https://www.scribd.com/read/261203054/Gospel-of-Sri-Ramakrishna’
http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/gork/gork02.htm
AWARENESS
Don’t regard the abidance as awareness as a part-time activity. You must have a life long commitment to get yourself established in it. At all times keep moving back to awareness, your source, and do not let anything divert or distract you from this. To constantly recognize your true being as awareness is the only way. If this is not continuous enough the other part of the mind becomes predominant.
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Be conscious of yourself as Awareness alone, watch all the thoughts come and go. Clouds come and go in the sky but the appearance and disappearance of the clouds doesn’t affect the sky. Your real nature is like the sky, like space. Just remain like the sky and let thought-clouds come and go. If you cultivate this attitude of indifference towards the mind, gradually you will cease to identify yourself with it.
Live as Awareness throughout the day while doing all other activities. Abidance in Awareness is a process by which attention is kept focused on the substratum instead of the names and forms that are habitually imposed on it. You are Awareness. Abiding as Awareness, you will realize everything as Awareness.
Outwardly one should do whatever actions are necessary, but inwardly one should always be aware of the centre of pure Awareness. You can simply relax as this awareness and just be indifferent to whatever happens in it.Your responsibility in this life is only to abide as awareness and not worry about the outer events over which you have no control.
Don’t regard the abidance as awareness as a part-time activity. You must have a life long commitment to get yourself established in it. At all times keep moving back to awareness, your source, and do not let anything divert or distract you from this. To constantly recognize your true being as awareness is the only way. If this is not continuous enough the other part of the mind becomes predominant. Never leave awareness, always keep it in the foreground and everything else you do in the background. Holding awareness in the foreground you will do everything exactly as it has to be done.
Let go of all the things that you pretend to believe are important in your daily life and instead focus on abiding as awareness all day and see what happens. Go deeply into this feeling of the open, awake, spacious, heartful awareness that you are. Be aware of it so strongly and so intensely that no other thoughts have the energy to arise and distract you. If you hold this feeling long enough and strongly enough, the false ‘I’ will vanish leaving only the unbroken awareness of the Reality, Consciousness itself.
In the very depths of your being deep within, the Divine Presence is permanently there, luminous and peaceful, full of love and wisdom. It is there so that you may unite with it and it may transform you into a luminous and radiant Awareness.
The last stage of this perfection will come when you are completely identified with the Divine Mother and feel yourself no longer to be another and separate being, instrument, servant or worker but truly a child and eternal portion of her consciousness and force. Always she will be in you and you in her; it will be your constant, simple and natural experience that all your thought and seeing and action, your every breathing or moving come from her and are hers. You will know and see and feel that you are a person and power formed out of herself, put out from her for the play and yet always safe in her, being of her being, consciousness of her consciousness, force of her force, Ananda of her Ananda. When this condition is entire and her supramental energies can freely move you, then you will be perfect in divine works; knowledge, will, action will become sure, simple, luminous, spontaneous, flawless, an outflow from the Supreme, a divine movement of the Eternal.
The Secret Knowledge
PART FOUR
All here where each thing seems its lonely self
Are figures of the sole transcendent One:
Only by him they are, his breath is their life;
An unseen Presence moulds the oblivious clay.
A playmate in the mighty Mother’s game,
One came upon the dubious whirling globe
To hide from her pursuit in force and form.
A secret spirit in the Inconscient’s sleep,
A shapeless Energy, a voiceless Word,
He was here before the elements could emerge,
Before there was light of mind or life could breathe.
Accomplice of her cosmic huge pretence,
His semblances he turns to real shapes
And makes the symbol equal with the truth:
He gives to his timeless thoughts a form in Time.
He is the substance, he the self of things;
She has forged from him her works of skill and might:
She wraps him in the magic of her moods
And makes of his myriad truths her countless dreams.
The Master of being has come down to her,
An immortal child born in the fugitive years.
In objects wrought, in the persons she conceives,
Dreaming she chases her idea of him,
And catches here a look and there a gest:
Ever he repeats in them his ceaseless births.
He is the Maker and the world he made,
He is the vision and he is the Seer;
He is himself the actor and the act,
He is himself the knower and the known,
He is himself the dreamer and the dream.
