The Dharma: Residing as Witness Consciousness vs Embrace a Chosen Direction with Continuity

There is definitely transmission from others and it cannot be dismissed and it is universal. This faith expressed in different languages and culture that everyOne has whatever the tradition needs to be honored respected and cannot be argued with. Yet these cultural identities only create fear and separation paradoxically and humanity has not even yet matured into seeing we are all the same despite wild and interesting differences. Argument never wins. The only thing to do, I find, is to give the faithful Yoga and then that takes them Somewhere beyond cultism.
But dharma wise this is what I recon! It is a question of, “what is your spiritual priority” to abide as witness consciousness to all arising conditions until you reside only as consciousness itself in which all “things” arise, where these are no subject object relationships only Reality. OR merge / embrace your chosen direction or object with continuity until you are completely merged with that object. In so doing you know the object but also synchronistically you know the knower of the object, consciousness itself, that in which all object / subject relations are arising. This was essentially Krishnamacharya’s teaching and he taught that it was necessary to all religious practice. It is the practical means by which the first mentioned idea, the “residing as consciousness only” would arise as a spontaneous “given” siddhi. It cannot be practiced but is given. Just like in the analogy of sleep. You cannot put your self intentional to sleep. But sleep is surely “given” when you make the conditions right. So i maintain that the senior spiritual priority is an appropriate Yoga, intimacy with all ordinary conditions. Then dissociation from ordinary conditions will never arise in attempt to be “spiritually” accomplished. That is, if one is attempting to “reside as witness only” before a life of Yoga, a life of intimacy has been established it only causes dysfunction and dissociation from life itself, which I see is the entire cause of humanity’s suffering, i.e. the lack of intimacy with life in all its forms. This has been forced on humanity too soon out by doctrine and power structure entirely out of the context of an actual Yoga, which now must be restored for everyOne. If the gift or siddhi arises genuinely, (the awareness that all is consciousness, or simply all IS One) in the life of Yogic intimacy it will never cause dissociation or cultism. And finally the merge with the object of choice is the age old anciently proven method of all the Great Traditions. The mutual love / affection between two real people IS the only method there really is in all the traditions. When it comes down to it, even in sophisticated dharma such as Vedanta or Buddhism they acknowledge that all insights arise in the fundamental relationship, one’s love for another. For example in the Mahamudra cults of Tibetan Buddhism their fundamental meditation inquiry is “no object, no subject no action,” but this meditation is gently given and practiced in the prior practice, which is mutual affection for an actual real life person, one’s Guru and intimacy compassion in all relationships. This is why Krishnamacharya would say “the Buddha was a Yogi. and Yoga is required.” That is, intimacy with all ordinary conditions. To be intimate with your own body and breath allows one to be intimate with another, one’s spouse, one’s Guru. That is body, breath and relationship in that order. And he would say Yoga is what one does as a practical response to the first sign of Grace. It enables us to stay intimate in our chosen direction, our “Ishta” with ease and continuity. Other wise we turn even Grace into an experience that has passed and the mind gets busy trying to grasp it again without the practical means of a search less Yoga.. direct participation in the Given life, which is only a nurturing regenerative continuity.
In the Great Tradition the avatar, Guru and Jivamukti appeared in a culture where Yoga was understood. It was mother’s milk of culture, a given and there was always the acharya in cooperation with the avatar, that could guide each person in there appropriate Yoga, their appropriate response to Grace or Life itself without seeking. Except Yoga has almost disappeared and something else exaggerated is being taught. Those who are spiritually sensitive, when they see modern day yoga reject it as being irrelevant, which it is. Real Yoga for real people must be given now as the fundamental and practical means of a spiritual life or any kind of life that wants to feel all that there is to feel.

The Avatar Is Not the Best Teacher. The cooperative symbiotic relationship between Avatar, Jivamukti guru, acharya and student in devotional community, the base of civilization

In Patanjali’s Yogasutra he points out that some people are born into an extraordinary state of grace, commonly known as “enlightened” a God realized avatar. Such people report their extra ordinary experience and through proximity their devotees have extraordinary experience by their avataric influence. Patanjali’s Yogasutra appeared around 330BC coincident with the time of the Buddha Yogi and the great review of Vedic wisdom.

However he also states that such people, though interesting are not the best teachers. Why, because they do not know the common human experience. They do not know suffering. They can even delude and lead you away from your own dharma or way. The Yogasutra makes clear that the best teacher is the acharya, a person who has gone through the process of suffering, the progression removing obstruction from their life. They have gone through and know the process of Yoga, from suffering to freedom. They have known human limitation. They are able to be truly helpful to a person who is suffering; to give them appropriate practice and recommendation designed for their unique situation.

