as death.

3. After experiencing my real self, everything else began to connect. I of course found the ananda.org website, learned my holy grail. Here are some dots that connected:

a. It was amazing when I remembered that it had been coming to me automatically since quite some time. I’d quit the breathing meditation on principle, but when I sat down to do the 3^rd eye meditation, my focus would inexplicably seek to include the awareness of my breath…my head was spinning with everything I understood. 

b. Even the ananda.org meditation came to me after this series of videos I watched… “How to achieve superconsciousness”, that taught what it claimed was the “true” meditation, which was actually just the breathing meditation. This series of videos presented the breathing meditation in an entirely spiritual light, explaining the silencing of thoughts as an increased flow of life force into the brain, and the major stages induced by that simple meditation were said to be first a lack of dependence on breath, whereupon the focus automatically shifts to the 3^rd-eye region­, and after this, astral projection. These videos removed my aversion to the breathing meditation in a way the ananda.org instruction words could not—it was, I realized, only to ready me for the ananda.org meditation, make me accept it fully.

c. I understood with firsthand experience parts of the theory of Sigmund Freud, regarding the Conscious, Preconscious and Unconscious Minds. I realized the Unconscious, into which there is no looking, is in fact the Original Self, or the Soul. 

d. I’d been told that the breathing meditation had been in fact used by many people before Gautam Buddha to achieve Nirvana. But Gautam Buddha devised a way to teach that meditation when the others could not. I’d wondered how they were unable to teach that simple thing. Now I have an idea. The “meditation”, or the Original Way of Being, comes to one’s understanding in a very garbled manner. Those masters before Gautam Buddha could have done the breathing meditation, but not realized that the Way works just as well if only applied on the breathing phenomenon. Gautam Buddha localized, with understanding, the Way to breathing and in the greater meditation of Vipassana, to the bodily sensation. The two rules of the breathing meditation, shuddha ra swabhabhic, translating to “pure and natural”, are congruent with the original awareness: Pure means pure observation of breathing without any associated thought—this overrides the thoughts which ruin pure observation, and Natural means to take no control of the breathing patter but simply to observe its natural pace, which again rounds up to the Way.

e. I understood with deeper insight passages from Paulo Coelho’s book The Witch of Portobello that might have seemed just a jugglery of words without true meaning to one who understands less. In fact many more such “jugglery of words” that we have been hearing connected. Here is a major passage from the book:

“Try to feel good about yourself even when you feel like the least worthy of creatures. Reject all those negative thoughts and let the Mother take possession of your body and soul; surrender yourself to dance or to silence or to ordinary, everyday activities—like taking your son to school, preparing supper, making sure the house is tidy. Everything is worship if your mind is focused on the present moment.”

What else is this than the Original Way of Being?

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Such is how the Original Way of Being came into my life and understanding. The incidents might strictly speaking, not be in actual chronological order. But I won’t make sure.It would be better perhaps if I kept it in the form that best allows the information to organize sensibly in the mind.

What It Means to "Open Up"

Grace. Amidst the increasing number of ever new revelations about the self and other things, that construct the golden perspective more and more as a holistic self-knowledge, and thus a pathway to the Void, is the knowing of the power of Grace.

The Void, the unfathomable, incomprehensible thing that has no formula to be found, unless it wants to be found. In my eureka day of the Original Way of Being revelation, I found what I found, but soon I began to try to forcefully fit the experience of the Void in that criteria. That is what I realized. That is why the Void began to get elusive.

I say, the thing that is sought is Infinity! What foolish method would entail searching for a specific manifestation of it, when it can come in all imagined and unimagined ways? Infinity! One has to keep all doors open and accept everything—only will the Infinity enter. Resistance to evils is resistance to infinity. Expectation of a narrow form of Infinity is stopping from the rest of the infinite creative variety of Infinity from Being; observer effects in quantum physics.

I say, let us keep no expectations. Expectations mean to be choosy about what doors we open; and that too, only those that the feeble human mind can name and comprehend. Expectations hearken either to a past memory or a non-existent imagined experience. Let us be in the Present, as I’ve already said. Let us let go, as I already said.

And then, with all doors open, we call out to our guest the Void. Again, we have to let go of everything. I may say that the Void is in the silence of the inner voice; if one can hear it as one hears outer silence, then one finds the Void. I may say that the Void is in the darkness of the inner sight; when the inner eye, Imagination, does not construct an image, if one can see the darkness as one sees the outer darkness, then one finds the Void.

But then one can begin to quantify the Void: as sound, as sight. It is a grave danger. Again, we have to let everything go. Inwardly call, Oh, Divine, Grace Me! And let a Void dawn in the awareness, but it is neither sight, nor sound, not sensation, not emotion. It is the Incomprehensible. I say, it is incomprehension itself. Only by opening to everything can we find the Void.

The Observer Effects in quantum physics refers to an observation made by quantum physicists regarding the nature of quantum matter: that a matter is influenced by the observer, invariably, in the way that the observer seeks to observe the matter. When an observer seeks to pay attention to one particular character of a matter, it does not put the other characters out of focus; it renders them nonexistent.

When one seeks the Infinity, one should truly seek the infinity. Infinity cannot be comprehended by the mind: one cannot find it by expecting one thing, or two things in contemplation. One should not rationalize or place in one’s logical mindframe what is inside, for when that is escaped, the Infinity is free to come in its real form. Observer Effects… what the observer wants to see is what exists. Close your eyes and focus on where you think the Void tentatively feels. It would most probably be not on the skin but on the inside. Just feel that whatever is there is the Void: since there is no sensation on the inside, that no-sensation becomes filled with a force that is simply characterized by an incomprehension.

Focus on the Present; feel that the Void is already there. Again, I say, that trying to narrow it down does not work. That is where the Grace works. Nothing might ever work. One just lets go, and realizes according to the framework what one learned, how it worked; but for someone else, it might not work. Grace is the only way.