“It took about five years of practice to wear down the seeker in me. I strove so hard that I was completely at the end of my rope. For five years I pushed myself until I literally thought I was going to have a major psychological breakdown. I would wake up thinking, Is this the day I end up in a mental ward? One day I went into my little meditation hut in the backyard, and I said to myself, I’m going to break through. Right here. Right now. I put all of my will into it, and within ten seconds it just imploded on me. I said, “I can’t do this.” The knowledge was from my gut. “I can’t do this.” It was like when someone punches you in the stomach and all the air goes out. I was totally deflated. That’s why I often tell people my practice was the practice of failure. I failed. I didn’t progress to a higher state. I beat my head against the wall until I failed. And even then I didn’t give up. I couldn’t be that noble.”
Month: June 2013
“It’s not the divine that must be found”
“It’s not the divine that must be found, it’s the things you’re deluding yourself with that must be released.”
“It’s not about being a fan of the Absolute.”
–Adi Da Samraj
“Humility is getting yourself out of the way”
“Humility is getting yourself out of the way, surrender, like a prostration, letting that Greater Power, Force, Truth, whatever — take you over, until there’s no you, there’s just it. And then it just is.
It strengthens, it endures, it’s powerful — but not over anything. It’s seeing the Divine. And it has its own way of doing things.
There’s no way that the intellect is going to understand that. As soon as the intellect says, “Oh, I’ve got this figured out,” it’s going to do something else.”
-James Wood, Importance of Body
Innocence
“In existence there is nobody who is superior and nobody who is inferior. The blade of grass and the great star are absolutely equal…. But man wants to be higher than others, he wants to conquer nature, hence he has to fight continuously. All complexity arises out of this fight. The innocent person is one who has renounced fighting; who is no longer interested in being higher, who is no longer interested in performing, in proving that he is someone special; who has become like a rose flower or like a dewdrop on the lotus leaf; who has become part of this infinity; who has melted, merged and become one with the ocean and is just a wave; who has no idea of the “I”. The disappearance of the ”I” is innocence.”
– Osho The White Lotus
Valuing your life
“Please understand this: When you value your position in life, when you value your life situations, that is not the same thing as valuing your life. Your varied conditions where you live, how you live, the large or small size of your bank account, the number of friends, acquaintances, activities all these are not your life.
They are happenings that are so numerous and so overwhelming and so demanding that unknown to yourself you have a conversation with yourself, and you carelessly without realizing what you are doing or saying, you tell yourself statements such as the following: ‘My life has had nothing but ill fortune; my life is bumpy; it’s going the wrong way; my life is not turning out the way I hoped it would; in spite of all my efforts, my life is just dull, boring, defeating, and sad.’
I want you to be far more careful with your vocabulary, with your use of words. You can give yourself a great shaft of light that will explain everything to you simply by knowing how you carelessly misuse words, terms, ideas. Now, you have just learned that what you do is not your life. So stop calling it your life. It’s an action. It’s a tragedy. It’s a misfortune. It’s a blow. It’s a sudden in-crease in your financial stature. It is not you. It is not your life.”
– from a talk given 12/28/1988 Vernon Howard’s Higher World
“The mind wants to tell you that you are something that needs to be held onto”
“It’s like your whole life you’re clinging to the side of a cliff, hanging over an abyss, and you’re afraid of falling, of letting go. Not only is there no way to know what that is when that letting go happens ― a complete letting go into awakening itself ― there is no way to know what in some sense awaits you. It awaits Itself. What you’re letting go is “you.”
But let me tell you: when you let go, it’s like you’re suspended about one nanometer above solid rock the entire time. And it’s even more solid ― less risky ― than that. But the mind wants to tell you that you are something that needs to be held onto. And when you let go, the sense of self, just like the politician, is still there, you’ve just voted him out of office. It’s no longer a problem.”
– James Wood, Sanity
Compassionate intervention
“Compassion will just reach in there and break whatever is possessing you. And if there’s an attachment to the pattern, it may be hard to grasp that it’s there to help you. It may seem like an enemy, and you will fight it. There’s a certain kind of force to the intervention, the way a surgeon might perform an emergency appendectomy with a spoon if necessary.”
– James Wood, Importance of Body
“Real meditation…is not a pious attempt to quiet your little thoughts”
“Meditation is not something that takes place in the dilemma. Real meditation is not a method to get rid of your suffering. It is not perpetual preoccupation with your own thoughts, the content of your life, in order to get free of them, to get aside from them, make them be quiet. The you who does all that is itself the dilemma. It knows nothing. It is itself the suffering. It is itself obsession with the endless stream of its own thoughts. Therefore, the attempts by such a one to do something about his “mind,” to make it quiet, to make it see visions, whatever, are within the form of this original motivating dilemma. Such strategies are expressions of his separate life, attempts to fortify and save his separate life, which is already an illusion.
Real meditation arises only in Satsang, only under conditions of Truth, already lived. There is force in such meditation. Real meditation is an intense fire. It is a marvelous intelligence, a brilliance, a genius, a living force. It is not a pious attempt to quiet your little thoughts. It blasts the hell out of these thoughts! From the point of view of the Self, the Truth, the Real, there is no concern for all these thoughts, all of these dilemmas, all of this mediocrity of suffering. It is nothing.
When Satsang lives as the principle of your life, and Truth becomes the form of your meditation, it consumes thought. It is a presence under which thoughts cannot survive. It is an intelligence that needs only to look at some obstruction for it to dissolve. This is the process that comes awake in Satsang, not some method, some remedy. The whole point of view of dis-ease is false. Spiritual life is not a cure. Spiritual life is the life of Truth, Satsang. One who is looking for a cure is obsessed with his disease.”
– Adi Da, The Method of the Siddhas
“Satsang literally means true or right relationship. It is commonly used to refer to the practice of spending time in the company of holy or wise persons” –The Method of the Siddhas
Compassion fuels practice
James Wood on compassion:
“How long do I practice before I wake up? It’s like digging to China. How do you know when you get to China? You see daylight, stick your head out, and there are Chinese people around.
Or like a big stack of dishes. If you’ve ever been to a cafeteria, they have a cart that has a cylinder full of plates that is spring-loaded from the bottom. When you take the top plate off, the next one rises to the surface. How do you know when you’ve taken the last plate?
It’s a good question, and the best advice I could give is that the fastest way through the stack is to focus on the one you’re doing now. As soon as you stop to say, “Gee, I wonder how big the stack is?”, you’re not doing it, and it’s just sitting there.
I think that’s part of why compassion is so powerful. Like, how many doors would you break through to get to your child who is trapped in a burning building?
Or even better: How many doors would you break through to get out of the burning building so that you could then see where your child is and go and rescue your child? That’s a good one. Then it’s not just for you, and yet it is for you. Can you feel into how much power it might give you?
Imagine this long hallway of doors. You know the building is burning down and you want to get out. But if you knew somehow that you had to get out so that you could then survey the building to find out where your child was to rescue him — to me it feels like it turbo-charges the whole thing.
Like I have to do it, and I have to do it for myself, but I’m doing it so I can do it for someone else. That’s what I’m talking about.”
– James Wood, Importance of Body
Svaha 