It is not that there aren’t such people born into a state of permanent freedom, illumination beyond all limits. There are many examples. It is naturally occurring; so they have their vital place in our lives. Such people are indeed inspiring. It is just that in the traditions, always and all ways an appropriate Yoga is Given. It is what we do in response to such a graceful meeting. We can learn this from an acharya, one who has gone through the process. In the ancient world there was a clear distinction between the avatar and the jiva mukti acharya, one who is liberated through a process of Yoga and who can therefore adapt yoga to individual needs for others. There was an acknowledged empathetic mutuality between such people in the community.

In our own time the relationship between U. G. Krishnamurti and Satya Sai Baba was like that. Sai Baba would send people to U. G. in Bangalore because he knew U. G. could help. He knew that his avataric gifts and skills were not ultimately useful for a person without an actual and practical means.

So my point always is that there must be a right Yoga as the practicum, the practical response to what has inspired us. We learn from someone who has a good teacher them selves, practice them selves, and care for others in practical ways. The teacher is no more than a friend and no less than a friend. This is the necessary context of Yoga transmission. This true friendship is beyond social definition and is beyond personal or social identity.

For good reason many people have rejected the concept of Guru because it has been used fraudulently as a social defense and manipulation. In fear the so-called guru protects himself from social interaction and normal mutuality. There has been a valid denunciation of world religion built on the Guru principle that is only used as a power mechanism. An infant argument rages between the atheist and the theist, the guru cults of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and many many more. However, the Guru as a a real function is not an authority, or senior position, or even a personal identity. And we do need others, at least one other because we come in packs, we are social animals. We need to have some One in whom we can trust. It is my wish that we do not throw the baby out with the bath water, that we will restore this natural function around the world as the necessary means to yoga transmission and real human help, real intimacy and liberation.  We need our gurus and avatars but they are not what we have been led to believe. It is not the social dynamic of realized and non-realized, more and less, which is the problem of our commonly defined of gurus, Popes and priests. The quality of the teacher student is simply sincere affection and caring in an equal and mutual relationship. The mutual affection between two real people is the context of spiritual transmission and it always has been. Even in the sophisticated dharmas of Buddhism and Vedanta that speak of “no thing” or Only God, when it comes down to it these lofty realizations are transmitted through the plain love between two very real “objects,” two very real people.

The avatar concept has created the social dynamic of inequality and can even create delusion that no yoga is necessary. The experiences generated through proximity to them suggest that just being with the guru is sufficient. Many gurus’ teachings are just that: be in relationship with me. Co-dependence is created where the power of the individuals own yogic directions are lost.  In the tradition it is understood however that Yoga is what you do in response to Guru’s grace. It was never absent. Further more, not just any Yoga but the Yoga that is right for you. “Following the Guru’s destination is another way of loosing your self.” In other words it must be your Yoga and not just the duplication of arbitrary practices and patterns that are passed on by charm, authorities or culture. 

This of course is the set up of the entire social mind, whether Christ, Buddha, Mohammad, or the contemporary Guru authorities, ideals and practices are set up, and there is no Yoga, no individual empowerment. The teachers teach with a cadence of authority, often sounding charming, sincere and certain but delusional to themselves and others. This arrangement creates social illusion, the fact of disempowerment, individuals trying to get enlightened, imagining they are not, trying to get to God as if God could be absent, yet creating the imaginary absence. It created hierarchy in society that disempowered, degraded the common life. To be a householder, to be in the village still having sex and family was less than the heroic gesture of the monastic life. Sex and mother hood were diminished even degraded as being even the obstruction to spiritual evolution. Of course the opposite is true. Stop looking start living!

Side Note

An interesting side note is that the Buddha, Christ and Mohamed in their actual human lives were not such avatars but indeed acharya Yogis who had been through their ordeals of human suffering and worked it out. Hundreds of years later they were deified by hierarchical systems for power.