There are Two who are One and play in many worlds;
In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met
And light and darkness are their eyes’ interchange;
Our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and embrace,
Our deeds, our hopes are intimate to their tale;
They are married secretly in our thought and life.
The universe is an endless masquerade:
For nothing here is utterly what it seems;
It is a dream-fact vision of a truth
Which but for the dream would not be wholly true,
A phenomenon stands out significant
Against dim backgrounds of eternity;
We accept its face and pass by all it means;
A part is seen, we take it for the whole.
Thus have they made their play with us for roles:
Author and actor with himself as scene,
He moves there as the Soul, as Nature she.
Here on the earth where we must fill our parts,
We know not how shall run the drama’s course;
Our uttered sentences veil in their thought.
Her mighty plan she holds back from our sight:
She has concealed her glory and her bliss
And disguised the Love and Wisdom in her heart;
Of all the marvel and beauty that are hers,
Only a darkened little we can feel.
He too wears a diminished godhead here;
He has forsaken his omnipotence,
His calm he has foregone and infinity.
He knows her only, he has forgotten himself;
To her he abandons all to make her great.
He hopes in her to find himself anew,
Incarnate, wedding his infinity’s peace
To her creative passion’s ecstasy.
Although possessor of the earth and heavens,
He leaves to her the cosmic management
And watches all, the Witness of her scene.
A supernumerary on her stage,
He speaks no words or hides behind the wings.
He takes birth in her world, waits on her will,
Divines her enigmatic gesture’s sense,
The fluctuating chance turns of her mood,
Works out her meanings she seems not to know
And serves her secret purpose in long Time.
As one too great for him he worships her;
He adores her as his regent of desire,
He yields to her as the mover of his will,
He burns the incense of his nights and days
Offering his life, a splendour of sacrifice.
A rapt solicitor for her love and grace,
His bliss in her to him is his whole world:
He grows through her in all his being’s powers;
He reads by her God’s hidden aim in things.
Or, a courtier in her countless retinue,
Content to be with her and feel her near
He makes the most of the little that she gives
And all she does drapes with his own delight.
A glance can make his whole day wonderful,
A word from her lips with happiness wings the hours.
He leans on her for all he does and is:
He builds on her largesses his proud fortunate days
And trails his peacock-plumaged joy of life
And suns in the glory of her passing smile.
In a thousand ways he serves her royal needs;
He makes the hours pivot around her will,
Makes all reflect her whims; all is their play:This whole wide world is only he and she.
(I don’t seem to be able to post the link here – trick: if you go to the left column and enter “Bohm” into the search bar, you’ll get to this page. I doubt if any other comments will ever mention Bohm’s name, so that should be a surefire way to get to the page)
NOTE: People often take suggestions for dialog to be woefully Pollyannish in the extreme times we’re living in. Please, in reading the post, take time to reflect before responding if you think that way – I’m not suggesting we should not fight. If we need to fight aggressively to retrieve the country from the insanity it is engulfed in, I’m completely fine with that. I’m suggesting we consider the very difficult task of holding two quite disparate attitudes – (a) whatever toughness and aggressiveness is needed; AND (b) a dialogic approach as well.
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We had our in-person Rational Republicans meetup this past Wednesday, August 22, 2018.
Gina Collias, as usual, had fascinating questions to ask. At one point, I asked her, “Could you please review again the core purpose of this group?”
She gave a wonderful, very articulate answer. What I took away from it was this: “There is a significant majority in this country, that are the ‘forgotten middle’ – center, center right and center left. RR aims to speak to those people, and to give them a voice.” And she went on to say her vision includes not just the Asheville group and the Facebook RR page, but groups (in person groups!) around the country that meet and bring people together – people of different views, even radically different views (and races and genders and ethnicities and religions and more) on the basis of care, respect and (my phrase, not hers) “deep listening.”
I added that one thing I see that is missing is a “practice.” By “practice” i mean guidelines for dialog. The Quakers, the Buddhist group “Insight Dialog” (created by Gregory Kramer), David Bohm’s dialog group, and many others have developed excellent techniques and practices to foster gentle, caring listening and dialog. I believe Parker Palmer may have some techniques along similar lines, and I’m sure many here know of others.
