goldenfox

The thing about it is, even if you dont practise them consciously, when you get to a certain stage, you will have a very hard time. Once you are expanded beyond your little ego, every thought and feeling of yours is on display to other people. Good luck staying comfortable or sane if you dont approach life from a very pure place then.

Hi, Yes ive read a lot by Norm. Years ago i came across an early edition of his book The Christ Consciousness. It was then called Sunburst: Return of the Ancients. Quite a revelation about some not so well known aspects of the path. He used to practice Yogananda's kriya with full kechari mudra for many years. Sometime back i also got Sacred Science. The kriya he gives freely through that seems like a somewhat watered down version of SRF kriya. For one thing the sounds are not emphasized and he doesnt give the other steps that go along with first kriya, like mahamudra and jyoti/yoni mudra. His kechari is just the simple beginner kechari. In Lahiri Mahasaya's system there was a whole kriya given from the start just so one could try to get full kechari by working on stretching the tendon of the tongue (it was called Talabya kriya). Without giving too much away, the spinal breathing of Norman's is different from SRF kriya. SRF kriya and all kriya of Lahiri Mahasaya's is quite a bit more 'intent' on the movement of qi along the spine, and the correct sounds made during the inbreath and outbreath are very important (it is a form of audible mantra so to speak). Lahiri Mahasya also stressed the use of mantra in each chakra during the practise of kriya, something that was taught early on in SRF Lessons but later dropped. Only in higher kriya is there mantra involved (which is the same as Lahiri Mahasaya's higher kriya). There are some versions of kriya which Lahiri Mahasaya gave differently to others, because the subtle makeup and situation of each sadhak was unique. There are versions of kriya which involve the crown right from the first kriya, but the majority of them are concerned with bringing qi to the brow (or sometimes the 'bindu' at the back of the head above and in from the medulla). This is because it is considered unwise to deal with the crown prematurely, and keeping ones attention there or bringing the qi to it is inviting the awakening of kundalini and bringing it to the crown to activate it. If this is done before a lot of the karmic cleansing (process of bhuta shuddhi - purification of nadis/meridians) is effected by kriya practise, there can be a lot of issues because the personal karmas of the sadhak get compounded by too early expansion of the consciousness beyond the body. The granthis or knots of the lower chakras are still in place and one is still firmly in the grip of ego despite having awakened the crown. This is why you will find the majority of kriya lines teach bringing the qi to medulla then making the angle from there onto the brow and back down from there. I know of a variation that takes the qi up from the brow and over the crown along the top of the head and back down over the outside of the spine at the back, but that was an older version and got amended. As far as i can tell, the qi goes where it is able, whether you are practising kriya or Taoist orbit, it will first go along the outer channels. Eventually the kundalini will rise in the sushumna regardless but the real work is the untangling of the granthis or knots (of the tongue, heart, navel and coccyx) so the way for kundalini can be made straight. The knots are like the places where soul as ego is especially attached to the body through its functions in the associated chakras. If you wish to read an in depth examination of the kriya system by a sadhak who has practised for decades, check out the online book at www.kriyayogainfo.net. He even mentions the Taoist orbit and its relation to kriya later in the text. It is if nothing else, a very interesting and informative read. *One is of course advised not to practise without initiation by an authorized teacher. It is not good to jump in the deep end of the pool without first having learned to swim. Waking up the third eye and especially the crown without a master to guide you is the last thing you want to do. There is a lot of karma to release and growing to do before that should happen. "A liar who cannot keep his word is not a good man. His Father, that is, his Lord, is also no good." - Lahiri Mahasaya.

Qigong psychosis is very real. Thats why its important to study and practise under an accomplished teacher. You shouldnt worry about it much though, it can be avoided from the outset if the front channel is developed and you learn to ground and bring qi back down from the head and store it in the LTT. Always perform qigong very naturally in a calm and relaxed manner (and do not overdo it). There is no rush to attain anything. The soul is already immortal; its just a question of coming to recognize it gradually. Then the body follows. Moving qi is just the means by which you can make calm the dynamic qi and come to rest in stillness (perceive the qi as static).

