But are you free of suffering?

Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace
- The Upanishads

*note*..hehehehe..I love this Brother Elias..I just run a search on his blog,and found these marvelous bits about Ramana Maharishi and the ,,whom I am,, non-sense.
What he is trying to explain is formidable..and only those really honest about self-definition would comprehend him..
So..instead of composing a fresh,new..never-heard stanza..I decided to re-post a poem of mine.
Kisses:)..this poem is from a former post of mine at http://kriptodanny.blogspot.com/2008/11/spiders-on-lake.html

Behold

Life is like a box of chocolate

Never know what dreams will get

Till the sun appears set

There is something to forget..

Will you wake up from the dream?

Can the path be always lean?

Were you dreaming in the sun?

By the beats of romping drum..

You were child and you were dreaming

Dreaming that you were awake

And the thought is quite unsettling

Walking thru the sleeper's gate

Never thinking for a second

Who's asleep and who is late

Who's the spider in the lake

Who's the one you shall forsake

For the dreamer's dreams are fake

When the sunshine stops to shine

Then your darkness it's your sign

Black and white and blue and ice

Sleeping pill is paradise

For the spiders from the lake

Wait for you to be awake

If you're not,they'll talk to you

Black and white and icy blue

For the lake wants you awake

Not for you but for it's sake

There is nothing what it seems

Only sleepers live the dreams...

Thus spokenth the mahayogi:)

-added by danny-
ps..unless you are advanced..you'll have no idea of what I really meant in this poem..but Elias is more merciful ,and he explains a bit..read him for now.

...................
Locate and penetrate your suffering...


by Elias


March 16, 2008


Some fellow tells you he is free of suffering, and maybe he is. But are you free of suffering? In considering your suffering, where did you locate your suffering? Outside yourself?


Mental or spiritual suffering is located in the subtle formations below the threshold of consciousness – the background of conscious awareness. These formations are the “nuances” of the mind that we tend to allow to persist in unexamined splendor.


If only you knew just how real this stuff is, you wouldn’t leave it undisturbed!

But we tend to be preoccupied with experiential/verbal interactions with others and with the outer world. We tend not to quiet down to the point where we begin to notice the nuances of the subtle dimensions – even to experience them as remembered dreams. Subtle awareness is being drowned out by the noise-level of the verbal/emotional mind.


And yet of the two aspects of consciousness – outer-verbal and inward-subtle – subtle awareness is the more real. Verbal mind is fine for what it is, and a necessary tool for living in the world. But it tends to override the quiet side of being alive. It occludes Reality. It cancels the Silence.


When you are inspired and moved to descend into the subtle formations of the mind, when you get to know and feel them, eventually you pass through them to the Silence. Then God speaks directly to you. Or rather, you notice that he has been speaking all along…but you weren’t listening!


Once the nuanced level of awareness becomes active in you, it is no shame to economize your outer relationships or to stop listening to the world. Most of what constitutes the world is jabbering anyway: self-promotion, selling, politics, and “the news". And if you have been part of a social group for awhile – even a religious group – you know that most of the talk among members of groups is not profound. It is just ordinary gossip.


People in groups tend to politicize their relations, looking for identity and position relative to each other and to the group structure. The group becomes their “i” reality. In the mirror of the group they find their self-defining moment.


Where can God be found when all your self-knowledge is born in your relationships within a social group? Well, in almost every case, it turns out that “God” is found projected into the leader of the group! And that’s why every group tends to gravitate toward becoming a cult: each person in the group is finding self-definition in relation to the iconic personality in the middle.


And thus people are able to think and reason less (if at all), as they hand over control of the “group-mind” to the “leader". Forget about self-inquiry. It never even begins. The direct connection to God within is broken. What replaces it is the energy-dynamic of the transference bond to the group leader. As Dr. McCoy so aptly put it on the old Star Trek episode, “peace…tranquility…Landru is with us.” (I still use that line as a joke every time I see a cult forming, either religious or political.)


In a cult, suffering may seem to be relieved because we have abdicated the responsibility for individuality and self-knowledge. Meanwhile, underneath the placated conscious mind, suffering persists as unreleased subtle formations of thought and feeling. Somehow we come to believe that we have obviated the need to inspect these formations, the moment we project an ideal humanity upon the “leader".


People do this in guru-cults all the time – in fact, it is de rigueur for them to do so. And in the la-la lands of the spiritual intellect, so-called “non-dualists” project a purely abstract concept upon recent figures like Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta, as well as some of their rather bizarre imitators. Just as with any garden-variety religious cult, the “non-dualists", by means of their transference, attempt to bypass the path to real self-knowledge.


