Karma Time

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Recent events with getting the book out have brought some very old resistance to the fore. I recognized the old lifetime in play. And that lead to a useful insight about karmic stores. I’m a little surprised I didn’t clue into this sooner.

Back on the past (10 years ago!), I wrote about the mesh. How we have karmic, energetic nodes of unresolved experiences. We can experience them in the present or in the past, along a timeline or all in the present. We can experience the lines (threads) that connect nodes of the past with the present, giving the appearance … Continue Reading… →

Balance of the World

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As I have written about prior on Dharma, the world needs a balance of forces so it continues as a stable platform for learning and experience. We might call the world a forum for experiences. Even science has discussed ideas like the “Fine-tuned Universe“, suggesting that the dimensionless constants have very specific values that support the emergence of intelligent life.

If we have acted against what is arising in the past, we may find that area of life blocked or sluggish. This is to prevent us from moving further toward imbalance. For example, if we have … Continue Reading… →

The Four Dispositions

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Swami Brahmananda Saraswati was a man who spent much of his life in seclusion. He left home at age 9 to find a guru and spent much of his life in remote forests of India. He only emerged in the later years of his life to take the role of Shankaracharya, the exponent of Shankara’s teachings in N. India. The seat had been vacant nearly 150 years.

Not only did he revive the tradition in the area but several modern teachers of high impact were his students. Millions of people around the world have taken up eastern philosophy and meditation … Continue Reading… →

The Ramayana

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The Ramayana is an epic story of the life of Rama, a prince in a kingdom of ancient India and an avatar of Vishnu (god in form, sent to restore balance). There are many versions of the epic tale. The original was told by Valmiki using his yogic vision. While Valmiki was visited by Rama, their time together physically was brief. He later wrote this epic poem about Rama’s life and taught it to Rama’s sons, who Rama didn’t then know existed (it’s complicated).

To give a sense of the scale of the story, it took 300 episodes to … Continue Reading… →

Selfish Mindfulness

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An interesting article in The Washington Post on how Mindfulness is being “diluted and distorted by the prevailing narcissism of our time.”

Mindfulness would be good for you. If it weren’t so selfish.

Similar things have happened to yoga and meditation. A watering down and a shift to making it about me. This is natural in an ego-centered culture. But it is useful to know so we’re not lead astray in our practice.

My perspective is that mindfulness arises naturally with culturing yoga. If there is sufficient presence, we can favour it here and … Continue Reading… →

The Fruits of Action

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One idea Westerners have picked up from Indian philosophy is karma. However, we usually think of consequences when someone mentions the word. As in “It’s good karma.”

However, karma means action. The consequences come because of action. And as we’ve discussed recently, there is what happens and how we respond to that. It’s the second that allows the action to complete energetically or not. If not, it will come up again another time for completion. The more we resist or grasp at what arises, the more we build a backlog of incomplete experiences.

The basics of action are … Continue Reading… →

Emotional Healing

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We digest everything we consume: food, drink, sensations, and experiences. Some of our thoughts and emotions are a symptom of this background processing, although more is done at night in dreams. However, it’s batch processing so we can only vaguely associate the activity with the prior experiences. You can see this clearly with dreaming.

If we’re under stress, energy is diverted from digestion and the higher forebrain to ready the body for fight, flight, or freeze. We also fall into resistance, grasping at what we want to keep and resisting what we don’t want. This resistance further impedes digestion. … Continue Reading… →

Where is the Self?

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On How Many Hearts?, a commenter asked why some teachers talk about the Self being in the center of the head and others in the heart. I thought the response was worth sharing. I’ve added more.

The Self or Atman aka self-interacting consciousness is universal and thus is located everywhere, infusing everything. It is the essential medium of all we experience, including what is experiencing, the process of experience and what we experience. Form, emotion, thought, or sensation and what is noticing these – it’s all consciousness. And yet, at its highest, we recognize that Atman is aware … Continue Reading… →

The 10th Anniversary

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I launched this blog 10 years ago today. It’s evolved a lot in that time. It started as a simple free blog called In2Deep for sharing various topics broadly related to spirituality. This included notes from talks, videos, and so forth.

As the shift settled in here, I gradually began to write more about it and what followed. I also shifted slowly to my own voice. At first I wrote under the Davidya nickname, only later sharing more of who I was after I’d wound down my tech consulting business.

A few of the milestones:

2008-09
Surge in posting, … Continue Reading… →

Book Update

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Book Cover
Just another short update on the book on higher stages project.

All the parts have finally come in, including entry into the library catalog I didn’t expect as I hadn’t applied (didn’t qualify being self-published). The book is written, edited, cover designed, graphic designed, and formatted. Now I’m compiling the book into the various file formats needed for print and ebook versions. The ebook conversion sure has bugs…

I hope to upload the files soon but they then … Continue Reading… →

Two Kinds of Resistance

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As Yoga describes, there are two basic kinds of resistance to what is.

The first is Grasping. This is trying to hold on to what passes through our lives. We try to hold on to passing experiences, perceptions, possessions (good word), memories, and so forth. We try to keep things we like from changing. When this fails, we experience loss and grief.

Similarly, desires for future possessions can be a grasping at wants, often with an expectation of satisfaction that never lasts. (cue Rolling Stones)

Grasping at the past (memories) and grasping at the future … Continue Reading… →

How Many Hearts??

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I’ve begun to lose track of how may hearts there are to open. (laughs) A few years ago, I wrote about the 4 hearts, then added one to it:

1 – the physical heart in the left chest
2 – Anahata, the heart chakra we meet on the rise of kundalini Shakti
3 – Hrit, the heart sub-chakra above the physical heart.
4 – the “high heart” or “soul thrill” sub-chakra behind the clavicle, between heart and throat.
5 – Hridaya, a higher octave of the heart chakra that opens during the … Continue Reading… →