Swami Vivekananda (12 January 1863 -- 4 July 1902), born Narendranath Dutta was the chief disciple of the 19th century mystic Ramakrishna Paramahansa and the founder of the Ramakrishna Math and the Ramakrishna Mission. He is considered a key figure in the introduction of Hindu philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga to the "Western" World, mainly in America and Europe and is also credited with raising interfaith awareness, bringing Hinduism to the status of a major world religion during the end of the 19th century. Vivekananda is considered to be a major force in the revival of Hinduism in modern India. He is perhaps best known for his inspiring speech beginning with "Sisters and Brothers of America", through which he introduced Hinduism at the Parliament of the World's Religions at Chicago in 1893.
Sudden Awakening, Gradual Cultivation
The great twelfth-century Korean Zen Master Chinul’s, framework of teaching is Sudden Awakening, Gradual Cultivation:“Although we have awakened to original nature, beginningless habit energies are extremely difficult to remove suddenly. Hindrances are formidable and habits are deeply ingrained. So how could you neglect gradual cultivation simply because of one moment of awakening? After awakening you must be constantly on your guard. If deluded thoughts suddenly appear, do not follow after them…Then and only then will your practice reach completion.”We have probably all had moments of what we might call a sudden awakening to the truth of global warming: reading different newspaper accounts, watching Al Gore’s impactful film An Inconvenient Truth, times even of deriding those who don’t believe it’s happening—“How could they not believe the obvious scientific truth of it all?” Yet those moments can quickly pass, and the beginningless habit energies of forgetfulness, other desires, and basic ignorance re-surfaced once again. Here is where Chinul’s emphasis on gradual cultivation can be a template for our own awakening. We need to repeatedly remind ourselves of the situation and not settle for a generalized understanding that climate change is a problem. We need to be willing to make some effort to keep ourselves informed, over and over again, so that we don’t fall back into deluded thinking: “How could you neglect gradual cultivation simply because of one moment of awakening?”~Joseph Goldstein
The World Within - Carl Jung in His Own Words
"When you observe yourself withinyou see moving images, a world of images..."~ C.G. JungCarl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961), often referred to as C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology.Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes, and extraversion and introversion. His work has been influential not only in psychiatry but also in philosophy, anthropology, archeology, literature, and religious studies. He was a prolific writer, though many of his works were not published until after his death.The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy. Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development.Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, was developed from Jung's theory of psychological types.
Guided Meditation on the Body, Space, and Awareness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GSeWdjyr1c
A Guided Meditation on the Body, Space, and Awareness with Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.In this short guided meditation, Tibetan Buddhist meditation master Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche gives simple instructions for bringing awareness to the body, sensory experience, space, and finally to awareness itself. The main point of the practice is to fully embrace the present moment with mindfulness and awareness.To take a free, self-guided intro to meditation course, visit http://learning.tergar.org.Or, for more information about Mingyur Rinpoche and his teachings, please visithttp://www.tergar.org, where you will find information about events and retreats, and also a free online intro to meditation course. Enjoy!
Swami Vivekananda on the Vedanta Philosophy
The Vedantist says that a man is neither born nor dies nor goes to heaven, and that reincarnation is really a myth with regard to the soul. The example is given of a book being turned over. It is the book that evolves, not the man. Every soul is omnipresent, so where can it come or go? These births and deaths are changes in nature which we are mistaking for changes in us.Reincarnation is the evolution of nature and the manifestation of the God within.The Vedanta says that each life is built upon the past, and that when we can look back over the whole past we are free. The desire to be free will take the form of a religious disposition from childhood. A few years will, as it were, make all truth clear to one. After leaving this life, and while waiting for the next, a man is still in the phenomenal.We would describe the soul in these words: This soul the sword cannot cut, nor the spear pierce; the fire cannot burn nor water melt it; indestructible, omnipresent is this soul. Therefore weep not for it.If it has been very bad, we believe that it will become good in the time to come. The fundamental principle is that there is eternal freedom for every one. Every one must come to it. We have to struggle, impelled by our desire to be free. Every other desire but that to be free is illusive. Every good action, the Vedantist says, is a manifestation of that freedom.I do not believe that there will come a time when all the evil in the world will vanish. How could that be? This stream goes on. Masses of water go out at one end, but masses are coming in at the other end.The Vedanta says that you are pure and perfect, and that there is a state beyond good and evil, and that is your own nature. It is higher even than good. Good is