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 …
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 …
Guest Blog by Ian Ralby: Nirbīja Sādhana….
I have always known, conceptually at least, that spiritual practice has to be a constant and consistent endeavor. Rohini has said it thousands of times: to make any progress, you have to practice no matter what you are doing, whether teaching a class, riding a bike or cleaning a toilet. But somehow I am only just now discovering that I …
Liberation….
Liberation is utterly different from what most people imagine it to be. Baba always made clear that liberation is not for the individual. He always stressed that the individual cannot be liberated, and that the only way to liberation is to give up our attachment to and wrong identification with any separate identity. I specifically went to Baba because that …
Climbing the False Mountain….
Self-esteem is nothing more than the small self’s opinion of itself. It is a tale told by an idiot. Any education that prioritizes self-esteem is a course in unreality; it leads the student on a needless journey across an imaginary landscape of illusory meadows and false mountains. When we fixate on self-esteem, we fall prey to the delusion that accomplishment …
Deprogramming….
Recently I heard that someone who once studied with me had to be “deprogrammed” because he had a hard time understanding why he stopped studying. I do not know if this information is even true. It is not my bent to go on hearsay, but I want to address the topic of deprogramming because over the years it has come …
Who We Think We Are….
The life of self-esteem is the death of the soul. Self-esteem is one’s overall assessment of oneself as an individual. The assessment can be backed by actual internal experience or it can be decided by phrases we repeat to ourselves. When the self-esteem becomes more important than the soul, we are lost. Our job is to reassess the assessment. The …
Accepting surrender….
Surrender is not throwing away or giving up and losing. Surrender is giving up the fruits of the outcome. Acting complete in every minute without expectation of winning or losing. Outcome is off the point. The question is, “Did I play with integrity and authenticity, and without thinking? Did I give my all without seeking any reward?” In his introduction …
The Great Stories….
It isn’t that we don’t know the stories. But the important thing is that the great stories are always teaching us. There are many great stories. Within them, at every moment, the great beings choose to live completely—not to settle for a mediocre, unconscious life that depends on emotion for its heights. The stories teach us the great lessons of …