I think the instruction of Jesus to treat thy neighbour as thyself is pretty much the essence of morality. It becomes really apparent why this is necessary the further you go in spirituality, because the oneness of all things within consciousness becomes more and more apparent, even overwhelmingly so at a certain point. The Taoist emphasis on spontaneous virtue is also the result of direct realization of the oneness. Even if you start out paying little heed to the moral do's and dont's you will reach a point where you realize it's essential to be righteous and benevolent. The impact of the oneness is often a stark awakening in this regard. Even whatever is merely thought of in the mind takes on the cloak of actual manifestation.

Not loving women (at least as souls) is a subtle kind of hate. The spiritual law of ahimsa (non-violence) states that one who is not seeking to help (actively benefit) sentient beings is in some way or other harming them. In other words if you do not love, then it is a form of hate, as even indifference is absence of love. I believe you do like/love women, but you fear them so you feign indifference. To despise sex, for reasons other than vairagya (strong feeling of detachment from the senses), is because you actually crave it but have psychological issues to do with it. Real vairagya is the outcome of practise, of preferring the finer vibration of actual spiritual perceptions that come from sadhana. It does not spring up prematurely due to pre-existing karmic issues with sex. Anger is the reaction to non-fulfilment of desire (lust in the broader sense, as desire for sense experiences generally). Desire and anger are brothers, they go together, for when desire is frustrated it breeds anger. Deep down you desire sex, but fear it so you repress, hence your anger. Tell me, have you had negative experiences with women, or with sexuality in general? Do you have a fear of intimacy?

And just a couple of sentences of his counters yours: You must not be puffed up with pride for your little achievement in celibacy. If you are put to test, you will hopelessly fail. You must be ever conscious of your shortcomings and you must constantly strive to get rid of them. Whats the point of being so proud of your stance against lust, that you crow about it to all and sundry here, and in the act of doing it are freely expressing some of the other evils that the aspirant is supposed to be weeding out? That has been the point from the beginning; not that celibacy is impossible or ultimately unnecessary, but that you will not be able to achieve it with the attitude you have. You will just end up an even angrier, crotchety, woman-hating, lonely old man, minus the comfort of human company and minus your so-called enlightenment. If youre really so bent on total and perfect brahmacharya, prove it. Go a few years of maintaining it and then talk. A brahmachari is supposed to be able to control anger easily. Yours betrays you are far from that state. You are filled with anger and my guess is its from all the negative repression of lust with which you are preoccupied right now. That is not the way to brahmacharya and is mere hypocrisy. Anger is just another form of lust.

Experience will be your teacher.

This is not true. If you have been initiated by a true master, a Satguru, the relationship is sealed that this soul will continue to look after you, guiding you with an omnipresent eye until you reach liberation. This is the promise of the scriptures and the masters, at least in Indian traditions. All matters including sex will be eventually resolved by continuing progress on the path. One is asked only to practise self-control and go forward gradually, not repress oneself and create further obstacles. Total renunciation of lust is possible only when one is ripe through cultivation and gradual mastery. The issue here is ripeness for transcending. There is a right and a wrong approach to lust which aids in conquering it. When you have such hatred and anger toward it, that shows you are not at the ripe stage and are not capable of the right approach at this time. It means you still have unfinished karmic business with sexuality. You will not be successful attempting to jump straight from where you are to the fully renounced position. Furthermore, the idea of segregating yourself entirely from the rest of humanity is the opposite of what enlightenment actually represents. It is the merging with all humanity that one must go through, warts and all, that leads to eventual transcendence of the whole creation. It is an inevitable experience that is ushered in on the aspirant even early on the path, the psychic or vital plane that has to be confronted and crossed. Moving through this will put you in the arena of the whole collective unconscious of humanity and even the primal mud of the senses, including lust. Attaining Cosmic Consciousness, or full enlightenment beyond all vibration (beyond creation) is only possible by first attaining Christ Consciousness or union with the omnipresence of divine intelligence in all creation first. Being in this state you will be one with the consciousness inherent in all things including being one with the minds and personalities/natures of all your fellow humans. You will be just as privy to lust then as you are in your individual consciousness now. So dont think you will somehow escape from having to deal with it any time soon. Have you seen the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Do you remember the scene where Li Mu Bai and Lu Shu Lien are sitting together, and she asks him what he experienced in his solitary meditation retreat? She expected him to give some glimpse of the grandeur of spiritual realization, but instead he said there was just a void filled with emptiness and that it was filled with terrible loneliness. This is a beautiful portrayal of the kinds of things one will have to confront on the arduous path to enlightenment. All the great beings who have attained the full thing have been cultivating for many lifetimes. Such souls have become ripe and pregnant with wisdom and experience. They are free of the anger and hatred of lust which is just another form of aversion, and must be renounced as much as attraction. You are just clinging to the opposite of lust, and that is because of fear. None of that is the middle way taught by the Buddha. Remember, wrath springs from thwarted desires. Your anger is because of your thwarted desires, which means you have not really renounced them at all. They are just festering in your subconscious.

