Blog Archives

Dynamic Tranquility

8/31/2016

This was the quotation I used in our Yoga to Ease Anxiety class tonight. A few people asked for it, maybe a few more can find some benefit. It comes from Rudolph M. Ballentine's The Theory and Practice of Meditation, by way of Georg Feuerstein's Yoga Gems.

“Tranquility should not be confused with passivity or apathy. It is, rather, a dynamic quality of balance and harmony. As love is the outward flowing of energy in selflessness, and joy is the experience of accepting the natural divinity of all life, tranquility is the experience we have when we know and accept ourselves for who and what we are.

“We are the source of our own turmoil. The inner doubts, fears, impulses, the unconscious drives and motivations, all create an imbalance that leads to mental and physical suffering. We remain unaware of our spiritual identity and are caught in habits and patterns of the personality. The habits that make up this small self control us, and we bounce whenever and wherever the habits bounce, nearly always reacting to the world, with little capacity to consciously choose our actions in the world. When, through meditation, we come to experience directly our true spiritual identity, the personality with all its peaks and valleys no longer exerts a claim. We experience an inner calm and tranquility, a center that is secure and free of conflict. From the vantage point of this calm, unattached center, we gradually resolve our inner conflicts and unfold the subtle potentials of the deeper mind.”

Aloe Polyphylla Spiral by Just chaos CC BY 2.0

Warrior: The Origin of Virabhadra

8/26/2016

Shiva Dreaming, by Cornelia Kopp. CC BY 2.0

If it were up to Shiva, he would sit, meditating on Mount Kailasa all the time. It is only because of his interactions with the goddess in her many forms that Shiva takes any kind of active role in the world.

Here is the story of Shiva and Sati, and of how Virabhadra (of virabhadrasana/warrior pose fame) came to be.

The goddess Sati is the daughter of Daksha, and Daksha is the son of Brahma the Creator. Now, as children of the Creator, all of Brahma’s children also create. Daksha creates culture.

Shiva, the Destroyer, stands outside of culture, setting up a polarity between Shiva and Daksha. And indeed, there are many stories that set Shiva and Daksha against one another. This is one of them.

Sati married Shiva against her father’s wishes. So, when Daksha held a huge fire ceremony (yajna) and invited all of the gods and goddesses and the great sages, he did not invite Shiva and Sati. When Sati heard of this, she was angry and determined to go anyway. Shiva said, “Nothing good will come of it,” but he did not stop her.

The Yajna

Daksha's Yajna, Public Domain. In the foreground Sati pleads with her father, Daksha.

When Sati arrived, the ritual was already underway and a great fire was burning. Her father was not happy to see her. When she asked why she and Shiva had not been invited, Daksha ranted. He told her that Shiva was worthless and not deserving of respect. He called Shiva names he considered disgraceful: king of the goblins, beggar, the ash-man, and the long-haired yogi.

Sati countered, “Shiva is everyone’s friend. No one but you speaks ill of him. All that you said, the gods and goddesses know and still they adore him.”

According to the custom (to the culture) of the time, when a wife heard her husband reviled, she was to either leave the place with her hands over her ears. Or, if she had the power, she should end her life.

Sati walked into the raging fire and died.

When Shiva heard the news, he was furious. In his grief and rage, he tore out one of his dreadlocks and from it created the personification of his anger – Virabhadra, a thousand-armed demon.

In Sanskrit, vira means hero and bhadra means blessed, fair, and beautiful. Just as in the renaming of Rudra, the Howler, into Shiva, the Auspicious, we see a wild and violent deity beseeched to mercy through renaming.

Virabhadra

Shiva Carrying Sati Away from the Yajna. Wall picture at Srikhanda Bhoothnath Temple in West Bengal. Photo By Sripat Srikhanda. CC BY 2.0

The description that follows of Virabhadra and the ceremony is from Tales of the Shiva Purana, compiled by H. G. Sadhana Sidh Das.

“Virabhadra shone with energy and he had thousands of mouths and eyes. His hair glistened like lightning and his hands were full of all sorts of weapons. When he spoke it was like thunder. From his body, Virabhadra created a female demon named Bhadrakali.

“’What are our orders?’ asked Virabhadra and Bhadrakali of Shiva. ‘Go and destroy Daksha’s Yajna,’ was the order. To help them in this mission, Virabhadra created several other demons from the parts of his body. All of them had a thousand arms and carried weapons. Virabhadra, Bhadrakali, and these other demons headed for Daksha’s Yajna. When they got there, they found that the sacrifice had already started and the sacred fire was burning.

