Ulises

It's a matter of temperament, or if you prefer, of aestethic resonance ( I envision more and more the different paths are different songs...) (My own comentary:the path of love is not exclusive of some tradition: for example the Bushmen of the Kalahari speak about the Big Love. I don't "follow" a path, simply my heart is expanding according to an organic, spontaneous rhtyhm...a good metaphor would be an "attuning", in fact the Bushmen and most of the primordial traditions speak about "getting your song/s". Also, I don't resonate with the Abrahamic traditions, but I feel strongly the truth of the following words. Other way to say it: "The poet only see similarities, where others only see differences". To retrieve the poetic eyes of the child is a great spiritual accomplishment...) "The unity of the path of awareness and the path of love cannot be arrived at intellectually. It is an experiential truth. And being this Truth, this love-light, is the only way to see this unity, this merging of the paths. Any reasoning or intellectual deductions to make these two paths meet are rationalizations and fall short of the Truth, the actual Reality. In my particular case I followed both the theistic approach (Judeo-Christian-Moslem) and the non-theistic one (Buddhism.) The first one emphasizes the way of love, the latter the way of awareness. I say “emphasize” because they both have both approaches, and the two paths cannot be totally separated, for in reality they are indivisible. I read and heard many accounts of how all paths are the same because they lead to the same Truth. But I was never totally convinced by those arguments, although I liked many of them. In my own experience, the two paths seemed to be very different. They have different qualities and emphasize different values. I experience myself differently in each of them. I could see that they were both true, that my experience in each of them smelled and tasted of truth. I could see that they were complementary, like fullness and emptiness, the green earth and the blue sky. My intellect could not figure out the unity. Only the experience of total transcendence showed me this unity, in the identity of love and light. At the time of the experience I had no conceptual idea of what I am saying now. There was only God. Now, reflecting back upon it, I see that I experienced truth simultaneously as love and light. In Buddhism, supreme Reality is referred to as Dharmakaya. And Dharmakaya, or Being-as-such, is seen as the unity of emptiness and bliss, sunyata and Mahasukha. Sunyata is an ultimate experience that crowns the path of awareness. It is the experiencing of reality directly, without the filtering of conflicting emotions and primitive beliefs about reality. It is arrived at by cutting through all concepts concerning reality. Yet, sunyata is not the ultimate experience of the Buddhist path. In fact, sunyata has to die and luminosity has to be born. In other words, intuitive awareness (prajna) has to lead to intrinsic awareness (jnana.) Prajna is the awareness that is sharp and intuitive enough to cut through all concepts and beliefs. However, it is still not being awareness. While jnana is being awareness, is being one and the same with light. That is why it is called intrinsic awareness. It is not other than Buddha-nature. So, sunyata is the gate to Buddha nature. It leads to the experience of Dharmakaya, which is the indivisibility of bliss and light, love and pristine awareness. For love is bliss, and awareness is light, and the two are the indivisible nature of Being. The Truth, Dharmakaya, Absolute, or whatever name we give it, is the origin of all paths, and is the home where all paths lead. Spiritual devotion leads to this consuming truth; so does awareness. Usually the path of devotion and love is theistic, for it is easier to devote oneself to a Bigger Reality. The lover and the Beloved are separated so that the longing of devotion will unite them again. At the beginning of the path the individual is not aware of the absolute truth, and that it is All. The Truth is apprehended only at later stages, or in peak experiences. The path of awareness, on the other hand, leads to the same Truth, but it is of the nature of awareness that it does not need a bigger reality to be aware of. It starts by awareness of our present experience and environment. So the path of awareness is usually non-theistic, as in Buddhism." http://www.ahalmaas.com/Extracts/truth.htm

Tell me just one thing, Vajrahridaya...are you laughing more and more about your assholeness...? I do about mine I love you, bro "The child-like laughter of the Infinite"

What a sinchronicity! This afternoon I picked the book I had ordered "A Story Waiting to Pierce You" by the scholar and mystic Peter KIngsley, explaining the genocide commited by the Tibetan Buddhists- mass murders, forced conversions - on the indigenous shamans of Tibet. The fascinating fact is that of Mongolian shamanism transmitted to Pythagoras, and then, becoming the gnostic/hermetic wisdom, the sufi wisdom...the message is that of a common mystical ground of East and West...

Dear Kate, that could be one of the most exciting and important threads in this forum..I consider it a crucial matter, specially in this time of decadence of all the "systems" of any kind...

