Jetsun

After awakening from the perspective of the mind essentially there is no point or advantage of being awake because such an evaluation comes from belief, which is seen through as fundamentally illusory. Yet if you still have arguments with your partner and have issues arising in your life then clearly the awakening still hasn't penetrated into all areas of your being, those things are still going to be registered and sensed on the level of body as suffering. So the shift of awakening is out of mind into the sensing body. After awakening many teachers now talk about embodiment, or one way Rupert Spira talks about it is that the awakening can start to colonise all the other areas which aren't yet touched. The point of actively doing this or moving towards it basically isn't that it is some sort of ultimately superior or better place, but in terms of your life the more of your being is awake and colonised the more in harmony and less suffering you are going to experience. Living from illusion or from a place which isn't true hurts a lot more the more awake you are. So in that sense there are further levels, deeper awakenings, to move to.

How long has it been like this? From what I have read what you describe can be a stage, where all the old motivations fall away and there is a kind of emptiness and pointlessness to everything, but some time later a greater motivation kicks in. But even after awakening there can a lot of left over beliefs and conditioning to work through, which can filter your experience. To say that there should be bliss is to put a condition on freedom, so it is just another belief that there should be bliss, real freedom means that there are no shoulds and anything can happen.

The Shugden issue is a strange one, the last two times I have seen the Dalai Lama in the UK he has been accosted by a rabble of angry screaming Scottish people who say they are representing Shugden. Why these people seem to think they should get involved with Tibetan sectarian politics is beyond me. I also think there may be some Chinese involvement.

They have started showing adverts on TV here in the UK to try to bring to light the issue of domestic violence of women against men. Statistics don't show the whole picture because men are far less likely to report it to the authorities and there is far more stigma and shame around men who are abused in this way. So I don't know if focusing on one side of the issue is going to help much, it may just polarise things more.

If you want a traditional method then you can go to a Hindu temple and ask for a Hanuman Puja, as Hanuman is the deity who protects against such things. Or you could find a Tibetan Chod practitioner to do a ceremony to clear away any entities or spirits. Or go see John of God in Brazil, he has a pretty good record.

There are esoteric healing methods where you go into another persons system and energy field and in a sense merge with them temporarily. The interesting question is how that is possible at all. But to do so doesn't necessarily take a really high level of spiritual development, yet for it it to be a completely healthy procedure it is better if the healer isn't coming from a place of lack or woundedness themselves (which a lot of people are, including Gurus) otherwise it can just be a perpetuation of dysfunctional interpersonal dynamics (which was basically why I brought up this issue in the first place, to consider that as a possibility). The Tibetans do a lot of out of practises which can bring them out of their usual sense of self, but they also do a lot of grounding to practices to bring them back down, such as all the deep guttural chanting and things like Lung Jam and breathing exercises to bring the energy down and most of them eat a lot of meat to ground their energy. It isn't all about flying off out of body to merge with others, most of them are rooted like mountains in their own bodies.

I'm not sure about clearing them to any significant degree using sound, but each of the chakras will vibrate at a different rate which can be sensed in the body using sound vibrations, which helps to bring awareness to their existence and their functioning. Sound is used in many spiritual traditions for example the Tibetans do a lot of deep guttural chanting, which isn't so much about clearing but grounding the energy in the lower centres and chakras. Whereas the high pitch sound you may hear in a Christian choir is likely to vibrate in the upper head or upper chakras.

Exactly, there are examples of merging all over the place both positive and negative, you don't need a tradition to verify it, in childhood, when falling in love, in relationships where one person dominates. When you go to a sports game you merge with the crowd to some extent and when you go into nature you can merge with nature. Many carers get exhausted and break down because they merge with their patients emotional problems too much. Merging with a Yidam or a Guru is still the same fundamental process, hopefully it is coming from a healthy place and will end up with a healthy result, but if the object of merging isn't pure or the subconscious intention is avoidance then who knows.

I didn't say anything about physiology. And you were talking about merging with other people as much as anything else.

It is possible that me and Tom are talking about different things, I mentioned that myself in what I wrote. You were not specific in your question, the main proportion of what I wrote comes from the tradition of developmental psychology. The parts about awakening and non-duality comes from all of the traditions I have studied such as Vedanta, Buddhism etc, and my own experience. The part about my own training come from my training in Vortex Healing and my own experience

Merging with others is described in a large proportion of the literature on developmental psychology. As small children we are all merged with our parents to some degree which is how we pick up a lot of their neurotic stuff. Pick up any book on co-dependency and co-dependent relationships and they will discuss this. Do I have the ability to merge with others? sure

Merging with another or even a divine being isn't necessarily anything to do with non-duality, merging can be a sign of co-dependency and a breakdown in the development of healthy autonomy. In relationships it is quite common for people to try to merge with another, especially if they have a traumatic history or that of neglect. So they feel the others feelings and life in their own body to a very accurate degree, which may appear like a form of unity and can feel reassuring and pleasant at first, but the long term loss is a loss in your own autonomous feelings and healthy emotional development. In psychological terms it can be viewed as an attachment disorder based upon lack or separation anxiety, so you seek to fill it with someone else. Merging may increase skills like empathy and even psychic ability and give temporary relief to suffering, so many classify it as spiritual, but by abandoning your own centre you are actually avoiding genuine intimacy with a substitute. What they call awakening or non-duality isn't about merging into something else, it is about the breaking down of the illusion of the separate sense of I which wants to merge in the first place. In my own energetic training those who have a history of merging and feel little boundaries with others may have a weakened etheric body and may even have holes in it, so strengthening that would be a good healthy step. I don't know if the kind of merging which people get up to here is the good type or not but I thought it was worth noting that not all merging is necessarily spiritual or a sign of strong spiritual development.