“The sages were reciting hymns and the Gods were watching. Musical instruments were being played. Virabhadra roared and the sound of the roar was so loud that several of the Gods began to run away. The earth shook and there were tidal waves in the ocean.

“Daksha was frightened. But he summoned up courage and inquired who they were. ‘We are Shiva’s assistants and we have come to take part in the sacrifice,’ replied Virabhadra. Virabhadra and the other demons then proceeded to burn down the structure where the sacrifice was being held. They tied up the priests and threw all the offerings away.

“With their weapons, they attacked the Gods. Whatever resistance the Gods tried to put up was taken care of by Virabhadra’s [trident] and Bhadrakali’s spear. The Goddess Sarasvati lost her nose and the God Agni lost his arms. The sage Bhaga had his eyes gouged out and the sage Pusha lost all his teeth. Virabhadra sliced off Daksha’s head and gave it to Bhadrakali. Thousands of thousands of Gods died and the sacrifice became a battlefield.

“Vishnu tried to fight it out and he and Virabhadra shot arrows at each other. But one of Virabhadra’s arrows struck Vishnu on the chest and he fell down unconscious. Spurred on by Brahma, the Gods began to pray to Shiva. These prayers pacified Shiva and he asked Virabhadra and Bhadrakali to refrain from causing further damage. Brahma asked about the Gods who had been killed to bring them back to life.

“When Shiva calmed down, he returned the lives of the dead Gods and everyone was back to normal. But Daksha’s head could not be restored. So a goat’s head was put instead and Daksha was forgiven.”

Shiva, the long-haired yogi who lives outside of culture and is concerned only with meditation, defeats the Culture Maker whenever they come up against one another. Culture is maya, an impermanent illusion. Culture led Sati to throw herself in the fire and Shiva sent a vicious reminder that some things are more important than following the rules.

On the Cloud of Unknowing: Medieval Mysticism from a Yogic Perspective

8/24/2016

Dark Cloud Silver Lining, by Nareign. CC BY 3.0

The Cloud of Unknowing is a classic text of medieval Christian mysticism.* For some, this book has just too much about our “wretched sinful nature.” I completely understand. It took me some time to process my initial negative reaction. I wrote about that here. And now? I am absolutely digging The Cloud! And I want to tell you why.

In amongst all the talk of sin and the devil and our shame and guilt and puniness, there is the essence of mysticism. Check this out: after our anonymous author bids us not to be “inside yourself, outside yourself, above yourself, behind yourself, or on one side or the other” (chapter 68), he tells us spiritual work should feel as if we are doing exactly nothing.

“Continue doing that nothing, as long as you are doing it for the love of God. Do not stop. Work hard at it with a powerful desire to be with an unknowable God. . . . [C]hoose ‘nowhere’ and this ‘nothingness.’ Do not worry if you are not able to figure this out in your mind. That is the way it is supposed to be. This nothingness lies beyond your grasp. It can be felt more easily than seen. It envelopes those who contemplate it even briefly in blinding darkness. An abundance of spiritual light creates this darkness. Only our outward nature calls it ‘All.’ It teaches the essence of all things, both physical and spiritual, without giving specific attention to any one thing alone. The experience of this ‘nothing’ that happens ‘nowhere’ dramatically transforms our love” (68-69).

Do nothing; be nowhere; become transformed. That's the message of the mystics throughout the ages. Elsewhere he says, much as the Tao does, to “Think of yourself as wood in a carpenter’s hands, or as a house in which someone else lives” (34). But I am getting ahead of myself.

The Goal

A mystical path is one of seeking union with the Ultimate, and that is our author’s stated purpose. “I desire to help you tighten the spiritual knot of warm love that is between you and God, to lead you to spiritual unity with God” (47).

The method he advocates is contemplative prayer. This is not the kind of prayer I grew up with. Not “Now I lay me down to sleep” or reciting the rosary. This is not the freeform supplications of Sunday morning or even Wednesday evening preachers. To describe what he means, our nameless author says, “The essence of contemplation is a simple and direct reaching out to God. People who pray at this depth do not seek relief from pain nor do they seek increased rewards . . . ” (24). They are not praying for anything; well, not for anything other than moving closer to God.

Also super important, our author does not see God as a father-figure God, a jealous God, or any other form of God that can be described. “[Y]ou are far better off contemplating God’s pure and simple being, separated from all his divine attributes” (5). Much later he says, “We speak one way with people, and another way with God” (47). In fact in this type of prayer, “Words are rarely used” (37).

