Mooji: On the Conquest of Thought

"If we think for a moment that there is such a thing as thought, consciousness itself will appear as thought. That itself will appear as the world, and jivas, and as the Supreme. There will be misery arising out of it. Therefore, beloved, conquer thought easily by the certitude that there is no such thing as thought and all is Consciousness, and like this attain bliss."

"Conquest of thought alone is the great success. Conquest of thought alone is the great achievement. Conquest of thought alone is the great yoga. Conquest of thought alone is the great knowledge. Conquest of thought alone is the great purification. Conquest of thought alone is the great liberation. Conquest of thought alone is the removal of sorrow. Conquest of thought alone is the greatest happiness. But conquest of thought is, itself, the renunciation of thought, (and) the renunciation of thought is Consciousness."

-- Ribhu Gita --

Anthony Paul ("Mooji") Moo-Young

Basing his short lecture (below) on a reading from the Ribbhu Gita, spiritual teacher, Mooji, points out that the basic problem of human existence, the individual ego, arises from the individual's identification with the body-mind complex rather than the pure Being innate in each of us. Mahamaya, the great illusion that we are the body-mind and nothing more, arises when we wholly identify with our egoic thinking, and are thus blinded to the pure consciousness and Being within us.

"Egoic thought can only molest you when you are the body-mind identity," Mooji notes. "Mahamaya, the great illusion, can only overwhelm you when you carry the modification 'I am the body-mind', 'I am just a person.' No person can defeat that Mahamaya. It is only because the Parabrahman is inside you, the Supreme Being is inside you, that you can transcend maya.""

"(It is) only by limiting yourself to being the body-mind only," Mooji points out, that illusions and (more) illusions can enter. But because the Supreme Being is your Being, because you are identical with that, and that alone can transcend the effects of maya, that is the evidence that you are the Supreme Being. Because human beings have transcended maya."

"Nothing is either good or bad," wrote Shakespeare, "But our thinking makes it so."

Rumi: The Sufi's Tavern of Love

"In the tavern are many wines," writes poet, Coleman Barks, "the wine of delight in color and form and taste, the wine of the intellect's agility, the fine port of stories, and the cabarnet of soul singing. Being human means entering this place where entrancing varieties of desire are served. The grapeskin of ego breaks and a pouring begins."

"Fermentation is one of the oldest symbols for human transformation," he points out. "When grapes combine their juice and are closed up together for a time in a dark place, the results are spectacular. This is what lets two drunks meet so that they don't know who is who. Pronouns no longer apply in the tavern's mind-world of excited confusion and half-articulated wantings."

"But after a time in the tavern," Barks warns, "a point comes, a memory of elsewhere, a longing for the source, and the drunks must set off from the tavern and begin the return. The Qu'ran says, "We are all returning." The tavern is a kind of glorious hell that human beings enjoy and suffer and then push off from in their search for truth. The tavern is a dangerous region where sometimes disguises are necessary, but never hide your heart, Rumi urges. Keep open there. A breaking apart, a crying out in the street, begins in the tavern, and the human soul turns to find its way home."

[Coleman Barks, "The Essential Rumi" p. 1.]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * 

THE DRUNKARDS AND THE TAVERN

I'm drunk and you're insane, who's going to lead us home?
How many times did they say,
"Drink just a little, only two or three at most?"

In this city no one I see is conscious;

one is worse off than the next, frenzied and insane.

Dear one, come to the tavern of ruin
and experience the pleasures of the soul.
What happiness can there be apart
from this intimate conversation
with the Beloved, the Soul of souls?

In every corner there are drunkards, arm in arm,
while the Server pours the wine
from a royal decanter to every particle of being.

You belong to the tavern: your income is wine,

and wine is all you ever buy.
Don't give even a second away

to the concerns of the merely sober.

O lute player, are you more drunk, or am I?
In the presence of one as drunk as you, my magic is a myth.

When I went outside the house,
some drunk approached me,

and in his eyes I saw

hundreds of hidden gardens and sanctuaries.

Like a ship without an anchor,

he rocked this way and that.

Hundreds of intellectuals and wise men
could die from a taste of this yearning.

