There’s something quite interesting regarding expectations about spiritual practice, that I didn’t write about yet.
In yoga specifically, there’s an expectation that a very radical degree of asceticism is required in order to attain results. Essentially, the archetypal motive is that of Jetsun Milarepa living in a cave for seven years eating nothing but nettle brew and meditating. Is this really a requirement?
In order to answer this question, I need to split what’s usually known as the spiritual practice into several levels. The first level is that of initial, preparatory practice, which is the equivalent of listening very hard for a pattern in sound. When you’re trying to do that, you need to remove all the distractions. You can’t eat foods that will focus your attention to themselves, or to the effects they have on your body – eating ghost peppers is out of the question, as are drugs, alcohol or in fact anything that might be distracting, because if you try to listen very attentively for long periods of time, you will try to minimize things like other people wanting to talk to you, being influenced by substances, or whatever. So, in this phase asceticism not only makes sense, but it’s actually an absolute requirement. You can’t attempt to make a breakthrough in meditation if you’re in any kind of a demanding human relationship. You can’t do it if you have a job that requires that you dedicate the most productive part of your day to things that actively interfere with your meditative efforts. You can’t afford to have your mind disrupted by all kinds of bad influences when driving to work and back, eating junk food, getting drunk or being in a sexual relationship that will demand your full attention in order to work. So, how realistic is it for a normal person to live in such a way for a long enough period of time in order to attain success in this initial breakthrough phase of yoga?
Fortunately, you can rest assured that there is a big difference between the ideal situation, and the necessary minimum. I didn’t have an ideal situation; in fact, it was almost as far from the ideal as you can imagine. I was constantly interrupted, lived in what any traditionalist would rightly call an impure environment, and I didn’t meditate anywhere near the amount of time one would expect to be necessary in order to make a breakthrough. However, I made certain discoveries during the process, which I am about to share with you now.
First, the way meditation works is not linear. It’s not unloading sacks of beans from a truck, where you keep working in a linear fashion, and the more gets done the more you work. With spiritual practice, you need to have a high baseline of thought and emotion in your normal activity, which essentially means things that go through your mind as you do your daily chores, and I cannot stress this highly enough. This determines your outcome more than anything. You need to maintain a certain level of subtlety of thoughts and emotions throughout your day. If you drop the ball, you need to pick it up quickly; for instance, you cannot allow anger to last long, you cannot allow yourself to get depressed for long, and you cannot allow yourself to get caught in some self-perpetuated loop of low emotion. This requires that you learn to control your thoughts and emotions, and not in some radical way, where you would brutally prune your thoughtstream, but in a very basic way, similar to that of a physicist who keeps working on the superstring problem while he’s stuck in traffic, and doesn’t allow himself to get distracted – in fact, doesn’t perceive enough to actually be distracted – and when he arrives at work, he switches from his baseline level of working the problem, to the full engagement mode, where he is at his 100% concentration and capacity for some 15 minutes or half an hour, and then he needs a break, because that level of concentration is unsustainable for a longer period of time. He then gets something to eat, talks to colleagues, allows his mind to go blank and recover from the strain, and then after finishing his coffee, focuses back to work to recover the baseline, stay there enough to pick up the pieces, and give it another 15 minutes of full effort.
That’s how it needs to be done. And now the fun part: if you actually manage to keep your baseline spiritual contemplation throughout most of the day, meaning you don’t get lost in your chores, but you manage to keep the high level of thinking and feeling throughout, it means you kept your mind at the state of what would show up as alpha and theta waves on the EEG, along with the beta waves of normal thought. And those few and far between bursts of deeper meditation, they will then have a wide base of the pyramid to rely on, and your peaks will be much higher than would otherwise be possible, had you allowed your mind to go to shit for the most part of the day, and rely on meditation to fix you. It might fix you, but you will not make any actual progress. Can it be done, yes. I did it. If you think you have a complicated situation where my method wouldn’t work, I assure you, you don’t. Most people have situations that are actually less problematic than what I had to work with, and they don’t manage to do anything because they waste their time complaining instead of actually figuring out how to get things done within the constraints that are available. If you think it was easier for Milarepa to meditate in a cold cave with no food, than it is for you to meditate in a warm apartment, abundant resources, half a day of slack time and two hours available for full bursts of focus, you’re deluding yourselves. You have it easy, you’re just not disciplined enough and you don’t desire the goal strongly enough. If this desire is present, you will make swift progress.