Contemplation is wordless prayer to a formless God.

The Work

Infrared Dark Cloud, NASA public domain.

Contemplative prayer isn’t easy. In fact, “Everyone finds contemplation difficult,” he says, “regardless of personal experience” (29). It is hard and constant work, as we see in these admonitions:

“Devote yourself now to a time of contemplation. Beat upon this cloud of unknowing. Rest will come later. This will be hard work, unless you receive a special grace. Let it become habitual from continual practice” (26).
“Though I highly recommend brief prayer, there is no limit on the frequency of prayer” (39).
“You do not have any freedom to practice moderation during contemplation” (41).
“Engage in it tirelessly for the rest of your life” (41).

He does not, however, advocate “vulgar straining.” Rather he beseeches the reader to “discover how to love God joyfully with a gentle and peaceful disposition of body and soul” (46).

To accomplish this “devout intention directed to God” (39) we must forget everything else: “Let modest love prompt you to lift up your heart to God. Seek only God. Think of nothing else other than God. Keep your mind free of other thoughts. Give no attention to the things of this world” (3).

This instruction to turn our thoughts away from worldly things is central to contemplative prayer, because “whatever you think about looms above you while you are thinking about it, and it stands between you and God” (5). “Whatever you think about”—we are to forget about everything, even things we might not consider worldly, things we would consider sacred—everything but God.

“Even holy work interferes with meditation. Similarly, you will find it inappropriate and cumbersome to think profound holy thoughts while working in this darkness of the cloud of unknowing” (8).
“Thinking about humility, charity, patience, abstinence, hope, faith, temperance, chastity, or voluntary poverty is counterproductive” (40).
“Forget about time, place, and body when you engage in spiritual effort” (59).
“Put distracting ideas under a cloud of forgetting. In contemplation, forget everything, including yourself and your accomplishments” (43).

Our author recognizes the difficulty of this, especially in letting go of the self. He offers a few pieces of advice that we’ll recognize as encouraging mindfulness, such as “Pay attention, then, to how you spend your time” (4), and “I want you to evaluate carefully each thought that stirs in your mind when you contemplate God” (11). At one point he entreats his reader to relax completely, realizing the impossibility of our effort, and to accept ourselves as we truly are (32). “Nothing humbles us,” he says, “more than seeing ourselves clearly” (13).

Clearing the mind of thoughts about oneself is key to clearing the mind of everything: “You can see that if you are able to destroy an awareness of your own being, all other hindrances to divine contemplation will also vanish” (44).

There is one tool that our author offers to help us control the wandering mind, and that is to choose a word and hold fast to it.

“You may wish to reach out to God with one simple word that expresses your desire. A single syllable is better than a word with two or more. ‘God’ and ‘love’ provide excellent examples of such words. Once you have selected the word you prefer, permanently bind this word to your heart. This word becomes your shield and spear in combat and in peace. Use this word to beat upon the cloudy darkness above you and to force every stray thought down under a cloud of forgetting. . . . Do not allow the word to become fragmented. If you keep it intact, I can assure you distractions will soon diminish”(7).

But earlier, you may be saying, didn't he say this type of prayer was different, wordless? The difference is in the way we use the word: “Let the word remain in a single lump, a part of yourself” (36). He is not advocating using words to ask for anything, nor is he advocating the intellectual investigation of the concept the word represents. That would be futile. Really, he’s quite persistent in reminding us that our thinking minds are unable to comprehend God:

“[W]e are incapable of thinking of God himself with our inadequate minds. Let us abandon everything within the scope of our thoughts and determine to love what is beyond comprehension. We touch and hold God by love alone” (6).

The purpose of the focal word is to turn off the thinking mind, not encourage it.

The Cloud

Campfire and Sparks, by Kallerna. CC BY-SA 3.0

Then, when we have quieted the mind, put all of our thoughts under a cloud of forgetting and set aside even our discriminative faculty, we approach the cloud of unknowing.

“God remains far beyond even our most profound spiritual understanding. We will know God when spiritual understanding fails, because God is where it breaks down. St. Denis wrote, ‘The only divine knowledge of God is that which is known by unknowing’” (70).

The experience of the cloud of unknowing, he says, consists of “a dark gazing into the pure being of God” (8).

While he tells his reader that the process is lifelong, the actual experience of union can happen in a flash.