only a lesser differentiation than evil.We have no theory of evil. We call it ignorance.So far as it goes, all dealing with other people, all ethics, is in the phenomenal world. As a most complete statement of truth, we would not think of applying such things as ignorance to God. Of Him we say that He is Existence, Knowledge, and Bliss Absolute. Every effort of thought and speech will make the Absolute phenomenal and break Its character.There is one thing to be remembered: that the assertion — I am God — cannot be made with regard to the sense-world. If you say in the sense-world that you are God, what is to prevent your doing wrong? So the affirmation of your divinity applies only to the noumenal. If I am God, I am beyond the tendencies of the senses and will not do evil. Morality of course is not the goal of man, but the means through which this freedom is attained. The Vedanta says that Yoga is one way that makes men realise this divinity. The Vedanta says this is done by the realisation of the freedom within and that everything will give way to that. Morality and ethics will all range themselves in their proper places.All the criticism against the Advaita philosophy can be summed up in this, that it does not conduce to sense-enjoyments; and we are glad to admit that.The Vedanta system begins with tremendous pessimism, and ends with real optimism. We deny the sense-optimism but assert the real optimism of the Supersensuous. That real happiness is not in the senses but above the senses; and it is in every man. The sort of optimism which we see in the world is what will lead to ruin through the senses.Abnegation has the greatest importance in our philosophy. Negation implies affirmation of the Real Self. The Vedanta is pessimistic so far as it negatives the world of the senses, but it is optimistic in its assertion of the real world.The Vedanta recognises the reasoning power of man a good deal, although it says there is something higher than intellect; but the road lies through intellect.We need reason to drive out all the old superstitions; and what remains is Vedantism. There is a beautiful Sanskrit poem in which the sage says to himself: "Why weepest thou, my friend? There is no fear nor death for thee. Why weepest thou? There is no misery for thee, for thou art like the infinite blue sky, unchangeable in thy nature. Clouds of all colours come before it, play for a moment, and pass away; it is the same sky. Thou hast only to drive away the clouds."We have to open the gates and clear the way. The water will rush in and fill in by its own nature, because it is there already.Man is a good deal conscious, partly unconscious, and there is a possibility of getting beyond consciousness. It is only when we become men that we can go beyond all reason. The words higher or lower can be used only in the phenomenal world. To say them of the noumenal world is simply contradictory, because there is no differentiation there. Man-manifestation is the highest in the phenomenal world. The Vedantist says he is higher than the Devas. The gods will all have to die and will become men again, and in the man-body alone they will become perfect.It is true that we create a system, but we have to admit that it is not perfect, because the reality must be beyond all systems. We are ready to compare it with other systems and are ready to show that this is the only rational system that can be; but it is not perfect, because reason is not perfect. It is, however, the only possible rational system that the human mind can conceive.It is true to a certain extent that a system must disseminate itself to be strong. No system has disseminated itself so much as the Vedanta. It is the personal contact that teaches even now. A mass of reading does not make men; those who were real men were made so by personal contact. It is true that there are very few of these real men, but they will increase. Yet you cannot believe that there will come a day when we shall all be philosophers. We do not believe that there will come a time when there will be all happiness and no unhappiness.Now and then we know a moment of supreme bliss, when we ask nothing, give nothing, know nothing but bliss. Then it passes, and we again see the panorama of the universe moving before us; and we know that it is but a mosaic work set upon God, who is the background of all things.The Vedanta teaches that Nirvâna can be attained here and now, that we do not have to wait for death to reach it. Nirvana is the realisation of the Self; and after having once known that, if only for an instant, never again can one be deluded by the mirage of personality. Having eyes, we must see the apparent, but all the time we know what it is; we have found out its true nature. It is the screen that hides the Self, which is unchanging. The screen opens, and we find the Self behind it. All change is in the screen. In the saint the screen is thin, and the reality can almost shine through. In the sinner the screen is thick, and we are liable to lose sight of the truth that the Atman is there, as well as behind the saint's screen. When the screen is wholly removed, we find it really never existed — that we were the Atman and nothing else, even the screen is forgotten.The two phases of this distinction in life are — first, that the man who knows the real Self, will not be affected by anything; secondly, that that man alone can do good to the world. That man alone will have seen the real motive of doing good to others, because there is only one, it cannot be called egoistic, because that would be differentiation. It is the only selflessness. It is the perception of the universal, not of the individual. Every case of love and sympathy is an assertion of this universal. "Not I, but thou." Help another because you are in him and he is in you, is the philosophical way of putting it. The