Practices

The page below was written three years ago. The new site, still building, puts more emphasis on understanding the hows and whys of practice.

How to go "Free." Techniques for Self-Realization

This section on practice was written many years ago and in ways has been superseded by much longer and more detailed discussions on the new site.

This section is about spiritual practices, the whys and hows.

The two most important practices in the Zen-Advaita traditions are keeping the company of saints and sages; the other is to practice the introversion of consciousness to find the true self, what Ramana Maharshi and Robert Adams characterized as following the I to its source. Keeping the company of saints and sages means being in their physical presence and hearing what they say. Their words can pound deeply.

Secondary, yet very important practices are chanting and various forms of internalizing, self-exploring meditations.

I am not an expert on chanting. The experiences presented here are mine only. I do not attempt to differentiate between types and which is better for what end. You probably will not have the same experiences; then again, you might. Since this is not my expertise area, you might want to leave it for last, unless you are a chanting junky, like me.

For me, ecstatic chanting causes the mind to relax and invert into itself, revealing deep levels of consciousness one can never be aware of when the mind is only in the world. Ecstatic chanting best done, requires musical accompaniment. A group chanting without music is still effective, but music intensifies it three-fold. The last is hard to come by because group chanting without instruments has little entertainment value, and only true devotees of the Bhakta type will be willing to do it. Audio tapes and CDs do work if you are by yourself, but do not work well in a group setting if people are not into chanting. The presence of musical instruments can draw the most skeptical into the heart of chanting. Therefore having drums, a harmonium, bells,finger cymbals, or even a violin are important.

It is important what kinds of chanting you listen to. Most of the Indian stuff is worthless. No wonder so few Indians don't like chanting; most of it is too boring.

When it comes to Indian style chanting, I highly recommend Muktananda tapes or those by his successor, Nityananda at Shanti Mandir. I also recommend the Hari Krishna CDs and tapes available everywhere, as well as the chanting tapes of Self-Realization Fellowship.

The non-Indian chanting opens up an entirely new realm. Japanese Zen and Korean Zen chanting is very powerful in a different way than Indian music. I cannot recommend any specific because I heard the best Korean chanting and music in Korea. Seung Sahn had a beautiful voice with a lot of power. I don't know whether his school sells tapes or CDs.

The dried up Jnani-types that Robert called “cold fish,” just never understand the power of this practice. They think chanting is beneath them and like talking-head Jnanis such as Balsekar, Jean Klein, Krishnamurti or some of my friends whose names I will not say.

However, many of the "biggies" in Advaita did chant. Nisargadatta chanted five times a day, and Robert twice at each Satsang. Ranjit chanted all the time. Many of the people that came to Robert’s Satsangs were the cold fish types. Chanting never seemed to catch on despite his and my best efforts.

What I don't know about chanting, I make up for in spades when it comes to meditation. Read the Introduction to Meditation below also, which outlines the various types of meditation and where they take you. I will soon add sections on three different sorts of meditation I think marginally valuable for enlightenment, but valuable in their own right for other purposes.

1) Microanalysis. This is an introspection of all elements of here and now sensations to experience them prior to the addition of a mind of concepts that make cognitive “maps” that tie disparate sensations into a falsely conceived whole. That is, we blow the crap out of the “realness” of the world and what we take to be ourselves, and expose its completely empty nature. This allows us to begin to see that neither the body, nor the mind, nor the world are real. None of it.

2) Opening the Third Eye. This is your basic exercise to open an awareness of the imaginary inner space, an inner "vision," the ultimate goal of which is recognition of the light of consciousness and immersion in that light. Before the exercise, few people ever really “see” what is going on in their inner space. They think, they imagine, and may even visualize, but they do not "see" the inner space itself. Sensations and thoughts are too dense to apprehend the space.

This is a difficult meditation and it takes perseverance. But, if done diligently, in the right setting, I will almost guarantee that almost half the people will have almost continuous access to unitary consciousness states as long as they continue to practice within a reasonable period of time. It took me six months of very strong practice even before going to Kapleau. I’ll tell you, this is best done at a very strict meditation-oriented center, such as a Zen center or Vipassana center, because when I did it by myself, without guidance, I was really scared a lot of the time by the very unusual happenings and mindstates, as well as the direct physiological effects.