“Genuine contemplation comes as a spontaneous, unexpected moment, a sudden springing toward God that shoots like a spark swirling up from a burning coal. . . . Any one of these sparkling moments may take on a unique quality resulting in a total detachment from the things of this world.”(4)

“Many think contemplative prayer takes a long time to achieve. On the contrary, results may be instantaneous. Only an atom of time, as we perceive it, may pass. In this fraction of a second, something profoundly significant happens. You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God. This brief moment produces the stirring that embodies the greatest work of your soul.” (4)

And that is the end to which he would have us strive: “the greatest work of your soul.” Later he amends himself, saying “Perhaps it would be better to speak of it as a sudden ‘changing’ rather than a stirring” (59).

What exactly is this “greatest work?” What is it that changes? “After God graciously transforms our soul, we begin perceiving what is ordinarily beyond our comprehension” (4). The cloud of unknowing “teaches the essence of all things, both physical and spiritual” (68). We begin to gain control of our will and may come to experience heavenly bliss (4). We find rest for our soul (26). And “Once this moment passes,” he says “prayer for others will be inclusive, caring equally for everyone.” After which he immediately assures us that,

“When I speak of the passing of the moment, I do not imply that we come down completely, but rather that we descend from the height of contemplation in order to perform activity required by love” (25).

Perception, presence, bliss, rest, seeing into the essence of things, and recognizing the equal worth of all people—those are the results of union with God.

The Cloud and Yoga

Every one of the mystical elements our author relates is also described somewhere in the Yoga tradition. The Bhagavad Gita tells us to reach toward God with love. The Yoga Sutras tells us that after we still the mind and come to reflect the Sacred, we will have a new perception of reality and control of our will.

In Yoga, some of the tools we use to overcome the self are

bhakti: devotion
tapas: discipline
svadhyaya: study of scriptures and self
pratyahara: withdrawing attention from the senses
vairagya: detachment from the world outside and from the ego
dhyana: meditation

These tools help induce samadhi (union), which results in ananda (bliss).

That is what I saw in The Cloud of Unknowing, a stunning description of the timeless human experience of touching the Sacred.

Om / Amen

Darwin River Dam, by Bidgee. CC BY 3.0.

* Link is to the modern interpretation I use throughout, edited by Bernard Bangley.

Morality at the Foot of the Mystic Mountain

8/13/2016

Dharma Wheel on the Konark Sun Temple in Odisha, India

If we start with the idea that all mystical paths lead up the same mountain, it can be a useful exercise to compare the scenery on the different paths, to get an idea of the terrain they all share.

Morality is a prominent feature at the base of the mountain of mysticism, like mesquite trees before moving up in elevation to manzanita and oak here in the desert. Every mystical path begins in the mesquite morality forest. Getting our ethical existence in order is primary, before practice, before higher states, before experiencing the great indiscriminate Absolute.

The eight limbs of Yoga put the yama and niyama (the moral restraints and observances) squarely first. And the noble eightfold path of the Buddha puts right speech, right action, and right livelihood before mindfulness and concentration.

These Eastern schools tell us there is a practical reason for this. We have to get our moral lives tidied up before we can make real progress toward liberation. Otherwise, when we sit to meditate, the inner landscape is cluttered with emotion and thoughts about things left undone.

What I want to explore here is the same idea in Christianity, especially through the perspective of the anonymous writer of The Cloud of Unknowing. This little text is a window onto the Christian monastic mysticism of the Middle Ages. Reading this book for the first time, I was surprised at the familiarity of his message. Contemplative prayer has a lot in common with the meditative practices of Yoga, with the goal being to settle the mind on one focal point in order to pierce the Cloud of Unknowing and, eventually, experience Ultimate Reality.

A little background: I was raised in the Catholic Church. It felt very unmystical to me. To my child mind, it appeared to be rule-based and cold—a land of authoritarian priests and nuns; pompous, empty rituals; and an outdated morality shot through with gender inequality. I quit the church in my early teens, rejecting the beliefs of my parents, as we do, in order to become an autonomous young adult with ideas of my own.

In college I studied the Tanakh / Old Testament and the New Testament. I learned the history of Christianity and even some theology. I read the medieval women mystics. But I was always wary. Christianity never attracted me the way Hinduism and Buddhism did.

But that was all a long time ago now, and I was hopeful that I could approach The Cloud in the same way I would any other mystical text—with respect for its parent tradition and seeking what benefit it holds.

