Prayers and Reflections

“If you are still trying, You arent…”

Concepts , Concepts , Concepts..
Shall we banish them for a while ?

Is there any Joy in any Concept ?
Do they not keep us bound
In the realm of words ?

Do we need to know
The chemical formula
Before tasting  sugar ??

–ramesh chivukula

“Atmanam viddhi-Know thyself. Each individual has to know himself. He has to know himself as the infinite, eternal and immortal
Consciousness. The concept of Infinity, Eternity and Immortality is
absolutely foreign to us. Why? The reason is quite simple. We live in
the body, rather than in the soul. To us the body is everything. There
is nothing and can be nothing beyond the body. The existence of the
soul we consider sheer imagination. But I assure you that the soul is
not imaginary. It is at once the life and the revelation of the Cosmic
Reality. Most of us live in the body, in the earthbound physical
consciousness. Our teacher is Darkness; our professor is Ignorance. But if ever we live in the soul, we shall see that our teacher is Vision
and our professor is Illumination.

“Life is effort.” So says the body. “Life is blessing.” So says the
soul. The human in man does not want to go beyond morality, society and humanity. The divine in man comes down from divinity into humanity, from unity into multiplicity.

Atmanam viddhi. Know thyself. The seers of the Upanishads not only
discovered this Truth Transcendental but offered it to the suffering,
crying and striving mankind. In order to know oneself, one has to
discover oneself first. What is self discovery? Self discovery is
God-Realisation.”

–Sri Chinmoy

http://www.srichinmoy.org/

“The divine manifestation is governed by a certain rhythm, which is present even in the minutest atom. This state of being knows no antitheses, it casts no shadows, and always brings forth itself. Good is not set against evil, nor beauty against ugliness, nor love against hatred, nor reality against delusion. The Gnosis does not have love; it does not radiate love; it IS love.”

- Jan van Rijckenborgh [The Chinese Gnosis ]

There is none dwelling in the house but God. When a man is awakened he
melts and perishes.

—Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi

The nature of being in tune with the infinite is this: comparing our soul to a string of an instrument, it is tied at both ends; one is the infinite, and the other is the finite. When a person is conscious all the time of the finite then he is tuned to the finite, while the one who is conscious of the infinite is tuned to the infinite. Being in tune with the former makes us limited, weak, hopeless, and powerless; but by being in tune with the latter we obtain the power and strength that will pull us through life in whatever adverse conditions may arise.

–From the Teachings of HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN

Man, of this nature is always astir; he is always busy, because he wants to do! The candidate on the path comes to fathom the mystery which lies in Lao-Tze’s words “not-doing”, not letting the I-being take precedence. It is He, the Lord of all Life, who fashions the willing and the doing in you. When the candidate is united again with “It”, with the path, with Tao, with the Gnosis, he has entered into a bond of voluntary obedience with the eternal, with the kingdom of God within him, with the Jesus-Man within him. Then it comes to pass that the other one, who cannot be explained from this nature, does, lives and is.”

- Catharose De Petri

There is a prevailing notion, that an identity exists between what
are called Initiatory states, and the mystical states.
These “mystical” states, incorrectly identified with the Grades of
Initiation, include such things as “ecstasy”-and the proponents of these
theories thereafter insist that these things are all availble to
visualizations, such as PET and MRI. Moreover, they argue that the
Initiatory Grades, being in their minds, equivalent to the states of
mysticism, can never be truly occupied permanemtly by the being, but
are merely fleeting “experiences”.

While we would agree that the states encountered by “mysticism” are
fleeting, and even that since they are psychic experineces, that they
can be observed via imagery techniques, we can not see how they are to be
identified with the Initiatory Grades, which speak of diverse other things.
Moreover, every traditional Initiatory doctrine notes not only an
ascent(“Realization”, and “Escape from the cosmos”), but a redescent, in which,
although the original individual being is
changed, nothing is lost of the Gnosis in the redescent (unlike
mysticism, where the experineces are but “memories”).

Doctrinaly, these differences are noted in many ways, but one way
of explaining it is in the Sufistic distinction bewteen “Hal”, and
“Maqqam”. Ibn Arabi, for example, goes to great lengths to explain the
distinction between temporary “states” (Hal), and totally aquired “Stations”
(Maqqam)–which are the objectives of the
Initiatory path.

