People have all kinds of ideas about what spiritual practice is and isn’t, and even when they get an explanation they interpret what they hear or read in all sorts of ways, most of which are off the mark. In this blog post, I will be answering some questions that have recently arisen. If you read carefully, you might find …
Baba’s Work….
One of the greatest misconceptions about spiritual practice is that it is selfish. Unfortunately, the world is full of pseudo-spiritual “paths” that really are nothing but self-indulgence. Real practice is the opposite. When we actually do it, the world changes on a deep and subtle level. It’s hard to fathom this. Few people want to grasp that by turning inward …
Crumbs….
For many years I have used the story of Hansel and Gretel with the breadcrumbs as an example of how we go Home. For us, the breadcrumbs are still there. We can follow them back to who we really are. The last few weeks my work has been focusing on the self-hate we all have. We have seen that our …
Victimhood: the Way of the World….
This is going to be the final blog in this series. I want to address something that is going to be uncomfortable for many readers: attachment to victimhood. This subject can be raw, and it can trip a wire that may bother people who have not faced that attachment in themselves. It is crucial to recognize that I am using …
Drawing Out the Poison….
Hate is so mundane. Last week, I wrote that in order to hate we have to maintain the small self, and in order to maintain the small self we have to hate. Everyone has hate; everyone uses it and everyone is motivated by it. This hate is the first and most important distortion of Love. Everything we do comes from …
The Rotten Root of Hate and the Route Out….
God is Love. Love is our True nature. If we want to be autonomous, we must reject God, and therefore reject Love. So we twist Love into hate, and call ourselves individuals in our own right. But the small self, the shrunken self, is a prison, and we “know” that and hate it. We all have the memory of who …
Respecting Lineage….
If we want to learn, we have to surrender to instruction. This holds true in any area, but never more so than in spiritual practice. When we submit to instruction, we have to willingly diminish our autonomy. By giving up our say, we climb out of the kiddie pool of shrunken ideas and plunge into the ocean of true knowledge. …
Surrender….
According to Indian philosophy the world is made up of the three gunas or constituent principles. They are different vibrations. These three principles are tamas, rajas and sattva. They combine in infinite permutations to form the manifested universe. When we put these three in complete balance and still them, we are said to have completed our sādhana. Combinations of the …
The Guru Models….
All my years with Baba taught me how to live. Baba was a great model for life. When I say this I do not mean that he showed me I should wear orange robes if it is not my dharma. I do not mean that he showed me that I should live in an ashram if it is not my …
The Guru’s Grace….
The five-fold action of God is as follows: Create, Sustain, Destroy, Conceal, Reveal. As human beings and therefore shrunken manifestations of God, we perform these five activities in a diminished form, believing we are powerful. We obviously create, sustain, destroy, and delude/conceal. Revelation or grace is harder for us, as individuals, to see or perform. Our “grace” is the grace …