I particularly think that Carl Rogers’ “reflective listening” (which almost all psychotherapists learn at some point in their practice, and the best ones employ regularly) is one of the most powerful foundations for dialog.
I’ll be the first to admit that I fail at it regularly (at least some folks here have seen me fail spectacularly – two particular occasions here in just the last 3 days) but nevertheless, I do try. I’m also going to try from time to time to put up references to the above techniques.
I just thought of posting now because I came across this wonderful statement from John Kasich and thought it spoke directly to the heart of our problem and why we so desperately need dialog:
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Here’s Kasich’s comment.
I think what’s fundamentally changed our country is that many people have not come to understand what faith is, which is loving your neighbor, elevating others, sometimes in front of yourself, putting yourself in other people’s shoes. And when we don’t do that, we lose the essence of our country. When my father and my uncle talked about the Great Depression, everybody pulled together. And what we’re seeing now is people pulling apart rather than coming together. And I think that’s an element of religiosity. If you’re a humanist, I love you anyway because, you know, you believe in making a better tomorrow. But we need the compass back.”
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I love that particularly – “when my father and uncle talked about the Great Depression, everybody pulled together.” I don’t know if that was true in all cases, but it spoke to me of times in my life (which started about 11-12 years after the Great Depression was over) when people of all different kinds pulled together.
One of the most powerful times like that was in the few days after 9/11. Jan (my wife) was a few blocks away when the towers were hit, and I was stuck up on the Bronx, unable to contact her and unable even to get back to Manhattan. When we finally met up later that day, all traffic below 14th street (we lived a few blocks south of 14th, with a view of the Twin Towers from our kitchen window) had stopped. There was a profound stillness in the air, and a deep sense of “we’re all in this together.”
Two evenings later, we attended a talk given by spiritual activist Satish Kumar. He was only in town because all flights had been temporarily canceled and he decided he had to offer something while he was there. He gave a beautiful talk, and another man, a philosophy professor, spoke as well.
The professor noted that all over Manhattan, there were fire-stations and other impromptu settings where people had put up photos of the first responders who had died trying to rescue people, and there were thousands of flowers, wreaths and other mementos celebrating their bravery.
As the professor told this story, we were all gently tearing up.
And he concluded:
“New York City has become a shrine.”
It is such a profound loss that we didn’t take that opportunity to bring the nation together, to realize, as Obama proclaimed in 2004, that this is not the liberal states of america and it is not the conservative states of america but, the United States of America.
METHOD:
1. Deep relaxation (use Ujayi, any form of brief breath holding, or spinal breathing with Ujayi and possibly mantra if that helps – these breathing exercises are my own addition – I find using drone music of some kind is almost essential for success in WILD)
2. Observe spontaneously arising hypnagogic images. DON’T STRAIN!! With as little effort as possible. if you aren’t aware of anything, you can try listening effortless for sounds and noticing abstract light phenomena, or “pretend” (as effortlessly as possible) to “visualize” (just take some place, like your home or neighborhood, that you’re very familiar with and take an imaginary walk, around there, you’ll soon realize you are visualizing then let go and see what arises)
3. This is the crucial part. I’ve been reading material on lucid dreams for almost 50 years, have had lucid dreams since a little child and did my masters research on lucid dreams, teaching 12 people to successfully have them from 1 to 4 times a week, with 6 learning WILD as well. I may have stumbled on this next part of Brian’s technique once or twice but i have NEVER seen this anywhere else and it’s been a key to more frequent success. Once you have succeeded in calmly, in a relaxed state, almost effortlessly (this relaxed effortlessness is crucial) observed spontaneously arising images, focus in on one of them.
If you know Culadasa’s distinction between selective attention and peripheral awareness, or even better, Les Fehmi’s “immersed” vs “Detached” attention, what you’re doing now is highly focused, but immersed rather than detached (this is very much like Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow state” as well).