Many try and have claimed to be avatars, either themselves or later their followers. The most effective way to fool the people is to fool your self first. But real avataric appearances are few and far between. Who is an avatar and who is not remains interesting debate. Are their transcendent masters or not, is a good question. This humorous pondering went on around even the Krishnamurtis, J and U. G. who were both involved and rejected the Theosophists who had proposed that spiritual masters were present to guide humanity. J and U. G. toyed with this game of belief, seeming to reject the notion and other times flirting with affection that they had their masters. They were always encouraging people to go beyond mere belief systems into each their own visceral non-mediated experience of life. Although U. G. was usually emphatically dismissive implying that the idea of divine consciousness entering as an exclusive human was a spooky idea that implied that the divine was absent from every one else. With non-yoga teachings that denied sex and motherhood these systems have stripped humanity of real intimacy. On the whole the avatar is a deceitful social construct that has disempowered humanity. The avatar must be redefined and understood. And there needs to be a practical appropriate response to such a One that is all about receptivity and not the denial of experience.

The whole question is finally beside the point when we see that we live in a depthless reality, a profound wonder and intelligence that is each and every ordinary life. There is as much intelligence to create a stone, a piece of dirt, a blade of grass to completely blow the mind. The appearance of anything is a perfect wonder. If we see this wonder in the life of another person, in our friend or Guru, so be it. That is beautiful and we will probably feel that wonder with all teachers, even the frauds because they too are life.

The avatar is some One born with the inherent knowing that they are everything. There is only one nurturing reality and they are that and can explain that you are that too. They are not authorities, not superiors, not different from you and me and do not feel themselves to be different from you and me. Their realization does not create a sniff of personal or social identity or status. They are utterly ordinary and extremely practical people.  If there is any one with that certainty in your life, born with it or established later, a friend, someone with whom you have a real relationship let them stand in your life. This could be a famous person or not, just honest, real and ordinary. Without requirement, expectation or need, be with anything or any one who is certain that life is a nurturing force. That everything is arising in nurturing source reality. Find some one or something that communicates to you that the universe knows exactly what it is doing in your case. That you are in good hands here, completely loved and cared for. Be with that flower, a friend, father or mother (either in archetypal cultural form or actual person) as your own, standing in your life as love. The Guru is a caring friend that is all. They make nothing of it.“ No more than a friend no less than a friend.” And Yoga is what we do in response. It is the means to respond, feel, and participate directly in nurturing abundance of your life in the way that is completely the natural relatedness of your life.  One day it turns in to the same certainty for you but don’t even look for that or require it. In Yoga there is no requirement to manipulate the body or the energy in attempt to know the source, rather it is the other way round. We start with the heart that is felt in the simple participation in the union of all opposites. In the opposites we find their source. Such as exhale with inhale, strength with receptivity, within and without.

If pain continues don’t worry it is the healing. Yoga is the pragmatic way to co-operate with nurturing but you can’t determine exactly when and how the healing works, but it is. You do it for your self and past present and future generations. The nurturing flows through. Just do your Yoga.

 

So to all who follow guru, be it in the context of the great world religions or the new age religions and for those who have finished with religion but want to feel better. There must be a practical means. Without practical means things get worse. People live in two worlds, the ideal and the blandness of their every day experience. There must be a realistic Yoga established as one’s life priority. The bottom line is: we are utterly nurtured, Yoga or not. And Yoga is our chosen participation in the profound nurturing that is upon us. By Yoga we know the natural state, the place from which the avatar speaks. It is our practical response to the love we feel with such a One.

We drive our own car, steer our own directions, fulfill our own desires in the guru’s company. We are thrown off mass transit’s predefined destiny and patterns, hurtling along like frightened sheep. We do our own Yoga, our own direct intimacy with reality (body breath and relationship in that order).

What is a Teacher? What is Yoga? Major Yoga Review in the West

Krishnamacharya’s scholarly description of the Teacher’s role, identity and function would make it impossible for teachers to become focused on their celebrity or their own power. The teacher according to our teacher Krishnamacharya has only one interest, to empower his or her student. When I say “our,” I mean all who are interested in modern day styles of Yoga in the West because he is the teacher of all our teachers. He said, it is the students power we are interested in, not our own. So this whole identity and structure of the powerful teacher cannot arise, or therefore fall, as we see in the Anusara example. Krishnamacharya’s own words, “one who calls himself a Guru is not a Guru. One who calls himself a Yogi is not a Yogi” makes this pretty clear. This system of idealizing a teacher or a linear system of some future attainment in body performance, meditation, spiritual or philosophical perfection simply does not work. And is the problem itself, which denies each person’s inherent perfection as Life. Yoga is each person’s direct participation in the extreme intelligence of Life already given. It is the teacher’s role to see that each student can actually do that. The precise way that Krishnamacharya taught asana as union of opposites, of inhalation and exhalation in the natural polarity of strength that is receiving must be given now. As well as to the students of celebrity systems, brands and styles, so that the public can go beyond the naïve yoga experiments in the West.
As William Broad stated in his book The Science of Yoga, Yoga can stay in its infancy in the West or grow up. It is my earnest request that Yoga Journal and other influential people who speak for Yoga take up at this formal position. That the principles of the teacher Krishnamacharya, the source of modern day Yoga can now be given and placed into the systems of asana that have been popularized. This makes each person’s Yoga entirely their own, efficient, powerful and safe.