Oh my! It's soooo boring to discuss with you! Buddhists chased out the Bon shamans the same merciless way than Christians went after their ecstatics. The point, since my early experiences is (sorry for the quotes, but are way far better articulated than my poor English): "The emergence of social institutions to house ecstatic rapture - whether as temples, ashrams, churches, synagogues, medicine societies, shaman guilds, or pagan societies - resulted in the quieting of the originating experience in exchange for uniform narrative understanding and maintenance of social hierarchy. The ecstatic experience was sacrificed for normalized belief and group conformity. This was true for shamanism as well as the major world religions" "We can choose to move toward the unpredictable, unknowable, and untamable wild. The sacred lives in the wild. The sacred constitutes the wild. The problem began when someone said that words and meanings must explain, domesticate, and cover up wild experience. Within this hegemony of words, we demystified whatever was mysterious and walked away from the wild in order to become semantically tamed. We sacrificed our link-to-the-universe-heart for a delusional body-less-head-trip that has imprisoned us far too long." The point is, for me, to enter the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans without maps..falling in love with the Mystery, as ,i.e., wisely did the Bushmen of the Kalahari for, at least, 60.000 years old. They never had religious wars, heretics, and the damned whole thing of lineages,etc. Entering the Mystery where, you, Vajrahridaya, and me, Uli, can feel that we are that unfathomable Mystery of the Big Hridaya, Big Heart... I can begin to feel it, now, my fellow human, and makes cry...

Hi strawdog, all I can say is that I found the web of this author (organelle.org) 5 yeras ago, and that certain experiences were synchronistic with his sharing. These experiences are still unfolding..I cannot say more because of the difficulty of putting it in words and because I haven't enough perspective to articulate it. Some personal feedback from some different facilitators in workshops seem to lead in the same direction... Time will tell. Thank you for your interest! Deep Peace, Big Heart Uli

"it's deeper, subtler and more refined", "Not in the line of the teaching of the Buddha","the Buddhadharma teaches more clearly, is more practical, goes that extra little bit deeper that makes a whole lot of difference" I see...if I substitute "Christ", instead of "Buddha", it sounds very known to my ears...no problem, but don't try to impose your conversion on the rest of us.. Look, Vajrahridaya, I was living for two years in a rented flat built on the site where the castle of Inquisition was built, in Seville, Spain. People thinking that their insights were "deeper, subtler, more refined" that those of other people began to burn them...I could feel the insanity in the air, the horror of it all. Perhaps I even was a victim in that time... And that experience has left me with a deep alergy to all kind of belief systems, religions, schools, etc... I don't believe nothing, I don't follow nobody, I trust Reality is inherently initiatory...that's all Again: if Buddhism works for you, because of your karma or whatever it is, FINE. But I'm sick of people trying to convert other people. It makes a lot of sense to me one of the late yogic experiences of Mirra Alfassa, when she received the message of "No more religions, don't change this unfolding in another religion..."

We are seeing an economic meltdown ( the psychopaths at Wall Street), a religious meltdown ( the psychopaths at the Vatican)...and now a politic meltdown (the psychopaths in all the goverments)... Bravo, Julian Assange! we need more warriors for freedom! Another step in the long road towards the retrieval of the primordial state, what the Dzogchen practitioner, professor Elias Capriles calls the "postmodern ecomunism", meaning: "The most ancient Eurasian mystical traditions achieving a state of Communion that discloses the true, single nature of all animate and inanimate entities veiled by the illusion of inherent multiplicity—including Indian Shaivism, Himalayan Bön, Chinese Taoism, Persian Zurvanism, the Egyptian cult of Osiris and the Greek Dionysian mysteries.." from Capriles, E., (enero 2007 ), “From Primal to Postmodern Ecommunism.”. http://webdelprofesor.ula.ve/humanidades/elicap/en/Main/BookChapters

Here http://www.kundalinisupport.org/ good support coming from big-hearted, non-sectarian people, with lots of first-hand experience Dorothy Walters has an interesting blog posting about her experience with kundalini http://kundalinisplendor.blogspot.com/

I love Alan Watts writings. The ohter day I found "The Book" in a second-hand bookstore. My favourites are "Nature, Man and Woman" (Probably the best take about the Taoist view) and "The Joyous Cosmology" ( a superb articulation of his experiences with mescaline). Also, "Myth and Ritual in Christianity" is a great deconstruction of Literalist Christianity, arriving to the archetypal, mystical core, trascending any tradition...

I see...did you find the Truth, like the Buddhist monks of different sects, killing each other in battles for "different insights"...? "It seems that in seventh and eigth century Kashmir, and even in later centuries, there reigned a great freedom of spirit and that the yogis and yoguinis, when it was a matter of realizing the ultimate, hardly worried about the etiquette of the masters or about their belonging to one group or another. The great Abhinavagupta himself had many masters, some of whom were not Shaivite." Yoga Spandakarika.The Sacred Texts at the Origins of Tantra, by Daniel Odier. (Preface) In other words... "So let us understand that reality transcends all of our notions about reality. Reality is neither Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Advaita Vedanta, nor Buddhist. It is neither dualistic nor nondualistic, neither spiritual nor nonspiritual. We should come to know that there is more reality and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all of our thoughts and ideas about reality." Adyashanti Perhaps it's time to realise in each one of us that , as Walt Whitman wrote "Above all things the flights and sublime ecstasies of the soul cannot submit to the statements of any church or any creed." In 25 years of studying the mystical traditions, I have found very, very few practitioners (less than three) that weren't promoting overtly or subtly their tradition. Now I feel closer to what Darin de Stefano says: "Don’t mistake an interest in spirituality or enlightenment with the pursuit of them. Every kind of predatory mind-cult on Earth has the former, and every one of them is desperate for new human agents to spread their diseases. The latter is comparatively rare, and tends to either remain silent, or work to expose the imitators. Sometimes both." http://organelle.tumblr.com/post/1038552846/dont-mistake-an-interest-in-spirituality-or