real Vedantist alone will give up his life for a fellow-man without any compunction, because he knows he will not die. As long as there is one insect left in the world, he is living; as long as one mouth eats, he eats. So he goes on doing good to others; and is never hindered by the modern ideas of caring for the body. When a man reaches this point of abnegation, he goes beyond the moral struggle, beyond everything. He sees in the most learned priest, in the cow, in the dog, in the most miserable places, neither the learned man, nor the cow, nor the dog, nor the miserable place, but the same divinity manifesting itself in them all. He alone is the happy man; and the man who has acquired that sameness has, even in this life, conquered all existence. God is pure; therefore such a man is said to be living in God. Jesus says, "Before Abraham was, I am." That means that Jesus and others like him are free spirits; and Jesus of Nazareth took human form, not by the compulsion of his past actions, but just to do good to mankind. It is not that when a man becomes free, he will stop and become a dead lump; but he will be more active than any other being, because every other being acts only under compulsion, he alone through freedom.If we are inseparable from God, have we no individuality? Oh, yes: that is God. Our individuality is God. This is not the individuality you have now; you are coming towards that. Individuality means what cannot be divided. How can you call this individuality? One hour you are thinking one way, and the next hour another way, and two hours after, another way. Individuality is that which changes not — is beyond all things, changeless. It would be tremendously dangerous for this state to remain in eternity, because then the thief would always remain a thief and the blackguard a blackguard. If a baby died, he would have to remain a baby. The real individuality is that which never changes and will never change; and that is the God within us.Vedantism is an expansive ocean on the surface of which a man-of-war could be near a catamaran. So in the Vedantic ocean a real Yogi can be by the side of an idolater or even an atheist. What is more, in the Vedantic ocean, the Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, and Parsee are all one, all children of the Almighty God.
The Hopi Conception of Time
The Hopi's universe has only two great temporal forms: the manifest and the manifesting (or not yet manifest). Manifest is everything which we perceive with the senses; it is objective and past. The manifesting is purely subjective and is a content of our heart. It is simultaneously present in the "Heart of Nature," in the "powerful something" (a'ne himu) or Spirit of Breath (hi'wsn); it embraces everything of the future. The razor's edge situation between the subjective and its having become objective is what we would call the present. But the Hopi circumscribe it by indicating either that the causation of something has stopped or by an inceptive suffix telling us that the end situation is beginning to manifest. The Hopi verb tunátya means "think," "wish," and "cause"; it is the word for what is subjective and not yet manifest.The past, on the contrary, is manifest and perceptible until, in its most remote forms, it re-disappears into the realm of the Origins, into the time and place of myths. There it becomes again "subjective" because it is only known to our consciousness after having come to visible forms in the world. It is as if from the original divine "Heart of Nature" a stream of events would flow out, becoming manifest and thus already past, while ever-new events still press forward from the realm of the subjective into actual manifestation. The remote past is, as I said, again "subjective" because no longer perceptible. One is reminded there of the Aljira of the Australian aborigines, who know a mythical Dreamtime (Aljira) where the great mythical figures walked about and created the world and from which the souls of the children still come and to which the souls of the dying return. It is the sphere from which dreams come. This is just another instance of the relative timelessness of what we would now call the collective unconscious.~Marie-Louise von Franz, "Psyche & Matter"
In The Forest of The World
The following is a parable as told by Sri Ramakrishna.Once, a man was going through a forest, when three robbers fell upon him and robbed him of all his possessions. One of the robbers said, "What's the use of keeping this man alive?" So saying, he was about to kill him with his sword, when the second robber interrupted him, saying: 'Oh, no! What is the use of killing him? Tie his hand and foot and leave him here."The robbers bound his hands and feet and went away. After a while the third robber returned and said to the man: "Ah, I am sorry. Are you hurt? I will release you from your bonds." After setting the man free, the thief said: "Come with me. I will take you to the public high way."After a long time they reached the road. At this the man said: "Sir, you have been very good to me. Come with me to my house." "Oh, no!" the robber replied. "I can't go there. The police will know it."This world itself is the forest. The three robbers prowling here are Sattva, rajas, and lamas. It is they that rob a man of the Knowledge of Truth. Tamas wants to destroy him. „Rajas‟ binds him to the world.But Sattva rescues him from the clutches of rajas and tamas. Under the protection of Sattva, man is rescued from anger, passion and other evil effects of tamas. Further, Satva loosens the bonds of the world. But Satva also is a robber. It cannot give man the ultimate Knowledge of Truth, though it shows him the road leading to the Supreme Abode of God. Setting him on the path, Satva tells him: "Look yonder. There is your home." Even Satva is far away from the knowledge of Brahman.
