Passion, Self-Discipline, And Maintaining A Serene Mental Witnessing Disposition are Critical Personal Traits for Spiritual Aspirants - Spiritual Practice and Yearning Can Be Excessive, Causing Insanity And Physiological Damage - The Mental Constructs Used In Meditation Can Be A Limitation For Sadhana

Lack of time for self-reflection leads to alienation. The energetically disruptive quality of air conditioning. Just "opening to the present" is a new age cliche that fails to recognize the developmental processes enlisted on the path toward enlightenment. Spiritual aspirants need more detailed experiential accounts from the lives of mystics. (That is why KCT exists - to help fill in some of the gaps.) This knowledge will provide seekers with a better frame of reference by which to gauge their own spiritual practice and spiritual trials.

Passion for enlightenment is key; but so is trust and the capacity for selfless surrender. It is important to have a LIFE that is consistent with your spiritual goals.

It is possible to be excessive in prayer and fervent devotion. Being extreme can cause insanity. It is essential to use good judgment and to ground heightened energy/awareness into the physical body. If the body is not revealing/communicating your spiritual insights, then you haven't brought your wisdom home.

If I work myself up into a devotional, yearning pitch, I can't sleep and I feel a strong throbbing all over my body. If spiritual practice generates fear and/or depression, you need to slow down and lower your sights. Lay down, take a swim, don't "try" to do anything. Safety and discipline are essential on the path.

Trying to advance too quickly causes headaches and damages the body. Meditating on inner light can overstimulate the autonomic nervous system. Pace yourself. Use good judgment. Listen to your body.

Will holding onto a mental image give me more control over the Kundalini process? Earlier this month, when I had the near-enlightenment experience, the force of Consciousness itself spontaneously turned off my mental image. The inference I draw from this is that mental constructions -- be they words, images, or even feelings, if willfully enforced -- at a certain point in the process, are a hindrance.

At the point of the mental image clicking off, I was plunged into a darkness that I perceived to be the very source of my existence. There was a sense of expansion within my brain. The location of the "I" sense, which had been limited to the golf-ball sized area at the center of my brain, was pushed out to fill the entire circumference of my skull. The sensation of my separate self sense simultaneously falling inward upon itself and expanding outward quickly grew in intensity until a gripping fear leapt from my heart muscle to arrest the process. The fear was directed at this event being a product of my central nervous system (and not my entire body) and its rejection of everything having to do with my limited person: my body, my social ties, everything having to do with "me" with a lower case "m."

Spirit is unreasonable. It will push you to the breaking point. That is its nature. You must have a disciplined mind to moderate its influence within the body.

Kundalini Awakening - Spiritual Signs And Symptoms - July 26, 1994

*1994.7.26. (continued) (beginning of tape #14)

(hiking) (sighing, tired voice) It's July 26th, continued. Umm, but yeah, today I felt really strung out by the end of the day. I had a hard time concentrating. The day's topics were so interesting... We were all talking about paths to health and wellness and fitness and vegetarianism and exercise, et cetera. The conversations continued until I felt really out-of-it. Really fried. People can develop such a profound level of attentiveness. I pick up on so much. The conditions have to be ideal for me to maintain the intensity. At some point I have to back down or withdraw again. The air conditioning didn't help. That mechanically treated air just sucks the life force out of me. And there wasn't enough time for silence, for processing and reflection. So I became alienated.

I engaged again in this endless conversation with myself regarding how to approach this spiritual path I'm on. (spitting) You know, part of me feels, "Oh, X [my name], you should just focus on the here and now. Get involved. Get involved with this life." But then the other part of me says, "X, you know, all that shit you read in that book about living in the present, all this crap, it doesn't take into consideration the enormous developmental process that goes into spiritual awakening." Yeah, living in the present, it's nice. It's such a fucking cliché. It's part of the path, of course, but you have to go inward to meditation and prayer, and you have to do things to improve your health to progress satisfactorily along this path. Umm, so this idea of just "opening to the present" really bothers me.