It is very easy to do this and it is a curious question as to why it has not happened before now. Iyengar Yoga and all that derivatives of his work, such as Anusara all arose from Krishnamacharya’s life and teaching, so it must be easy now to include the full spectrum of Yoga practice into them. Also into Pathabi Jois’s work and derivatives of. After William Broad’s book and the downfall of Anusara as a celebrity belief system, of teacher and technic, the broad public is legitimately questioning even the validity of yoga. We are undergoing a major review both within the Yoga community and beyond. It is not good enough to defend the partial systems that have been branded and merchandized, but to see the bigger picture, honor the early experiments, but now be open and “grown up” to modify these systems.

The principles of the modification are these: 1. Make the breath the central feature and purpose of the asana. 2. Sequence the asana to individual needs where the breath is the gage and action of the movement. 3. Let the breath initiate and end the movement. 4. Allow the strength of the asana to receive the inhalation. 4. In stationary asana allow the breath to remain the central focus. 5. Allow the asana to create bandha in the four part breathing cycle (the intelligent cooperation of muscle groups in the polarity of strength receiving). 6. Each day, asana allows for pranayama and pranayama allows for meditation as a seamless process. Meditation arises as siddhi or natural result of asana pranayama and cannot be willfully practiced. 

Asana, your first spiritual responsibility and the Eros of God.

The soul’s relationship to God is described in religious traditions as an erotic play between male and female divine personalities. There are many examples. Sita and Ram, Radha and Krishna, Shiva and Shakti. These human stories do not by pass the extreme sensual pleasure of a love relationship. The ‘erotic’ quality is of course in the most positive use of the word. It is the eros or utter connection; the connection of the soul to the Lord, the individual to the universe. This Eros quality is ‘eros ive’ to the soul’s obstructions (heavy like rock or soil) and allows the soul’s reunion with its source. My personal research with the dying showed me that in death there is an utter pleasure for the person merging back to their Source. They describe it in terms like delicious, exquisite, utter peace. This religious, ‘re linking’ point of view is clearly the opposite of other religious methodologies that teach the transcendence of desire as THE way. So we need to figure this out and take a personal position on what works for us.
Believe it or not, the participation with the obvious union of opposites in our own life, as simple as left to right, front to back, above to below, inhalation to exhalation, strength to receptivity, male to female, within and without IS your ancient religious, re linking, Eros, participation in the universe, you and source reality that is nothing other than nurturing, abundance, regeneration, continuity and healing. It is the soul’s relationship to God (if that language is ok for you) and it is erotic and delightful. So what is the implication? “Do your Yoga,” not just any Yoga but your Yoga, your participation in your own opposites. Elevate asana to the extreme religious priority, non-obsessive spiritual responsibility and practical means that it is. This exquisite participation in the opposites already in erotic union as your own life may very well result in the same Eros wonder, strength receiving in the outer polarity (that is with some one you love!) although it does not need to. But it will result in the certainty of your utter connection, absorption in the nurturing wonder of this total universe, arising as the sheer regenerative perfection and extreme intelligence of life that is YOU.

Yoga: The Union of Opposites, The Heart is the whole body and all its relationships, Left is Right etc, You are a flower blooming in your own garden.