Training Psychic Ability
Deep levels of concentration and jhana can also become a gateway to a wide range of psychic abilities. Buddhist psychology outlines how systematic training in concentration can bring the ability to read minds, to see or hear at a remote distance, to know the past of any individual, to manipulate the elements of earth, air, fire and water. Based on highly developed concentration, these practices and powers are detailed in such texts as Buddhaghosa’s thousand page Path of Purification, and the Yogas of Naropa. These psychic abilities were trained and practiced by a number of my teachers, but they are misunderstood in the west. Western scientific studies of psychic abilities have failed because these abilities are usually not stable at ordinary levels of consciousness. You can’t invite ordinary graduate students into a lab and expect to study psychic abilities. While there are exceptions with certain gifted individuals, most people need some form of concentration training for psychic abilities to strongly arise.Some of the most skilled Buddhist meditators still practice the powers outlined in the Buddhist texts. During her intensive practice period in the 1960’s in Burma, Dipama was trained in all these capacities. According to her and her teachers, she could visit people at a distance (she once went psychically to the United Nations to hear a speech by the Burmese secretary General U Thant), she could see into past lives and she could transport herself through time and space and appear spontaneously for her interviews. By the time I studied with her, it had been years since these trainings and she was not interested in psychic powers anymore. Of course, I wished that I had seen her demonstrate these powers. But I have seen and heard from colleagues of so many other psychic phenomena – from the spontaneous appearance of rainbows in a clear sky to the sure knowledge of someone’s death or difficulty at a distance – that I am open to all possibilities. Even with moderate levels of training, some of my western colleagues have found the ability to read minds or to project specific teachings into the dreams of their students.Because psychic powers are considered a distraction from freedom and compassion, they are left as optional trainings for advanced students. To use jhana or psychic powers wisely we have to take into account the dangers that accompany the territory of these refined states. There are dangers of inflation and grandiosity, taking pride in “our” attainments. There are also dangers of ambition. Even if we discount the domain of psychic powers, spiritual practitioners can hear about samadhi and jhana and then struggle after them unsuccessfully for years, not realizing that the grasping itself prevents their opening. And when we do find access to states of bliss and jhana, we can also lose them. We can peak, then crash, experiencing the kind of loss and frustration described by St. John of the Cross as “the dark night of the soul.”The point of these trainings in concentration is not to increase grasping, but to use concentration states in the service of inner liberation. Through the power of concentration, the solidity of the world shows itself to be dream-like and insubstantial. In meditation we may first experience fear when we open to the groundlessness of experience. But the stability and well being created by the concentration allows for steadiness while the whole sense of self and other dissolves. With the power of concentration we can let go easily and return to balance, even as all things dissolve. One student, Rosina, initially worried as her meditation showed the world as empty and insubstantial. “What about my family, my children, my career?” she asked. She feared she was deserting them for a realm of emptiness. But emptiness always gives birth to new forms. “Is it o.k. to dissolve, to let go this much?” Her Zen Master smiled and told her not to worry, “Death o.k. Resurrection o.k., too.” After the retreat Rosina returned to her family, emptier and more openhearted than she had ever experienced. Concentration and insight show us how to be with all things as the play of consciousness. We become free in their midst. We become wise.A wise psychology must incorporate the transcendent dimensions of the concentrated mind. But in the end, even the most luminous states of concentration pass away, as do the insights that can arise from them. Ajahn Chah reminds us, “When blissful and extraordinary states arise from your meditation, use them but do not cling to them.” Concentration is a powerful step on the journey, one important way to quiet the mind, open the heart and discover freedom. The real blessing appears when we can bring the experiences of the transcendental to illuminate the miracle of the ordinary. Seeing with the eyes of wisdom allows us to reawaken to the secret beauty all around us.This excerpt is taken from the book, “The Wise Heart” via Jack Kornfield Image: Nicholas Roerich