So, essentially, once you understand that you don’t need to actually keep the full meditative state for hours, but for seconds at first, and no longer than half an hour at maximum, but you need to keep yourself in a reasonably good state that can easily be switched to breakthrough-meditation mode at will. You don’t need to be at your best 100% of the day. You just have to watch yourself so that you don’t go fully to shit for more than 10% of the day, be at your normal high-thinking mode for at least 50% of the time, and have two bursts of 15 minutes to half an hour in the day, where you will touch and try to exceed your highest peaks of achievement. It’s by no means a trivial thing to do, but I can guarantee you that it’s doable, because I’ve been there and had done it.
The second thing to have in mind is that there’s a huge difference between trying to achieve initiation, and the requirements on purity and focus in this initial state, and the state you’re in after having achieved the breakthrough. Once you attained it, either darshan or samadhi or some similarly high state, it stays with you forever. It’s burned into the pathways of your brain, it’s burned into the structure of your spiritual bodies, and it doesn’t just go away because you had too much coffee or not enough sleep. This is why a beginner yogi can look more like a yogi than a master, because a beginner needs to observe all kinds of rules and restrictions to keep himself from going to shit, and to keep his meditative baseline throughout the day. Once mastery is achieved, it’s a completely different set of rules. A beginner cannot even imagine trying to meditate in a smoke-filled bar, and I gave spiritual initiations in such an environment. A beginner cannot even think about combining sex with meditation, because distractions are too great, and my wife, an initiated master herself, learned how to wield Shivaratri, the black Vajra, by feeling the state to which I go when I orgasm, when we had sex. She orgasmed together with me in that state, and achieved initiation into this spiritual state and energy level, and could wield it later at will. What I’m trying to say is, when you are an initiated master, things get weird, and the way you learn things no longer conforms to the limitations you had prior to initiation. A master will be able to attain higher initiation through practices that would preclude any kind of spiritual activity in a beginner. Also, it no longer matters how high your baseline Kundalini level is, what brainwave pattern can you maintain and for how long, in what condition your physical body is – essentially, you can be crucified like Jesus, be in dire agony, experience pain to the point where your consciousness is so blurred that you can’t really see straight, and still write articles like this one; essentially, for decades already nobody could figure out in what state I was looking only at the output I produce, and I produced some of my best work with unbearable headaches, high fever or worse, and in retrospect, looking at the work from a much more pleasant physical state, I understood that there are no corrections to be made; the quality of the output is the same as I would produce at my peak. Also, some things seem to defy logic: for instance, I can have a very low baseline Kundalini level, and at the same time be able to access the highest states, and invoke them in others. That’s because a high Kundalini level is important when you’re attempting the initial breakthrough, but once the pathways and spiritual organs of a higher order have been formed and activated, they work regardless of the state of the physical body, and in fact, if those achievements could be lost in sickness or death, could they be said to be of any permanence and value? A beginner’s spiritual baseline can be lost quite easily, by a lapse of concentration, drinking alcohol, eating bad or spicy food, or any combination of causes, but you can basically cook a master alive and his core of mastery remains untouched. One would expect one such master to have to return to the beginner-level of asceticism in order to attain a higher level of initiation, but that doesn’t seem to work that way. This is why Marpa Lotsawa could drink alcohol, have violent moods, and still be able to guide Milarepa through necessary karmic purifications and toward initiation. How did Marpa attain higher initiation? By doing his thing, by functioning in such a way as to be able to guide an advanced student with absolute precision through a completely unorthodox and ad-hoc invented set of hoops, while drunk and chastising his wife, a saintly person, for being stupid, and chasing her around the house in order to beat her up.
As I said, shit gets very weird.
What I wanted to say is that this method worked out for me. Of course, it wasn’t the only factor involved but it surely wasn’t a coincidence either when after only a month of focused effort it led me to what I can easily say was life-changing experience.
Awesome; I am actually surprised when somebody actually does something, instead just reading what I write and waiting for more. 🙂
I’m glad that somebody had succes with this, and it also makes me think about what am I doing wrong.