It goes without saying that in secular politics, great masses of people do the same thing, pumping up every “new face” with a utopian dream of a better world. The smart politician remains an attractive mystery for as long as possible, sucking up the projections of the ignorant, and building up a reservoir of energy and good-will.


The fact remains, losing yourself in a cult of personality, religious or political, does not release the formative structures of the mind, does not resolve the conflict they express, does not awaken self-knowledge, nor does it open the mind-body to the Spirit. Left to persist, such loss of self eventually leads to a tragic or destructive end. If you “drink the kool-aid", you will pay a price with your soul.


________________________


The principle way that self-awareness blooms is by introversion: either via meditation, the awakening of subtle awareness, or taking up the night journey into the unconscious. (Or all of the above.) Religious or religion-like devotion won’t do it. Repeating “who am I?” won’t do it. Nothing will do it except a literal confrontation with the subtle formations of which I speak.


Now, as I’ve said already, this necessary process isn’t all on your shoulders. God initiates your self-education, if you will let him. God is the Self buried deep in you, the “inner guru” that will come forward, bringing with it everything you need to know about yourself…and the world.


You can compare the process to the story of a man and woman walking through a frozen land, hand-in-hand. As they walk along, the sun comes out and the land begins to thaw. Plants spring to life, flowers open, birds begin to sing – a regular Disney film, but an excellent metaphor for the change that occurs when the fixed and frozen formations of the subtle mind are examined and begin to release.


When the formations are penetrated and dissolved, their energy is released to consciousness. (This is what “expansion of consciousness” really means.)


The duality of one component or area of the mind vanishes. The relative states that tend to characterize the dual-mind vanish. Opposites vanish. Great and small vanish. (This is what “integration” really means.)


What do you have in its place? Just this: undifferentiation, a unified field, a state of awareness that is no longer fixed by formations and complexes that no longer exist.


You can’t quite put your finger on what you have become, because the “thing” of your identity no longer exists. The modification is gone. The mirror seems empty. You know the beingness of it and the “I” of this beingness. Other than that, you do not know “what” you are – you have no outside perspective on yourself, because technically speaking, there isn’t one.


(Some will try to create an outside perspective for you, to “help” you reassemble an identity complex, because for them the duality expressed in your relationship needs to continue, and they need your support for it to do so. They will build “scripts” and invite you to assume an assigned role. They will suggest “higher” archetypal dominants to which you really should give your soul. They will describe you to yourself in new ways and ask for your adherence to a revised mirror-identity. It might even include an heroic or glorified “self-image", the better to seduce you back into the relative mind!)


But of course, what you have accomplished in dissolving the relative states has nothing to do with any story they create for you, or any dream they dream for you….


_____________________


All to the well and good. But how exactly are the formations “penetrated and dissolved". This is something I intend to get into in some of the upcoming essays.


Elias
Categories: E-Notes, Ramana, non-dualism
(Part Four) ~ Spiritual Life is Not Possession


by Elias


Feb. 28, 2008


from Monastic Days:


VISION. One afternoon I was taking a nap after dinner, dreams and jazz music were sluicing through my brain. Suddenly a voice spoke very loudly next to my ear: “NOW THE SECRET OF LIFE WILL BE REVEALED.”


A hole opened up under me and I fell into it. It was a square dark hole, which got progressively lighter the deeper I fell.


I fell quickly at first, then more slowly as the light thickened. Soon I was floating in the loving embrace of the Light, an intense rapture flooding my senses. The words “I need you!” echoed in me and around me.


There was progressive dissolution of form and quality as the light thickened. Images dissolved into light, dream dissolved into light, I dissolved into light, and this light was Consciousness itself.


That is the secret of life.


Such experiences would “dissolve” me, and for a few days I would walk around transported. The other brothers would notice and I would receive lots of smiles and nods.


Then my mind would resolidify, new crystalline structures would form, and new dreams of conflict would emerge.
_________________________


VISION. I am walking on a road that leads into the forest. Suddenly a circular chasm opens next to the road.


Cautiously I approach the edge of the pit and peer over. I am gazing into a fathomless dark deep, and I am thinking of all my ecstatic falling dreams.


At that moment I hear the clatter of hoofbeats coming along the road out of the forest. I raise my eyes and see a spectral being on a black horse galloping toward me. He is moving with the speed of the wind, and his aura is of stupendous and irresistible power. I know at once that nothing in the universe can impede or resist this onrushing power. As the horse thunders by, its flank brushes me lightly, and I am knocked head over heels into the abyss. I wake up quaking with fright.


What’s so different about this descensus from my other glorified tumbles? Why was there no hint of luminous supporting depths waiting to receive me? For a long time I thought this dream meant that I was going to undergo physical death at an early age. I took this horseman to be the Lord of Death himself, on his daily journey around the world.
_________________________


When you take a breath of air, are you possessed by the air? When you take a drink of water, are you possessed by the water? When you eat a meal…and so forth.