What Brian describes, and what I’ve found – to my amazement – is that it seems like this focusing in on the details of one particular image, if you can sustain it (you keep focusing on all the details with increasing interest if you can – that’s what makes it “immersed” attention) you start to feel like you are “pulled” INTO the scene. If you can sustain awareness (Culadasa’s peripheral awareness, balanced with narrow, selective attention- balancing left mode and right mode, as Iain McGilchrist would put it) you’ll find yourself “In” the dream.
Brian suggests, and I pretty much agree, that you should try this at least a few weeks to see if it works for you. All the other things about lucid dreaming can be helpful – keeping a dream journal to make your non lucid dreams more vivid, doing “reality checks” (which are described VERY well in Alan’s “Dreaming Yourself Awake”), MILD (see LaBerge) etc.
I’d love to hear how this works if anybody wants to try it for a few weeks. I’m planning to put up some “drone” music that I find helpful, and you’re welcome to use it for free. I’m also very interested in finding how people use music and if it helps.
If you do use your own music, you might try bringing your attention, during the relaxation phase, into different parts of the body, and “feeling” the music vibrating and filling the whole area, until it fills the whole body and spreads beyond. This “vibrating” sensation will be VERY helpful for the next phase.
Also, if you’re having trouble visualizing, you might look up Helen Bonny’s “Guided Imagery and Music,” for help in seeing how music can dramatically facilitate the awareness of hynagogic imagery.
Good luck and sweet dreams!!
August 10, 2018
I used to have about a dozen essays at http://www.infinityfoundation.com. If someone asked about one of them, I would just send them a link. But Rajiv (the creator of that site) has taken down all the essays (mine and a few hundred more) he formerly hosted.
A few people in recent days have asked about various essays. I don’t have time to post them individually but I thought it might be nice to give links to essays that are still on various sites around the net.
Here are my essays from http://www.integralworld.net (a formerly pro-Ken Wilber site, now mostly a vociferous anti-Wilber and generally anti-integral site – very interesting place)
- Don Salmon, The Challenge of Writing about Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Psychology, March 2008
- Don Salmon, Integral Psychology Beyond Wilber-V: Inviting Open-Minded Skepticism of the Materialist View, June 2008
- Don Salmon, Shaving Science with Ockham’s Razor: What, if anything, does science tell us about reality?, September 2011
- Don Salmon, Shaving Visser, Goswami, Lane and Carter With Ockham’s Razor: With a little off the side for DeGracia and Huang, October 2011
- Don Salmon, The “Greg-Goode-and-Alan-Wallace-Wield-Ockham’s-nondual-Razor” Rondo, October 2011
- Don Salmon, Ken Wilber’s Evolutionary View Gets a Trim with Ockham’s Razor
- Part I: The Question of Direction in the Evolution of Consciousness, December 2011
- Part II: The Fractal Nature of the Evolution of Consciousness, January 2012
- Part III: The Emergence of Consciousness Over the Course of Evolution, March 2010
- Part IV: The emergence of consciousness in birds, mammals and primates, April 2012
- Don Salmon, The Conflict Between Soul and Ego in the Life of America, July 2012
- Don Salmon, The Feynman Delusion: The True Cause of Ecological Devastation and Worldwide Economic Collapse, August 2012
- Don Salmon, To David Lane, An Invitation to the Forum, September 2012
- Don Salmon, Shaving Science with Ockham’s Razor: The Sequel (or, “No, it was not written in support of any form of idealism”), April 2014
- Don Salmon, An Anti-Scientific Way of Viewing, A Response to David Lane’s Latest Posting, May 2014
Here are my blog posts from the Indian Psychology Institute (if you have trouble accessing these, just go back to http://www.ipi.org.in, choose the pulldown menu on the right – “Forum” and choose “Blogs.” Then scroll down and look on the right side where it says “Select Author” and choose my name and you’ll see all my blog posts.
Or just click this link: http://www.ipi.org.in/blogs/author/don/
Here’s another essay on the IPI site: http://ipi.org.in/texts/ip2/ip2-6.2-.php
That should be enough to keep y’all busy for a few centuries. I have digital copies of all the essays that were at the Infinity Foundation site and hope to get them up at some point.
Thanks for reading and as always, please write if you have any comments or questions (perhaps the best way to reach me is on the contact page at http://www.remember-to-breathe.org)
