Practice requires us to actually practice. And because this practice is internal, there is no place where practice is not appropriate. And yet, we decide when and where and how to practice. More insidious than this willfulness is our tendency to misunderstand what practice is. From the standpoint of the three gunas, our understanding of sādhana is determined by which …
Miserly Hoards the L to Get Misery….
When life is all about “me”, I am a “taker”. I am stingy. There is no one else in the room with me—I am the only one. Everyone else is just an object that impacts me in some way. Identifying as the one true shrunken self only makes us miserable. Misery, then, is the bottom line of all vibrations; it …
Happy-go-lucky….
I am writing this out of a deep sense of sadness as we keep heading down a road that hurts us all. Many years ago, I worked with an eleven-year-old who was extremely troubled. His parents were a big part of the problem, though there was no recognition of that fact. What I heard over and over again was the …
Tools To Still….
No matter what the tradition, the goal of spiritual practice remains the same. It follows that every spiritual tradition draws from the same essential tools for practice. Teachers within a given lineage expand and refine its toolkit as time goes on. Below is a list of some tools from the kit I was given by Baba. If practiced appropriately, with …
Seamless Always….
There are certain questions we need to ask ourselves constantly: Do I have public and private faces? Do different people get different versions of me? Can I be good without someone else being bad? Is how I act in line with what I profess? Am I seamless? In order to be seamless, we have to have good boundaries. This seems …
Subjectivity Is the Wedge….
Subjectivity is the wedge we must use to get rid of the wedge of subjectivity. By subjectivity I mean “subject” in the grammatical sense. We have to accept our agency as the individual subject in order to let go of our limited subjectivity and get to the Absolute Subjectivity of God. We need agency to move from dualism to nondualism. …
Emotional Maturity….
Baba used to say we have to have a strong mind and ego to get rid of the mind and ego. Watching many people over many years, I have found that he was so right. People with undisciplined minds could not last around Baba; they were unwilling and had made themselves unable to do the hard exercise of practice. Sādhana …
The Real War To Be Fought, Part Two….
Once we have realized that the outer world is not the real battleground, we then must turn to the place where the real war is to be fought. We turn in, within our own territory, and do battle with ourselves. If we do not do this inner work, the work we do outside will not be clear and clean. By …
The Real War To Be Fought, Part One….
Be with your experience. Let everything that comes up from that experience come up. Function appropriately on the physical plane. Seems so simple, yet it is so difficult to practice. Simple, but not easy. This is the war to be fought. Every worthy religious and even martial tradition speaks of this war. But because of our wrong vision and understanding, …
How Unsafe Happens….
“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). Jesus meant what he said here—not in the literal sense of hating, but in the sense of being completely nonattached. If we are not nonattached to …