Left is Right, Inner is Outer etc
Yoga is the union of all opposites. Your participation in the opposites does more than you know. Please observe that left IS right… left is literally the right, yet can be defined and experienced independently and are also utterly the same as each other. You are the whole body. Please observe that base IS the crown… you are the whole body. And please observe that your inner IS the outer. You are literally another person, a tree, a cloud, the sky, solid ground and moon and stars. You are the whole body appearing in this vast context utterly one with and dependant on everything for your Life, yet amazingly an autonomous individual as well free to steer in any direction you choose. By these simple means you know your Reality. Nurturing source reality is appearing in you as you.
You are a flower blooming in your own garden
Your first form arrived as one cell known as the heart. A spark of Life, initiated by male female, giving and receiving union of opposites, the catalyst of nurturing, your spirit took form and the source became seen. This one cell is the portal to absolute nurturing reality, mother source. Poetically it is the jewel in the lotus. She has unfolded like a flower in bloom as a subtle body, the movement of energy through your whole form. And she has manifested as your physical form. Well, you are not a flower. You are a human. But the same life beauty, wonder, intelligence is blooming as you. Indeed there are subtle structures in your body like flowers. So you ARE a flower blooming in your own garden. Rest in that. Searchlessly see the flower petals unfolding from the heart. Be in the tips of petals. Be in your skin and all ordinary conditions. Nurturing energy flows from the heart. The love prana flows from the hridaya and everything is nurtured in all directions.
The Heart, The Whole, Source of All Appearance, From Where Opposites Originate, Served and Sustained by Union of All Opposites
In Yoga there is no requirement to manipulate the body or the energy in attempt to know the source, rather it is the other way round. We start with the heart that is felt in the simple participation in the union of all opposites. The heart or “hrid” is felt as the place where all opposites are in union and the origin of all opposites, from where the life energy flows, nurturing the physical and all its relationship. Yoga starts and ends with reality participation. The hrid manifest as all life as the giving and receiving functions of life. (hri = to give, d = receive).
It is felt in the body as:
1. heart on the right (hrid, causal nurturing origin)
2. heart in the center (anahata heart chakra and all chakra, the nurturing energy flow base to crown from the hrid enjoyed as mantra and yantra)
3. physical pumping heart on the left.
There is no value system one higher than the other. Resting in one gives access to all.
They are the same originating heart reality. Intimacy with the physical is the primary means. The attempt to reduce the physical to realize the subtle or causal heart is not required and disturbs our heart and life.
Yoga is not about self-consciously trying to realize anything. That creates the false identity of one who is seeking. It is surrender participating in what is already true. We are completely nurtured. This we can depend on any time in the future. Just wait relax and be healed. If there is pain it is the healing. The nurturing is always operating and cannot be lost in the extreme wonder and intelligence of the universe always functioning to maximum degree to keep you well and happy… like a mother does!

Esalen Talk 8/13/09

Mark speaks recently at Esalen, California. His friend John Patrick was visiting. He had moved in his life from praticing as a monk in a religious order to become a yogi. Mark discusses the dissociation of meditation (as if it it is something you can do as a separate practice) from its Yoga context. “The Buddha was a Yogi, not a meditator” The pervasive doctrinal social influence to abide as witness consciousness diminishes the value of experience and creates conflict with ordinary experience including and especially sex, the the extreme intelligence of ordinary Life. The Buddhist, Vedantic or Christian monastic life, going within, has destroyed the value of the individual and all natural relationship. “It is intimacy we want, not enlightenment.” The very concept of enlightenment is only a power mechanism, a hoax that has destroyed humanity’s inherent intimacy with life. Yoga is a the return to intimacy for everyOne. Yoga is direct embrace of reality, which is only nurturing, abundance and continuity. Yoga is the embrace of all ordinary experience, not merely to be aware or witness experience. Then we spontaneously feel the Source of all experience.

You have a virus!

The attempt to change your self in terms of any social idealism, god realization, enlightenment, peace, love, whatever it is, invades the body like an intractable virus. It is an imposition of mind on this wonder full organism, this utterly perfect life that you are. There is truly nothing you can do about it except know that you have the virus and wait for life to heal you. Life heals all disease in time. It can be painful, but pain IS the healing. You can also practice the yogas of intimacy in the meantime. That will heal you too.
Stop looking start living.

GRACE IS HERE / MALE FEMALE MEANS BY WHICH SPIRIT TAKES FORM / RAM DASS ON YOGA

My daughter is giving birth. I am deeply moved to see the natural state in her, as her, the extreme wonder, intelligence of Life appearing as Mother as new Life. I am filled with awe for this Life and all life, for me and for YOU. Male female are in union. Spirit has taken form as you and me and my daughter’s child, named Grace Dyani. Source has appeared as this ordinary seen reality.

I said that it would be very positive for humanity if the leaders of the free world were a couple in a polarized relationship where the wisdom of both male and female dynamics of nature made the crucial decisions for humanity. I suggested that Hillary and Bill would approximate this yoga equation of male / female mutuality and that it would be recognized in secular thought because they would both be known as “President”.  America would have to deal with it. For me this was a Yoga dharma consideration not a political endorsement. I think also that Barack and his wife will express this mutuality in the White House more than ever before in human history. We may see the ending of the lopsided male power structures that are not surrendered to the feminine. May this happen quickly! It would be like “what if the Pope had a wife of equal social visibility and status.” What society would that have created. Yaah!