It depends on what is meant by energy work/refinement. I am not denying that there is an energy connection to all of this, I do energy work myself. What I am saying is that the approach which a number of people have had success with is that the energetic side of things can come as a result rather than a cause, or can occur naturally after a certain level of realisation, which is the discussion I was trying to have with rainbowvein in the Spiritual Heart thread. If you do energy work before realisation then it can smooth out the process and help prepare the vessel for the pure spirit of life to flow through you, it could even help ripen you depending on how it is gone about, but if you exclusively focus on strengthening the energy bodies and never get round to seeing the truth of the core blockage of separation consciousness in the heart it is like preparing for your wedding your whole life but never getting married.

That is your dogma that energy work is absolutely crucial. For those in his lineage and other lineages energetic work in the sense of intentional manipulation of energy wasn't crucial, which doesn't mean that there isn't an energetic component, just it doesn't come in the form of energy work.

I don't think Mooji ever advocates energy practice as far as I know, which doesn't necessarily mean his realisation is purely intellectual, it's just not what he does or sees as necessary.

I just wonder if all the people who are talking about light are really talking about the same thing on the same level. On the fundamental level I always assumed: light = awareness But then I have worked with different qualities of "light" myself, for example I have been to see Mother Meera who works with "Paramatman light". She explains in one of her books how she would go astral travelling through the higher realms and managed to make contact with a form of light which humanity hadn't contacted before and her role now is to bring it down to the conscious level. Personally I have felt its effect and it is different from other light energy work I have experienced and don't know of anyone else who works with this quality of light. The closest thing I have found to which people here describe as light work is a form of healing discovered by a husband and wife in the Mikkyo Shugendo Buddhist tradition which they call "Radiance Healing": "Pujitha has said the universe is permeated with a radiant white light that is the highest vibration of energy in existence. This healing energy is all around us, but most of us have forgotten how to "tune in" on our own."... ...This energy pours divine light to your soul and gradually dissolves accumulated negative qualities in you." http://www.radiancehealing.net/ Although it doesn't have anything to do with uniting chakras and connecting with beings which suggests it may not be the same thing. Perhaps there are different qualities and purities of this light which one can connect to, or purity of being which one can connect to, because if you do a google search many people claim to be working with pure divine light but the effect of this light seems to vary considerably between person to person.

Is this light body from a specific tradition or something you have stumbled upon? Do you see the light body as anything to do with "awakening" in the way that people on Batgap and people like Ramana describe it?

That is one way of looking at it. Another is that he was trying to break the woman's fixation on the experience so she can become aware of what it is that is experiencing. I guess the Guru makes the decision in the moment what is the best approach to take, I don't know if he got it right with this woman. In terms of the lineage he comes from based upon Ramana Maharshi teachings his advice isn't out of sync with that lineage. I personally know someone who many years ago went to Mooji's teacher Papaji and said to him that he was having all these amazing blissful high samadhi experiences, and Papaji just said to him that is just a waste of time and useless. Ultimately those experiences weren't useless but those words at that time were incredibly helpful in helping him realise that those experiences weren't it, weren't liberation, otherwise he could have continued chasing them for many years.

It makes sense what Mooji says though, that if the kundalini was a temporary experience then it can't be what you are, and if it makes you feel special then it can be a block to realisation by inflating your ego.

As am I, as I said it is about awakening from exclusive identification with the mind, which by definition is beyond intellectual understanding.

You are describing a peak state like some kind of Samadhi not the state of someone who has awakened into oneness in some kind of permanent way. Except in short moments or peak states the mind will continue on making dualistic judgements, which is its nature and function, but if you don't identify with those judgements then non-duality can still be present, as the mind content is just another aspect of experience like everything else that arises within awareness. If the mind has no judgement or like or dislike how do you know whether to eat that lovely burger or that dog shit on the ground? How do you know whether you should kiss or slap your wife when you meet her?

You can recognise that you and Hitler are the same and still not like him. The mind continues on judging and making evaluations non stop no mater how deep your awakening into non-duality goes. If you awaken out of the mind then the mind can make as many dualistic judgements as it likes and not touch the non-dual awakening as long as you don't go back to identifying with those judgements in any fundamental way

I think you are going to an extreme in non-duality, you and a woman are one thing in non separation but also simultaneously she is also an individual in the sense that the intelligence fields including her thoughts and emotions are localised. Just because a non-dual awakening has occurred it doesn't mean all separate characteristics have been overcome in any practical sense. I remember the awakened Jesuit Priest Anthony De Mello telling a story how when he used to do counselling and psychotherapy with people he would be in the place of oneness/non-duality with his patients where there was mutual love between the two, which is a natural force of nature, of one heart. But also he was completely aware that on the personality level he didn't particularly like some of his patients. He loved them all but didn't like all of them.

"The dangers of un-natural breathing practices" http://thedaobums.com/topic/22384-the-dangers-of-forced-and-unnatural-breathing-pratices/ If you want to find a teacher try the "Sudarshan Kriya" pranayama taught by the Art of Living foundation, they teach it world wide and is considered safe. http://www.artofliving.org/us-en/search/course#distance=10&sSearch=&st=&lat=&lng=&ctype=&acol=0&c=&cc=&d1=&d2= Doing it on your own you will probably just do yourself much harm.

Yes stop before you do serious damage