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?

 ********

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.