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An idiot can sit here quietly. A mystic can sit here quietly.
There was pain. Terrible, unbearable pain. But pain is a natural phenomenon, and it is good. Without it you wouldn’t know if your leg was chopped off. But suffering is another matter altogether. Pain is bad enough; why make it worse with suffering? Suffering is entirely self-created. And every human being has the choice: to suffer or not to suffer. It doesn’t take much intelligence to choose the latter.
Karma is like old software that you have written for yourself,
kriya yoga cannot be done with people who talk “freedom” all the time. It is not for people who keep asking, “Why am I not free to eat my ice cream? Why can’t I wake up whenever I feel like it? Why can’t I eat, drink, or have sex with whatever, whoever, whenever I feel like?” If you take the path of kriya, a certain fundamental discipline has to be brought into all physical, psychological, and emotional processes.
Every forty to forty-eight minutes, there is also a shift of dominance in the way the breath is moving through the right and left nostrils. It is dominant in the right nostril for a length of time, and then in the left. Become aware of this so you know at least something about you is changing. This awareness can be further enhanced into awareness of the solar and lunar influences upon the body. If you bring your physical system in sync with the lunar and solar cycles, your physical and psychological health is guaranteed.
The sun is aggressive and outgoing; the moon receives and reflects.
In southern India, there was a legendary yogi named Sadashiva Brahmendra. He was a nirkaya, which literally means “bodiless yogi.” He had no sense of body. Wearing clothes does not even occur to a person in such a state. He just walked around naked. Also in such a condition, there is no sense of home, property, or physical boundary.
If your energies are dominant in muladhara, then food and sleep will be the most dominant factors in your life. If your energies are dominant in swadhishthana, pleasure will be most dominant in your life; this means you enjoy your physical reality in many ways. If your energies are dominant in manipuraka, you are a doer; you can accomplish many things in the world. If your energies are dominant in anahata, you are a very creative person. If your energies are dominant in vishuddhi, you will develop a powerful presence. If your energies are dominant in agna, then you are intellectually realized.
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The vishuddhi chakra, located in the pit of your throat, literally means “filter.” If your vishuddhi becomes powerful, you have the ability to filter everything that enters you. Or in other words, once your vishuddhi is very active, you grow so powerful that external nature has no influence over you. Indian iconography depicts Adiyogi, or Shiva, with a blue throat, because he is capable of filtering all the poisons of the outside world and preventing them from entering his system by stalling them in his throat.
Dhyan traveled from India to China along with the Buddhist monks, where it was referred to as Ch’an. This yoga traveled through the Southeast Asian countries to Japan and became Zen, and found expression as a whole system of direct insight without an emphasis on doctrine. Zen is a spiritual path that has no scriptures, books, rules, or rigid practices; it is an uncharted path.
Indian culture built numerous temples on every street. The idea was not to create temples that were in competition with one another. The idea was simply that no one should live in a space that is not consecrated. It
The word “linga” means “the form.” When creation began to happen, or when the unmanifest became manifest, the first form that it assumed was that of an ellipsoid, or a three-dimensional ellipse, which is what we call a linga. It started as an ellipsoid, and then took on many other shapes and forms. If you go into deep states of meditativeness, you will find that before a point of absolute dissolution, once again the energy takes on the form of a linga.
core of every galaxy is always an ellipsoid.
Interestingly, lingas are found all over the world. In Africa, there are terra-cotta lingas, largely used for occult purposes. In Delphi, Greece, there is a linga below the ground, known as the “navel of the earth.” This is purely a manipura linga, meant to promote prosperity and material well-being. When someone showed me a picture of it, I immediately knew what type of people had consecrated this. It was definitely done by Indian yogis thousands of years ago; there is no doubt about that.
“Velliangiri” literally means “silver mountain,”
torrent of divinity,
The yogic tradition is filled with stories of the great yogi Gorakhnath. Some say he lived in the eleventh century, but there are many accounts that date him much earlier. He was a disciple of Matsyendranath, an illustrious yogi in his own right. Such was his level of attainment that Matsyendranath was often venerated as a reincarnation of Shiva or Adiyogi. The lore tells us that Matsyendranath lived for about six hundred years.
The word kundalini literally means “energy.
There is not a single Indian temple where there is no image of a snake. This is not because this is a culture of serpent worshippers. It signifies that a sacred space holds the possibility of arousing the unmanifest energies in you.
A vast number of people live in states of constant anxiety and depression. Some are suffering their failure, but ironically, many are suffering the consequences of their success. Some are suffering their limitations, but many are suffering their freedom. What is missing is human consciousness. Everything else is in place, but the human being is not in place. If human beings stopped obstructing the path to their own happiness, every other solution is at hand. You cannot transform the world without transforming the individual.
Your joy, your misery, your love, your agony, your bliss, lie in your hands. There is a way out. And the way out is in. It is only by turning inward that we can truly create a world of love, light, and laughter. This book could be a doorway to that world. Let us make it happen.