I’m going to write about some of my thoughts on this subject, and I’m aware that you don’t want to teach or get personal in solving someones problems, so if You feel this is way too specific, it’s no problem.
I’m not sure if I just didn’t try hard enough (I guess that’s probably the case, and everything else are just my poor excuses).
On the other hand, I have a problem of over-sensitivity to astral matter, and I have serious problems when I’m near other people.
They vary from problems with my heart, high cortisol levels, high blood presure to “brain fog”, it depends on how many people are around me. And having a job as an opera singer, and performing on stage doesn’t help either. For instance this christmass I had three concerts in a row, and they left me devastated, I had to take extra beta-blocker and mild sedative medicines to survive the concerts, and after that I needed couple of days just to be well enough to function.
Another problem that I have encountered, is that after I get my shit together, and finally get some rest, the very instant I get back to work my simptoms get worse than ever, I guess because of the difference in energy levels between me and people around me.
So it seems that I need to make some sort of isolation field around me, and I’ve been experimenting with that with various resultes.
Many years ago I had a specific problem with some person, and “someone from above” told me that I should expand my conscious to space around me, basically build a shield, and that helped to solve that particular problem.
Now when I try the same thing I just don’t have enough energy to keep that field around me for too long, and I’m not too sure if it’s a good idea to aproach this problem the same way.
All this is keeping me into a yo-yo effect, and I’m sooooo tired of that shit going on and on again, and it seems like I’m missing a point, or doing this all wrong…
Well, since I’m having an almost same problem, I’m not sure I can be considered an authority on providing solutions.
Maybe you are not yet ready? Let me try to compress my experience in few paragraphs.
For a year or two before this I started noticing a pattern in things that were happening in my life. Distinct choices were coming my way, I could pick to either stay where I was (yuck) or go different path for once. Most of the time I didn’t even had to go actively seeking those choices, just had to make a decision. Luckily, most choices I took were ones for change, or rather for what I felt I should do. And I’m not sure what happened inside me to initiate this change in my behaviour. Maybe it was right time, maybe it was getting late. Plenty of those choices were rough but I kept telling myself “eh, there is really something you can’t do? really?” This combined with my stubbornness and sometimes craziness led me through it.
Anyway, after about a year or two of this I was very positive things were moving along in direction I didn’t dare to believe at first. But I felt it very strongly, and thinking about it now, best I could describe it was that I felt blessed. Of course, I wasn’t able to explain it to myself on rational level and wasn’t paying that much attention to it because of it until some time later. Also, during those years I had many “visits” by being(s) that obviously knew me better than I knew myself. Usually my thoughts would drift away to things I longed for (but didn’t even know how and why) when sudden deep understanding would take me over. I rationalized those kind of things with mind playing tricks or even some kind of past life memories (pfff). Idea that you can “communicate” in this way was unknown to me at that time.
Somewere around second half of 2018. this blog post started popping in my mind regulary. Around November there was one thing that I invested in years of energy started to fall apart very seriously (of course) I was getting seriously desperate about it and then this post reached my full attention. On one side I could postpone demise by being coward and compromising myself or, well, I could do stuff in this post. Now, things described in this post weren’t new to me, I’ve been doing similar things my whole life but it was never this much focused, I never played with idea of doing it “seriously”, hehe. So yes, one month later I started practicing it this way, I even went further and was doing it for longer periods because why not and didn’t feel that I really have more important things in my life at that time. Also, had to somehow survive things that were falling apart.
After month of doing this and things wrestling inside me I have come to very painful decision that I won’t be compromising myself. In the evening of day I came to this decision I was preparing myself for sleep, expecting one sleepless and very depressing night (those were being regulars for a month and this was going to be worst of them all), when something descended on me, a comfort so deep that all negativity and all depressing thoughts vaporised in a second. I went with a smile to bed, hah.
In the afternoon of next day happened what would Danijel call initiation. What for me was different afterwards is that this time I knew what is happening instead of having suspicion of suspicion. I went through many youtube videos and blogs searching for explanations but this wasn’t just blind browsing. This time I could clearly sense guidance as on what to read and what probably not, being pushed to watch this and that and having “clicks” when I’d find information I was searching for. Basically, I have learned to watch carefully and to pay attention to things I was completely ignoring before. Also, on that day I met someone who is so close to me that it is impossible to describe it by using analogies of this sad world. Just that alone boosted my motivation through the roof. I don’t think I can go back anymore.