All was going well, even delightfully, until our anonymous author started to talk about sin. And not just sinful acts but our “sinful nature.” Call it a stumbling block, a button pusher, a trigger—I had a visceral reaction, my gut and shoulders tightened up, one eye brow raised, and mentally I kept trying to check out, reading without really processing.

Instead of letting myself of the hook, I decided to ask, Where does this come from? What does it mean to the writer and does it mean something different to me? And of course, that’s exactly what was going on.

Sin as Avidya / Ignorance

As kids, moral teachings come across as “This is a sin. Don’t do this. Don’t do that.” It’s just a list of rules and proscriptions. This was my experience with Catholicism, because I was a kid.

As adults we can understand that “sin” is anything that moves us away from the Truth, away from the experience of union with God.

(I gotta say, I still don’t have the same experience of the word God that I do with Brahman, the Tao, or the Sacred, though I understand intellectually that they are all referring to the same Ultimate, the Absolute.)

In Yoga, sin is the equivalent of ignorance, avidya. Because we misunderstand the Truth about the sacredness of the world, we act according to our own selfish desires, seeking to affirm our attachment and avoidance preferences. To make progress toward spiritual liberation, we have to learn how to let go of our self-centered and self-constructed desires. Therefore “bad” thoughts, words, and deeds are those that are unwise, that move us away from Truth, and “good” thoughts, words, and deeds are those that are wise and move us closer to it.

In The Cloud of Unknowing, our unknown author tells us that sin is the result of “weakness and lack of understanding.” Lack of understanding causes misperception, and this faulty perception in turn creates errors in thought and false judgments. The misperception, he says, is cleared up through humility, through selflessness.

He advocates using the word “sin” as the focus of contemplation, not as a reminder of individual acts, the memory of which he says will only distract from contemplation, but as a reminder of the evil that is to be overcome, the ignorance that creates distance from God.

“Sin,” he says, “is an indefinable lump that is nothing other than yourself.” This might seem startling to some, but is this idea so different from the yogic principle that the ego personality, your self, is not your real Self? I proposed it could make sense to think of it in such terms.

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake"

Positivity! (At quotesgram.com, this is labeled as an advertisement.)

But equating the self with "sin," with ignorance and misperception, is difficult for many of us to do for at least two reasons: (1) the baggage of our childhood experiences with Christianity. And (2) 100 years of our culture being imbued with the positivity-at-all-cost model, starting with New Thought, then New Age and the self-esteem movement. We’re so afloat on the power of positive thinking that we shrink back from or rise against anybody who tries to point out our faults.

We are good. We are worthy. We “deserve the best.” We have been sold the idea that everything ought to make us feel good about ourselves, especially spirituality.

By SanDorfALot

But go deep enough into any religion, and you’ll be told the opposite. Not only are you not, by default, good and worthy. You are not, as Chuck Palahniuk has Tyler Durden remind us, “a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying matter as everything else.”

There comes a time when we have to learn that we are nothing; we are less than the shit in a fly on the windshield of the Universe. Compared to the vastness of the Absolute; to the eternal nature of the Sacred; and to the inevitability of death, we are terrifyingly meaningless. Our existence is a flash in the pan; we are tiny, fragile, limited, and finite. In fact, a central theme of mysticism is that “you” aren’t even real. You have to let go entirely of any sense of “you” to meet what is Really Real.

This experience of our utter insignificance, trembling before the Ultimate, brought low by the realization of Truth—this is the dark night of the soul. This is the “perfect humility” The Cloud talks about. And out the other side of it is the way to knowledge, understanding, and the experience of union.

To tie this with the topic of morality, the author tells us, "Strive for perfect humility. When you have it, you will not commit sin. Once you have experienced a moment of perfect humility, you will remain less susceptible to temptation."

It is these instances of selflessness that change us at the core.

Moving up the Mountain

It’s a long and treacherous path up the mystic mountain, and we prepare for it with morality. “The first step toward contemplation involves cleansing your conscience from sins you know you have committed, following the regular practices of the Holy Church. This will destroy the root and ground of sin in the soul,” says The Cloud.

Just like with the yama and niyama or any seemingly proscriptive list of rules, at first they are external, then with their internalization and with progress on the path, the principles on which those rules are based emerge as part of our perspective, the lens through which we see the word and act within it. With these principles in place, actions in accord with the “rules” spontaneously flow from the movement closer to the Sacred.

Then, with the inner landscape tranquil, we can head up the mystic mountain in earnest.

Now, with this more tolerant and perhaps more mature understanding of sin, God, and humility, I turn back to read The Cloud of Unknowing again, to find what waits on this new plateau.