You cannot live without air, water, and food. All of these material dependencies are metaphors for your dependency on the Spirit. (Actually, they are metaphysical manifestations of your dependency on the Spirit, but that’s a discussion for another day.)


In order to consciously awaken to Spirit, you will have to fall into that aspect of consciousness we call “subtle awareness". Subtle awareness is the intuitive faculty which allows us to know things directly, without the intermediary of the verbal mind. Some of you have that already, so you know what I am talking about. Others may think I am telling a fairy tale or a myth. More’s the pity.


But the fact is you do have this subtle awareness. You already have it. You are born with it. In your case it may be sleeping in a dark cave, or atrophied or suppressed, but it is a living part of your totality. Unless you revive it, you will never walk out of your current imprisonment in the mind. No amount of money will liberate you from your half-alive state, this condition of atrophied subtle awareness.


Know though, that subtle awareness is a vast expanse of experience that, like an ocean, can be either shallow or profound. Hopefully you will make your way from the shallow shores towards the unspeakable depths.


The subtle realm is nurture. It is education. It is also danger, a universe in which archetypes roam like carnivorous fish, making a meal of the weak and the naive. (These “dangerous entities” in the deep psyche include people who developed subtle awareness only to use it as a tool for possessing others and placing them in bondage.)


I am saying you don’t need to fear such intelligences as long as you keep faith with your own heart, and with the underlying truth of subtle experience:


May I recognize whatever appears as being my own mindforms. May I fear not the bands of the Peaceful and the Wrathful, who are my own mindforms. ~ from The Tibetan Book of the Dead
______________________


The important thing to remember is that the realm of subtle experience responds instantly to how it is seen. Yes, it contains everything that is unknown to you, but it is also instantaneously responsive to the act of perception itself. (Or should I say the art of perception?)


How can that be? Please remember, it is not an other that is awakening but your very “I” – the Self that is the root of your being. That’s why we say, “May I recognize whatever appears as being my own mindforms.”


This Self is looking for you, and will, if you allow it, educate and awaken you. It will test your “art of perception". When it knocks at your door, and when you open to it, it begins at once to transform your perspective – your way of seeing. It is the Liberator of your seeing – not all at once, but bit by bit.


Yes, in the realm of subtle awareness there will be moments of vision and great revelation, private glimpses of the “beyond-beyond” state of the Self. But the essence of the Self’s initiation is work – a new kind of work in which the soul collaborates with the Spirit in the real tasks of real liberation.


The work has been succinctly described as “self-inquiry". Sadly, this simple phrase has been wildly misunderstood to mean a kind of rote practice in which one asks the question, over and over, “who am I?".


Presumably this mantra-like recitation will help one to peel away the layers of illusion, false-self, and ego-persona to arrive at direct realization of the “I” of the Self. I say presumably, because no one has been shown to have achieved Self-realization using this formulaic practice.


Even Maharshi, who is supposed to have simplified his own awakening into this formula that he could hand out, like prasad, to the thousands who came to see him, did not achieve Self-realization by asking “who am I?” Rather, he allowed his i-sense to confront the inescapable reality of death. And that’s what you should do as well. When death becomes so real to you that you see the futility of the hopes and dreams of the little “i", then the great “I” will come to you and shake you awake.


And that’s important to know: the Self comes to you, and takes an active role in your education and awakening. It is another terrible mistake that seekers make, to believe they can do this “practice” in isolation from the tremendum of God. Again, as I have suggested before, they have made “non-dualism” into a ritualized form of Spirit-denial. The ego actually believes it can do the whole job of “becoming enlightened” by reciting a simple prescription handed-down by an authentic sage. And they sit for hours and hours in their “communion halls", repeating the phrase inwardly, waiting for sudden and total illumination. Good luck with that, boys.


Personally I have preferred to take the dynamic and inter-active route, of responding to the spontaneous intrusion of God into my life. I know I am not alone in this, having known others of similar disposition.


And in taking this path, I have allowed myself to be educated by that Tremendum which was Unconscious to me. I have accepted the tasks the Spirit set for me, of unraveling and inspecting the knots and complexes of the psyche.


This is true self-inquiry, you know. This is the self-inquiry that the Spirit wants you to practice: to know the personal psyche inside and out, and to explore those deep parts of the mind which Jung called “the archetypal".


Don’t worry about this legendary “God Realization” you seek. To turn around Jack Kornfield’s famous phrase, forget the ecstasy – first do the laundry.


Elias
 To us all towns are one, all men our kin. Life's good comes not from others' gift, nor ill. Man's pains and pains' relief are from within. Thus have we seen in visions of the wise !." - Tamil Poem-