There are times when righteous anger is appropriate, but being spat at or near (if it isnt spat on) is best handled with indifference. This is because the person who is doing it, if their intent is to do it to you specifically, and not just something they are doing with lack of awareness of you being there, is trying to express disdain towards you. They feel lesser than you or inferior, so they compensate by acting superior, or acting with disdain/disrespect. It is a way of saying "Look, see.. you think youre better than me, here's what i think of you." They actually want you to react, to take notice of them, to get your goat. Thats why ignoring them is best. It just drives home the point, that they are just doing it to themselves to begin with. They are the ones feeling inferior, for whatever reason, and they are the ones internalizing and reacting to this feeling by acting out. What does it have to do with you? Its like the story of the man with the apple and the Buddha. The man placed an apple before the Buddha. He wanted to give it as a gift, but the Buddha perceived an impure motive behind the man's offering. Hence he did not take the apple. Did the apple belong to him then, even after being offered, or was it still the man's apple? Sometimes there are subtle reasons why things like this happen on the path. It could be you were feeling low self esteem at the time. If you do this even unconsciously, if your qi is strong, you will be broadcasting your mental state to your surroundings. Egotistical people will pick up on that and react to you the way they are used to doing towards someone they consider inferior, with an air of superiority. If you feel down about yourself, they will feel down about you, and express it also. The other side of it is that you could have been feeling good about yourself, but subtly tinged with pride or superiority. This is a more subtle trap. Some people will pick up on this and feel your pride, and consider that you think highly of yourself, that you are better than them. They already feel inferior to some extent, and one will tend to compensate by assuming an air of superiority as a defense. The lesson in it all is that neither inferiority or superiority will do. We have to get to the point of equal vision, and perceive the non-dual nature of pure consciousness everywhere. Then none will appear truly inferior or superior to us, and we will never consider ourselves inferior or superior to others. It is all one pure consciousness pervading everywhere, despite whatever qualities are superimposed on it. In those situation where a show of anger is appropriate though, it will not be because of our own projection reflected, but of someone else's projection onto us. Then like the proverbial snake we should "hiss, but not bite."

I dont really buy into the theory that Vedanta can be realized before there is success in Yoga. All these Advaitins jump on Sankara and Ramana Maharshi as prime examples of the 'already enlightened, just have to recognize it' school and while this is a valid viewpoint, the actual practise of recognizing is still a very long process for the vast majority of sadhaks. Maharshi's Self-inquiry is actually also Yoga, just that its Jnana Yoga, and Sankara was a Raja Yogi, though he expressed himself through Jnana. Vedanta itself means the flowering of the Vedas, or in other words the final realization to be had after the Vedas have been practised to fulfilment; in other words when Yoga has been perfected. Vedanta is strictly speaking the same as the attainment of Nirvikalpa Samadhi of Yoga, and the state of Kaivalya of Samkhya philosophy. Advaita (and thus Vedanta) cannot be known by an unripe consciousness. The lower dantien is no doubt an ocean of qi, but the qi coming in at the medulla is the cosmic qi, to which there is no limit. It is the entry point of the whole ocean of qi beyond the body. The only reason one thinks that projection of the consciousness into the infinite is occurring at the brow centre is because it is a reflection of the medullary cetre; that is where it is actually occurring. Kriya focuses on the upper dantien and medulla as the ocean of qi because cosmic qi is the shen, fresh and vital, which is the same reason MCO is done in Taoism, so that the stale jing gets recycled by being transmuted to qi, then shen, and fresh shen gets brought down to convert to qi and jing. Medulla is the psychic gate also, because infinite shen or cosmic qi carries all the 'data' of omniscient knowing with it as it enters the body. Yogananda did know of the lower dantien. It is evident in his posture and the way he stood. You can see it in the photos. All the kriya gurus had well developed bellies from abdominal breathing. All the kriya masters tended to have well developed chests also, even breast like chests to a degree, which indicates cultivation of the middle dantien. It is an unspoken fact that lower dantien gets well developed through kriya, but it is necessary to sit a long time in meditation after the performance of pranayam. That is when alchemy begins to happen without having to be explained. As youve seen, Navi kriya is a kriya of Lahiri Mahasaya's which actually works on the LTT a certain way, combined with the Om mantra. This kriya is not taught in SRF Lessons, but there is evidence that Yogananda taught it to certain people, just as he taught the full kechari mudra to certain people. The streaming qi to the brow centre was the result of kriya. It was not accompanied by light or visions, it felt as though the whole world was flowing towards a point in the brow. With eyes open i could actually see the streaming of qi continuously flowing there from all sides, thats why it seemed like it was the whole world, when in fact it was occurring within my body. It is the same with kundalini. When it awoke, and went to the brain, it felt as though the whole world (whole existence) had gone from below to the head. It was incredibly powerful a sensation and also not a little unnerving. These experiences were present in or out of meditation, and always verified constantly by the presence of certain siddhis like vyapti. It is quite amazing but also a bit frightening, well it was for me.