Ha, ha, ha,ha! Your commentaries reveal your dogmatism, Vajrahridaya... A. H. Almaas studied Vajrayana AND Sufism until a new unfolding began to happen to him. And one of the caracteristics of his so-called "Diamond Approach" (you can find virtually aspects of all the mystic lineages in it) is precisely the opposite of your "diagnostic": the emphasis in the personal essence... He is a living example of the overcoming of stinking sectarianism: Truth cannot be contained in any box

vibrant, heart-expanding, mischievous, delicious.... http://www.futureprimitive.org/2010/12/timothy-freke-the-wisdom-of-not-knowing/

yeah! He is great! Here, http://www.futureprimitive.org/2010/12/timothy-freke-the-wisdom-of-not-knowing-part-2/ Tim speaks about his experience with ayahuasca and other entheogens, shamans, and the "shift" he has noticed 2 years ago…

DECLARATION OF UNIVERSAL HERESY " No sacred cows survive the realization of the nonconceptual, and one's realization becomes independent from any belief or teaching. He recognizes that who and what he is is ultimately beyond any category, including all the spiritual categories. He realizes that Reality is not a description, and that any description, any teaching or belief system regardless how useful and accurate, falls short of Reality as it is. He recognizes the uniqueness of his realization without having to compare it with others, and appreciates the differences between the various teachings without having to rate them. His realization has gone beyond conceptual categories and, hence beyond comparisons and ratings. He believes in nothing, and adheres to no teaching or religion as final and ultimate. He has become a universal heretic, embracing all, yet free of all." A. H. Almaas

Is this life-affirming...?: 'In a talk the Dalai Lama gave at UCLA in June, 1997, he read the following text: "Most attachment to women comes from the belief that womens bodies are pure. But in actuality there is no purity in a womans body at all. Her mouth is a vessel of impurity, with putrid saliva and gunk between her teeth; Her nose is a pot of snot, phlegm and mucous, and her eyes contain eye-slime and tears. Her torso is a container of excrement, holding urine, the lungs, liver and such. The confused do not see that a woman is such; thus, they lust after her body. Like unknowing persons, who have become attached to an ornamented vessel filled with filth, Unknowing and worldly beings are attached to women. The Dalai Lama was reading from the Precious Garland of Nagarjuna, who is sometimes revered as a "Second Buddha." Life affirming....? ...and Aurobindo is not the only one...

mmmmmmm...interesting...I attended the past Friday evening a meeting of Sistemic Constellation Work...and the energy was awesome!: sparkling, blissful, child-like joy/laughter...delicious! I wonder if you had part in that... ; ) big hugs Uli

here, interesting views about the Buddhist path... http://www.quantumyoga.org/Revolt%20Spirit%20vs%20Matter%20Life%20Divine.htm

The experience of so-called "Kundalini" is found virtually in all the wisdom traditions...including the roots of the western tradition: "Syrinx was the name either for a musical instrument or for the part of an instrument that makes a piping, whistling sound — the sound called syrigmos. For Greeks, this sound of piping and whistling was also the sound of the hissing made by snakes. Ancient Greek accounts of ‘incubation’ repeatedly mention certain signs that mark the point of entry into another world: into another state of awareness that’s neither waking nor sleep. One of the signs is that you become aware of a rapid spinning movement. Another is that you hear the powerful vibration produced by a piping, whistling, hissing sound. It is also the sound produced by the solar basque, during the process of creation of the universe. In India exactly the same signs are described as the prelude to entering samadhi, the state beyond sleep and waking. And they’re directly related to the process known as the awakening of kundalini — of the ‘serpent power’ that’s the basic energy in all creation but that’s almost completely asleep in human beings. When it starts waking up it makes a hissing sound. In general, the sound of a syrinx was a call for silence. This is something that makes sense even on a very obvious level when you consider how hissing or whistling at people is still a way of silencing them (shhhhhhhhhhh…..). To ancient mystics and magicians the journey into a greater reality was a journey made through silence, in silence and into silence. The noise of a syrinx is the ultimate password. It’s the sound of silence." REVIEW In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley

Beautiful!! Thank you!! It's so synchronistic...the last days I've been thinking a lot about how speak the Bushmen about "pulling the ropes"of feelings with others...I envision it like we are like mushrooms sprouting from a unified mycelial net of Big Love.... ; )

....so true...

I love this love letter to the Femenine: Kundalini as the Universal Communion...