Table Mountain Contour Path, By Abu Shawka CC0

Stages of Faith

8/5/2016

Preparing for a lecture and discussion on the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Bhagavad Gita, I decided to throw in this information about the stages of faith. As I constructed my notes, it occurred to me that this is really super important stuff. It's a map of where we've been and where we're going, and it's a useful tool for understanding others on the journey. So, I decided to share it here.
********************************
As we grow, so does our mental capacity. As this happens, we go through various stages of development - cognitive, moral, social, and otherwise.

James Fowler put forward this model of the stages of spiritual development across the lifespan. What follows is an extreme simplification of his ideas. If you find yourself interested, please check out his book, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning.

Stage 0: Undifferentiated faith

Infancy
Learning to trust or fear the important adults in our life and also to trust or fear the environment. We come to believe that either the world will take care of us or that it won’t.
This sense of trust or fear will become foundational in our later sense of faith in the Divine.

Stage 1: Intuitive-projective faith

Early childhood (3 – 7)
Cognitively, this stage is fantasy-filled. It’s all about imitation and imagination.
Fantasy and reality are the same.
In this stage, development of spiritual understanding is based on interactions with important adults and the stories they tell.
In order to progress, we must develop concrete operational thinking; i.e., we must be able to use concrete concepts (concepts with a physical referent)

Stage 2: Mythic-literal faith

Middle/late childhood (7 – 15), this is the first stage that some people never move beyond
Here there is a literal interpretation of mythology and religious stories.
God is seen as a parent figure
To move on from this stage, we must develop abstract thinking

Stage 3: Synthetic-conventional faith

Early adolescence (15 – 21), can last into and through adulthood
This stage is characterized by conformity to the beliefs of others and integrating the faith of one’s culture
It is the beginning of creating a personal identity and shaping a personal definition of faith
To move on from this stage, we must experience internal conflict between personal beliefs and social expectations

Stage 4: Individuative-reflective faith

Late adolescence/early adulthood
Independent critical thinking leads to unique, individualistic worldview
This is where we begin to balance our view of self, other, and Sacred
To move on, we must desire to integrate the way we see the world with the worldview of others
(We have to want to get over “I’m right and you’re wrong” thinking.)

Stage 5: Conjunctive faith

Middle adulthood and beyond
Awareness of our finiteness and limitations leads to becoming more open to paradox and opposing viewpoints
(We know that we don’t really know. We are always open to the possibility that we could be wrong and someone else might have something valuable to say.)
There is an increasing appreciation of symbols and myths
We value our own direct experience as well as affirm other people’s beliefs
To move on, we must desire to reconcile our personally developed transforming vision with the world as it is
(We’ve changed but our world hasn’t. And that has to be ok.)

Stage 6: Universalizing faith

Middle and late adulthood
Few ever reach this stage
Awareness of complex universal issues and loss of egocentric focus leads to transcending belief systems and realizing a sense of oneness with all beings
Conflicting events are no longer viewed as paradoxes
Often manifests as disciplined activism toward transforming the social order

So, to simplify it even further, when it comes to stories like those we’re going to talk about,
Stage 1 would say, “Neat!”
Stage 2 would say, “It’s not mythology; it’s history.”
Stage 3 would say, “This is a blueprint for how I ought to live.”
Stage 4 would say, “I call bullshit!”
Stage 5 would say, “Fascinating. What can I learn from this?”
Stage 6 would say, “How can I implement these lessons to make a world a better place?”

Dynamic Tranquility

Warrior: The Origin of Virabhadra

The Yajna

Virabhadra

On the Cloud of Unknowing: Medieval Mysticism from a Yogic Perspective

The Goal

The Work

The Cloud

The Cloud and Yoga

Om / Amen

Morality at the Foot of the Mystic Mountain

Sin as Avidya / Ignorance

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake"

Moving up the Mountain

Stages of Faith

Yoga Talk

Archives

Categories

Dynamic Tranquility

Warrior: The Origin of Virabhadra

The Yajna

Virabhadra

On the Cloud of Unknowing: Medieval Mysticism from a Yogic Perspective

The Goal

The Work

The Cloud

The Cloud and Yoga

Om / Amen

​Morality at the Foot of the Mystic Mountain

Sin as Avidya / Ignorance

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake"

Moving up the Mountain

Stages of Faith

Yoga Talk

Archives

Categories

Morality at the Foot of the Mystic Mountain