I asked, "Where are you from?"
He laughed and said, "O soul,

half of me is from Turkestan and half from Farghana.

Half of me is water and mud, half heart and half soul;

half of me is the ocean's shore, half is all pearl.

"Be my friend," I pleaded. "I'm one of your family."
"I know the difference between family and outsiders."

I've neither a heart nor a turban,

and here in this house of hangovers

my breast is filled with unspoken words.

Shall I try to explain or not.

Have I lived among the lame for so long

that I've begun to limp myself?
And yet no slap of pain could disturb
a drunkenness like this.

Listen, can you hear a wail

arising from the pillar of grief?
Shams al-Haqq of Tabriz, where are you now,

after all the mischief you've stirred in our hearts?

(Translation by K. Helminski, A, Godlas, and               L. Saedin)

[Kabir Helminski, "The Rumi Collection," pp. 32-24]

Mystics, Awakening and the Divine: A Sufi View

 “… Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God who is our home. ”

 -- William Wordsworth --
("Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.")

"Mystics are lovers going home," writes Sufi teacher and author, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, "living the passion and commitment that are needed to surrender and be taken, to become empty of oneself and filled with the Beloved."

"Little can be told," he suggests, "of the innermost mysteries of the heart, of how our own soul opens to God. And for each of us this jouney, our heart's pilgrimage, is unique, because each of us is unique. We are each a unique creation by the Great Artist, and each of us makes our own offering in the fire of love."

"We all come from God," he continues, "but when we are born into this world we forget. We forget from where we have come and that we are children of light. We take on the clothing of the world, leaving behind the "clouds of glory" of our true Home. The Sufi calls this the "journey from God," a journey of forgetfulness in which we leave Paradise behind."

But," Vaughn-Lee observes, "there are those who never quite forget, who keep a distant memory buried deep within them. As a result this world never seems like home; there is often a sense of not quite belonging, not fitting in."

"Mystics," he notes, "are strangers in this world, just because they remember their real home."

["Love is a Firre: The Sufi's Mystical Journey Home," pp. 20-21.]

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

In the following six-part video lecture, Vaughan Lee examines spiritual awakening, who and what it is that awakens, and what they awaken to.

Carl Jung: Consciouness and the Psyche

Carl G. Jung
(1875-1961)

In his essential guide to mankind's psyche, "The Undiscovered Self," the pioneering Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung expounds on the preeminence of the individual psyche and consciousness, and discusses the challenges that the psyche and consciousness present to both science and religion.

"The structure and physiology of the brain furnish no explanation of the psychic process," Jung observes. "The psyche has a peculiar nature which cannot be reduced to anything else. Like physiology, it represents a relatively self-contained field of experience to which we must attribute a quite special importance because it hold within itself one of the two indispensable conditions for existence, namely, the phenomenon of consciousness. Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position coequal with the principle of physical being."

"The carrier of this consciousness," Jung notes, "is the individual, who does not produce the psyche on his own volition but is, on the contrary, preformed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If the psyche must be granted an overriding empirical importance," he notes, "so also must the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche."

The psyche, Jung observes, is devalued by science because of its own subjective characteristics, which is not amenable to statistic analysis, and by organized religion which discounts the validity of the psyche if the individual does not ascribe to its particular dogmas.

"One other remarkable fact (about the psyche) deserves mentioning," Jung notes. "This is the common psychiatric experience that the devaluation of the psyche and other resistances to psychological enlightenment are based in large measure on fear - panic fear of the discoveries that might be made in the realm of the unconscious."

Of course, such fear (along with rampant desires that are impossible of fulfillment) is the substratum of the human ego, which, as such, separates the individual not only from religion, but ultimately severs the ties of the individual to human society, ties that Jung sees as being of paramount importance, unless one is sheltered from such isolation by real religious insight based on experience rather than mere belief.

"Often the fear is so great," Jung observes, "that one dares not admit it even to oneself." "Here," he notes, "is a question that every religious person should consider very seriously, (as) he might get an illuminating answer."