Maybe you are not yet ready? Let me try to compress my experience in few paragraphs.
For a year or two before this I started noticing a pattern in things that were happening in my life. Distinct choices were coming my way, I could pick to either stay where I was (yuck) or go different path for once. Most of the time I didn’t even had to go actively seeking those choices, just had to make a decision. Luckily, most choices I took were ones for change, or rather for what I felt I should do. And I’m not sure what happened inside me to initiate this change in my behaviour. Maybe it was right time, maybe it was getting late. Plenty of those choices were rough but I kept telling myself “eh, there is really something you can’t do? really?” This combined with my stubbornness and sometimes craziness led me through it.
Anyway, after about a year or two of this I was very positive things were moving along in direction I didn’t dare to believe at first. But I felt it very strongly, and thinking about it now, best I could describe it was that I felt blessed. Of course, I wasn’t able to explain it to myself on rational level and wasn’t paying that much attention to it because of it until some time later. Also, during those years I had many “visits” by being(s) that obviously knew me better than I knew myself. Usually my thoughts would drift away to things I longed for (but didn’t even know how and why) when sudden deep understanding would take me over. I rationalized those kind of things with mind playing tricks or even some kind of past life memories (pfff). Idea that you can “communicate” in this way was unknown to me at that time.
Somewere around second half of 2018. this blog post started popping in my mind regulary. Around November there was one thing that I invested in years of energy started to fall apart very seriously (of course) I was getting seriously desperate about it and then this post reached my full attention. On one side I could postpone demise by being coward and compromising myself or, well, I could do stuff in this post. Now, things described in this post weren’t new to me, I’ve been doing similar things my whole life but it was never this much focused, I never played with idea of doing it “seriously”, hehe. So yes, one month later I started practicing it this way, I even went further and was doing it for longer periods because why not and didn’t feel that I really have more important things in my life at that time. Also, had to somehow survive things that were falling apart.
After month of doing this and things wrestling inside me I have come to very painful decision that I won’t be compromising myself. In the evening of day I came to this decision I was preparing myself for sleep, expecting one sleepless and very depressing night (those were being regulars for a month and this was going to be worst of them all), when something descended on me, a comfort so deep that all negativity and all depressing thoughts vaporised in a second. I went with a smile to bed, hah.
In the afternoon of next day happened what would Danijel call initiation. What for me was different afterwards is that this time I knew what is happening instead of having suspicion of suspicion. I went through many youtube videos and blogs searching for explanations but this wasn’t just blind browsing. This time I could clearly sense guidance as on what to read and what probably not, being pushed to watch this and that and having “clicks” when I’d find information I was searching for. Basically, I have learned to watch carefully and to pay attention to things I was completely ignoring before. Also, on that day I met someone who is so close to me that it is impossible to describe it by using analogies of this sad world. Just that alone boosted my motivation through the roof. I don’t think I can go back anymore.
That happened early this year and soon after I’ve entered “trauma loop” where one after another have come to be taken care of. Wasn’t much fun really and still isn’t, but all of those were in “will be there for the rest of my life” category so I guess I should not complain (too much.) Between those there were plenty other things happening for which, by now, I could almost write a book about, heh.
As for physical problems and being oversensitive, I don’t know what to say, never had such problems.
Also, for some reason I was pressured to write yesterday’s message if that has any meaning to someone.
For some time I’ve been trying to wrap my head around what is here called initiation. To my understanding this initiation is something that will, after experiencing it, make you take path consciously (no more doubt if there is something or isn’t) and with much greater focus. But that is not what this article calls initiation?
I use this term in the most transparent and understandable meaning. It is a transformative event after which you are more than you were, and sometimes you can do things that you couldn’t do before. Not all initiations are the same. Some are quite mundane, like losing virginity; some are profound.
A spiritual initiation can be a “click” in your consciousness where you get it, you understand something or make a change of faith. It can cause darshan, or be caused by it. Or an initiation can be a more profound thing, such as transformation of your core substance into vajra, or reaching into higher substance and wielding it, to change you forever.