Interesting experiences you relate. The subjective perception of various experiences is different for different people I would say. While i cant say ive ever experienced 'sparkles' i can definitely attest to the role of the lower dantien in deep pranayam practise. When i did Kriya daily, religiously, i got to a point where real kumbhaka began to manifest. It was not simply a longer time between needing to inhale after exhaling, as the books suggest, but an actual lingering of the exhalation, as though even when the breath had left the lungs, a force continued to flow downward and into the dantien, like a magnet, rendering the need or even desire to breathe in again unnecessary. I did breathe in again, of course, but even then the primary motion seems to be the carry through on the exhale, so that it feels like taking breaths is just a secondary exercise, and all one's qi is continually flowing down and sinking into the lower dantien. Whenever i had this spontaneous experience, usually during or after meditation (after the kriya), the stillness and joy began to subtly be at the back of it. Its as though i could see what actual breathlessness in true samadhi would be like. It is in this same prolonged kumbhaka that the inner sound becomes clearly audible, and some aspect of the light at the brow point manifests. Paradoxically, as the flow of exhalation is so continuous and goes downwards, a flow of qi goes to the head. Often i felt as though the whole world was flowing toward the brow point from all sides. Could even see the stream of it converging there sometimes, like a crawling motion superimposed over everything visible (because it is an inner phenomenon). This paradoxical flow downward and upward is due to undoing the tug of war going on between the two currents responsible for moving the breath (prana and apana). When you undo them by the friction of rubbing the breaths together (kevali pranayam) you get kevali kumbhaka, the spontaneous breathlessness. The apana current continues to flow down even during inhalation, and the prana current continues to flow up even during exhalation, because the two currents have been loosened from being so involved with each other, in a vying for supremacy that gives rise to the breathing process. Once kevala kumbhaka is made potent by a lot of kriya (or MCO), the prana current carries the consciousness to the brain centers, and apana keeps merging the qi with the samana current and ocean of qi in the lower dantien. There is also a tremendous influx of cosmic qi through the medulla center in the back of the head (jade pillow?) This is why yogis consider the upper dantien or brain to be a battery or reservoir of qi, but it takes untying the prana and apana currents to become aware of this and have greater capacity for intake of qi at that point (Bible says: man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.) It is the cosmic sound issuing forth at the medulla that the yogi is attempting to absorb the consciousness in. That is the one that brings infinite expansion in omnipresence beyond the body. Aum is definitely significant in pranayam, and especially in kriya. Lahiri Mahasaya wrote that if one is not performing kriya by chanting mantra (Aum of first kriya, or the Dvadasaksari mantra of higher kriya) in each of the chakras, it is a tamasic kriya and the fruit will be tamasic (negligible). If you really want to get the most out of pranava mantra, might i suggest mentally placing 'Aum' into each chakra as you perform the MCO, if you are practising that at all. Really speaking, everything is the Aum, even just the feeling of qi (of the body), the inner sound and light, everything.

If by 'merit' you are not addressing the results of good actions, ie; karma, then it can also perhaps refer to the results of tapas (austerity) which is punya (merit). Cultivation is bit like earning money. You then have to decide how you will spend that money.

Not really. But many are/were.