[Jung, "The Undiscovered Self," pp. 59-61]

"Self-Awareness Allows Us to Become Conscious"

Rev. Theodore (Ted) Nottingham

In a timely, yet timeless, message, aimed at those of us struggling with the reality of difficult times, Pastor Ted Nottingham of Indianapolis' Northwood Christian Church, a prolific author and inspired teacher, asks: "(H)ow can we apply in a practical way the great teachings of spiritual masters throughout the ages to the here and now, to this 21st-century malaise, this troubled living that so many of us are in and (can) seem to find no way out of?"

Reverend Nottingham, one of the most informed and transformative voices in America's religious life, draws on the vast teachings of the Orthodox Church and its great spiritual teachers, as well as other esoteric wisdom traditions, to inform his brand of enlightened Christianity, a brand of faith based on the vast untapped, and perhaps unknown, potential of the individual.

"Self-awareness," says Nottingham "allows us to become conscious of who we are in the midst of our external circumstances. Because just by that separation of attention of yourself and the external world, you begin to pull back some of that energy and attention caught up in the struggles of the outer life."

"Through self-awareness," he says, "you are calling yourself home, you are coming back into yourself in a place that is, in some ways, beyond time." The timelessness of the Eternal or Spiritual, being, of course, at the heart of all the world's great religious and wisdom traditions, and it is the essential teaching of Christ's message that Nottingham continually brings home to his audience

"God or Spirit," doesn't just drop into our existence," he notes. Indeed, he points out, "we have to reach up to it metaphorically through consciousnsess, through expanded awareness."

"Most of us," he rightly observes, "are tunnel visioned, funnel-visioned, hypnotized by the outside world, and therefore full of fears (and) full of helplessness, really, in this global meltdown."

"The kingdom of God cometh not with
observation: Neither shall they say,
Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold,
the kindgdom of God is within you."

-- Luke 17: 20-21 --

"My suggestion to you," he advises, "is to separate out, where you can find some peace within that is not completely flooded by the tsunami of the outside world. And from that first step into a place of peace, you can expand into (a) spiritual awareness which give us strength and courage that we knew not that we had; that gives us hope when there seems to be no hope around, (and) the courage to make it through another day."

"This teaching of detachment, he observes, "of recollection, of mindfulness, of remembering the deeper self, all place us in a new relationship to our circumstances."

"Let (these) be teachings for you now in this hard time," Nottingham urges. "Find that peace that you can't find any place else; find that strength that is your spiritual self and ability of your true identity; and, with God's help, may you find your way through these difficult times."

Human Existence Is "Trifarious" . . . Consisting of Body, Mind and Spirit

Writing in The Times of India - an excellent source for spiritual aspirants, as  one of India's top daily newspapers features reports on India's spiritual heritage - Shri Shri Anandamurti makes the following observations on humamankind's true nature:

Human existence is trifarious, a combination of three currents: physical, mental and spiritual. Most people may not transcend the limits of their physical existence: they get enmeshed in crude worldly pleasures, tormented by desire. Subtleties of life, expression and practice are perhaps beyond their reach. Their world is limited to their bodies and physical requirements.

There are others who are more concerned with their minds as they feel that it is the supremacy of mind that sets them apart. Their lives are guided by their desires for mental satisfaction. By virtue of their endeavours they create poetry, art, music and sculpture, for instance. They express the finer human feelings of mercy, sympathy, love, friendship and pity. They believe that the mind flows for the sole purpose of attaining the Infinite, and hence they focus their energies on the contemplation of the Transcendental Entity. They are spiritual aspirants. Drawn by the magnetic attraction of Cosmic Consciousness they speed forward and reach the stage which marks the end of mental existence and the beginning of spirituality. At that stage one is no longer a human being, one is a veritable god.

Clearly drawing from India's Vedantist heritage - perhaps the true source of most, if not all, of the spiritual traditions - at a deep level, Anandamurti's comprehensive comments encompass Christianity's "trinitarian" nature of God, and idealized Man.

The entire article is worthy of review for its observations of how cultures and societies in this phase of their evolution have lost their focus on mental and spiritual accomplishments - and, thus, their 'humanity' - in the pursuit of physical comforts and stimulation.