Another illustration, is derived from geometry.
All of the states of being can be envisioned as points along some
indefinite verticle axis, which have, independently, their own
circumference (conceived of in the horizontal plane, or
intersecting the vertical plane, at specific given points).

Initiation involves something of a reversal…as opposed to
seeing independent concentric circles staked on one another,
along a verticle axis, the “circumference” (of what is really
sphereical), presents itself as a circle in the horizontal
plane, uniting all states in simultaniety and succesion.

There is thus an ascending path (the lowest point to the highest
point), and and a descending path (the highest point returning to the
lowest point)…occuring without interuption and continuity.
This is a partial explanation of the Cross, that forms the
emblem of “Rosicrucianism”.

In the Hermetic (Alchemical) symbolism, that Rosicrucianism
originated from, there are many similar examples of this
“return to earth”, invloving things such as birds having their
wings removed, among other symbols.

If I cut an apple up, a thousand times, and then cut it more, a trillion times.

I still am unable to see an apple tree.

One day a young man full of much wisdom and knowledge decided to share his wisdom with the world.

He went out and travelled the world and met many people.

Try as he might he couldnt find anyone willing to listen to his special revelations.

He knew in his heart of hearts that he knew the secret to God, the universe and everything.

Finally after 40 years of travelling, he was now an old man. He had found no one who would simply listen to his revelations.

Then he found a dog. A faithful brown dog. As the man spoke the dog stood to attention and listend.

The man knew, at last, he had an audience.

Decades of spiritual revelations and insight poured forth from the mans lips, the dog listend and stood staring as the man spoke.

Finally the man had finished and excalimed “Do you understand my friend!!????”

The dog looked at him, sat down, begain licking himself and fell asleep.
…………..

Moral of the story:

no matter how you try to conceptualise things, there will always be something outside the realm of concept. Thus like the dog there will always be something you cannot coneptualize. The dog was told the secrets of the universe, but being a dog it was beyond his conceptualisation. Thus like the dog, there will always be something beyond the realm of modern science as science like the dog only deals with a very narrow set of parameters. To state that spiritual truths, realities can be relegated to science is to treat such realities as the conciousness of a dog. Of course that is not to say that secretly pink elephants are on mars…but that a yard stick is a yard stick and until it breaks free of itself, it is nothign more than a yard stick.

“The other is not a person;
If you mistake it for another, you are already way off.
Your child has wandered outside -
Give it a call; when it sees your face it will follow its parent.”

………………..

Over the millenia sacred knowledge survived not because the
manuscrips by the masters were preserved in well-kept libraries,
but because the oral transmission and a living spiritual
presence continued, because in each traditional world in which such
knowledge survived the Logos continued to illuminate the minds and in
fact the whole being of certain people who belonged with all their
heart and soul to the religion lying at the heart of that
traditional world.

 
The realization of traditional knowledge could not but be accorded to
to a disciplined practice kept hidden…

 
The realization of sacred knolwdge, therefore, has always been tied
to the possibilities which tradition makes available. Obviously,
therefore, if sacred knowledge is taken seriously both in its
essence and as it has existed in human history, it cannot be
separted from revelation, religion, tradition, and orthodoxy.
The army of psuedo-masters who roam the earth today cannot make
a plant whose roots have been severed bloom no matter how many
beautiful words or ideas they seek to draw from the
inexhautable treasury of sapience to be found in both East and
West. The possibilities in the human intellect, which must be
actualized in order for man to attain in a real and permanent
manner sacred knowledge, cannot be actualized save by the Intellect,
the Logos, and those objective manifestaions of the Logos which
constitute the various religions.
Anyone who claims to perform such as a function by himself and
independent of a living tradition is in reality claiming to be
himself the Logos or the manifestation of the Logos…

 
(Knowledge and the Sacred , 290)”.

Don’t rest on your Laurels

It’s neither “bad,” at this time, nor is it “good.”

Don’t cut part of yourself off to make a patch,

Don’t react like this to make a change…

–Kuan Yin -The Quatrains (65) (The Kuan Yin Chronicles: The Myths and Prophecies of the Chinese Goddess of Compassion)