I will guarantee that most everyone will awaken their Kundalini energy and be in for a long trip of playing with inner and outer energies within a fairly short period of time of practice. But, this is a big distraction. The ultimate intent is to open the inner eye to the light of consciousness, not to be able to see in absolute darkness or feel the earth's electromagnetic field or that of ordinary house wiring, or to be able to sit in meditation half naked in the snow completely toasty, all of which I did because I had no idea where I was going at the time.

Again, the intent is to perceive self-illumined inner space that contains all phenomena, and is the ultimate source of all light in the world of appearance.

As you can imagine, once the inner eye has opened, microanalysis becomes manyfold more powerful, as the analysis is done against a background of translucent light. The different phenomena and objects that make up our world, the objects of taste, touch, smell and vision, as well sight, hearing and touch are seen as nothing but light.

At this point I urge readers to read the Ashtavakra extracts on the web page of that name on this site. This is the experience you can have as well as the mature understanding that comes with it.

3. Sinking into the self; following consciousness backward to the root.

Enlightenment has two aspects: An awakening experience and the knowledge that experience reveals.

Sinking backwards into silence makes us fall to our deepest levels of consciousness. You have to regard this as a metaphor, as consciousness has no qualities of one part being deeper or better than another. Consciousness in its pure form is nothing but undifferented light. Actually, you fall backward into mindlessness and that's where all the changing experiences happen and the final knowledge attained.

The experience of enlightenment, for me, initially was that from the state of most deep consciousness, a moment will come when you see that the way you saw the world to be and thought the world to be, was only a creation of your thinking mind. All existence is only concept attached to unitary consciousness.

Thus the Zen understanding that everything is mind. No thing exists without mind.

The next experience takes even this experience away; mind and consciousness itself are illusory. Some Jnanis (The Advaita term for the enlightened) say that phenomena arise out of one's own Nounmena. That is, the manifest arises out of the unmanifest. This, I think, comes form someone who has not gone all the way.

My experience is that the manifest has nothing to do with me at all. It has nothing to do with me. It does not touch me. The illusion does not touch me. I am far, far beyond that illusion of the world, of life and death.

The other variant of going inward, introversion, is self-inquiry, where we seek to find the source of I or of the I-thought.

This is tough, because there is no I.

For me, I had to be taught that there was an I. I found out there was an I because the thousand year dead Zen monks all said looking for the I was where it was at.

I had to create an I concept to seek. Most have an unarticulated sense of “presence” which we confuse with the ultimate subject; however, that vague sense has to be articulated in order to see that the concept of I, as well as the experience of I are empty. This is what developmental psychology is all about.

At some point we see that we are seeking a concept, not a thing, either subjective or objective and you cannot obtain a concept, only think about one. That is, you are thinking!!! When you understand this, you disappear.

With this insight, we see that everything in the world is such: mind droppings.

Almost all of these are grist for guided meditation and I will show you how to do that later.

After all is said and done and you realize the empty nature of existence, practices drop off completely. Yet, chanting remains sweet and just sitting quietly brings deeper peace and deeper silence to better observe Consciousness.

This is an extremely broad and thus incorrect statement, but I believe that not one moment spent in proper meditation or energetic chanting is wasted time. Each moment helps towards the end goal of awakening. Even if that is not your goal, each moment spent in practice will bear some fruit in the future. But continuity and perseverance magnifies many fold the effectiveness of each moment.

Nisargadatta mentions over and over that he just sank inwardly into consciousness for three years, and abided there. I don't know whether he had any specific technique such as sitting in meditation, or self-inquiry. My guess is he just learned to abide in himself. Therefore, do not listen to those who misunderstand him and think hearing his words, by itself, is enough.

There is one other traditional practice I have found extremely useful: hearing the words of great sages and saints in print or on tape, like the cold fish do. In fact, for me, this became a primary practice during the late 1980s, supplanting meditation. I think though, unless one has a lot of training under one’s belt, any enlightenment thus generated does not stick.