We know yoga to be the natural and actual means of participation in the male female union by which spirit takes form within and without. Yoga is so easily practiced and is a natural healing activity that is available to anyone who has breath. It is for everyOne everyWhere including individuals who do not have normal physical movement.
My friend Ram Dass was showing me with great joy how he had adapted his Yoga to his needs. One side of his body is paralyzed. He holds one arm with his good arm and moves the whole body as breath. It makes him feel well and joyful. It brings health into his system. He wanted to know why he had not been taught this earlier in his Life when it is clearly devotion. It is bhakti yoga to which his Life has been devoted. It is the direct intimacy with our Nurturing Source. In a poignant moment he tearfully apologized for hatha Yoga being so poorly represented in the West.  He said he never had a chance to do it because all his hatha yoga teachers were show offs. They would teach him extreme exaggerated, heroic things to do in the dualistic psychology of trying to get somewhere idealistic, imaginary enlightenment. Not the direct intimacy where each person participates in the wonder of Life already Given, in us as us.
So he was crying.. so sweet. “I have it now” he said. I love this man.

Deepak Chopra, Ram Dass, Krishna Das, Shyam Das

We just finished teaching with Deepak Chopra, Ram Dass, Krishna Das, and Shyam Das in Hawaii. Many people gathered for these retreats. For me to teach Yoga in this context is very auspicious because everyOne there has a sincere spiritual inquiry going on, otherwise they would not have taken the oportunity to come and meet us. Most everyOne before the retreat was not aware of the vital role a personal physical Yoga practice plays in the spirtual intention that teachers like Deepak Chopra and the Dass Brothers are bringing forth. in fact, most of the students there had previously, and justifiably rejected yoga as not being relevant to their spiritual Life because of the gross way yoga is taught as a muscular exaggeration and egoic effort. However, once given the technology of the nondual practice of Hatha Yoga, a tantric practice in which one celebrates their direct connection to Source, rather than striving to achieve God’s grace, it becomes obvious that this is their primary bhakti. By participating in the union of all polarities already Given, they are expressing devotion to Reality or God, within and without. It is easy for each person to learn because it is about intimacy with who you are, the extreme intelligence of Life, the very visibility and expression of Source. Without this practice it is very difficult to go beyond the dualistic presumptions that seem to seperate our ordinary Seen conditions and Source. These doctrinal ideas are present everywhere and we do not even know we have them. The social concept of looking for God itself creates the belief of God’s absence. Looking for something implies it is lost! By a careful nondual understanding and the practical means of the “ha tha”, we participate in the Given and are no longer searching for what was never lost.
Gratefully Ram Dass and Deepak acknowledge this equation and are encouraging their students to learn an approriate personal Yoga and I am happy to give it.
I also want to acknowledge the enormous public work that Deepak Chopra and Ram Dass, Krishna Das and Shyam Das have done to bring the understandings of the great traditions into the public mind of the west. Thank God.
it was a joy to see them together. It was great to give Ram Dass his Yoga at the age of 76 recovering from a severe stroke. I know he felt it as his whole body prayer to the One who loves him. Krishnamacharya always said that the nurturers of the community have a special right to practice Yoga because it is direct intimacy with our nurturing Source. I said to him, “Now the great nurturer is nurtured.”

Spiritual Realization

Hi everyOne, frequently the discussions in our Yoga groups have been about Yoga as a means to some kind of spiriual realization. We generally conclude that it is not. Why? Because we are already realized! If there is such a thing as an “unseen Source” (God) responsible for all this appearance here it can not be absent from its own expression, this extreme intelligence, which is our Life. Yoga asana is a non dual practice of direct participation in the Given. Not an attempt to get somewhere as if we are not Somewhere. God has realized you as all this ordinariness, so there is no need to realize God.. What a relief! Now Yoga begins without the idea of trying to get somewhere, my teacher would say, as the direct participation in Nurturing Source.
Yay!
The idea here is that you understand that the search for God or enlightenment creates the idea that both are absent. With this understanding you can now learn the non dual, non linear Yoga for yourself as a daily, actual and natural, non obsessesive practice. This practice is specific to you and can not be learned by copying the popular styles of Yoga that have swept the world as commercial activity. These have all been infected by the virus of dualism.