(still hiking) But anyways (sigh), you know, you find out that "this is it" after you've gotten there, and you're not going to get it until you've had that milestone experience. Everything else is fleeting and temporary until that point. Umm, I was questioning whether I wanted to pursue more of this meditation, or more prayer and devotional stuff. And really, where I am coming from right now, I'm not sure. You know, I don't have enough material to draw from to really understand what's going on here. I wish I did. I wish I had more insights into the lives -- the personal lives, the experiential lives -- of Rumi and Jesus and a hundred other people. I want to have the fucking profiles. I want a book of the inner experience of saints and mystics. I want that. I want it fucking documented. I want it to be part of the literature so that we can see what to expect. Because, my feeling right now is, I'm too fucking good at prayer, in a way. What I mean is, I'm very passionate, and I can work myself up into a very passionate frenzy. But on the other hand, I'm not willing to submit selflessly. And the only way to do that path right, I think, is basically to deliver yourself into the hands of God, completely. And I don't think that's possible right now for me. My sense of self is too strong, too lodged. You can't be making selfish requests of God. It's like being at His Feet and saying, "Hey, I can take over now, so get off your throne." But God's not going to want me to have his fucking job. I know it. And so what you do is...

You know, it might be more appropriate if I was living in an ashram -- you know, doing something where the expectations upon me were, uh, minimal and consistent with the path. And so what I'm thinking is that through prayer and fervent devotional stuff I can get myself to the point where I just can't sleep or I feel this throbbing all over me. I can do that very easily, and I feel insanity clutching me, horribly. (birds chirping) And I just don't feel comfortable. I have a lot of fear and I get depressed. And that doesn't fit. All the while I've got to wonder, with all the stress and the pains in my head, I hope I'm not damaging myself. You know? Fuck. If I knew more about this, if I had a little more guidance, you know, I probably wouldn't be as afraid. But anyways, I'm figuring that the only way to really do it right -- to do it safely -- (birds chirping, labored breathing) is to be more disciplined -- to concentrate very deeply, but not to the point of excess where I cause myself headaches. Not to concentrate on shining light inside. That's too easy. I can get worked up too fucking quickly without having the discipline. What I mean is, I'll have this image -- like I've been lately doing -- like this golden ball that's shining light, golden light. But the thing is, is I don't have a grasp on the fucking ball. It's moving around, changing shape, flitting here and there, and what I'm doing basically is titillating my autonomic nervous system, because it's getting a sense of light, and I'm just freaking myself out. What I need to do is get a grip on just a sterile image -- like just a flower that's alive but not shining light, nothing transcendental about it on first glance. And then once I have that, then add a little bit to it, and like I said before, since I'm already so jazzed up, you know, it's just a matter of moments from having the capability of holding an image and stilling my mind -- just moments from that, you know -- that I'll be all over and done with this particular phase of consciousness. And if I can hold... The thing I want to do is be able to hold on to the image while spirit is coming up through me, because that will give me a sense of control -- that that image will serve as my identity, rather than giving myself completely over to it -- this higher awareness. Because, like what happened before, that one time, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago, where I had an image that was flitting about, sort of, but I had a decent grasp on it (chuckling) every now and then, and as consciousness is swelling my mind and I felt it starting to get more intense (heavy breathing) the image clicked off. It's like God turned it off, and it drew me closer into him. (spitting) And it scared the hell out of me. Like I said, I felt I was being plunged into darkness. It wasn't really... To tell you the truth, there wasn't anything bad about it. It was actually comfortable. I was being drawn into the very source of my existence. That's what it really felt like. So it was good. It was like partly neutral, partly good. And the fear is just the fear that I felt like I was leaving everything about me behind, that I was going to become immutably transformed by this experience. At some point in my life, if I can revive that experience, maybe I'll let go and do that. But like I said, my heart was clutched with fear, and, uh, I don't want to become some sort of religious lunatic. (labored breathing) And what I'm banking on is that I'll retain some kind of skeletal self-sense so I can hold an image with discipline. That is, I'll have this spiritual energy coursing through me with my awareness of it, but at the same time I'll be able to be a teacher, a writer, a common American citizen. The other way around, I felt like I was taking a chance that I would do only the very highest, I mean I would do only what... Because spirit is very unreasonable. It doesn't see the limitations of our situation here. It's constantly pushing you forward, to the breaking point. That's just its nature. That's what evolution is all about. It's fucking pushing you to the breaking point, all the time. So, in deep levels of samadhi Gopi Krishna would fry himself. Yet, who was it that told him to go into that? He had this overwhelming desire to meditate because consciousness wanted to push the envelope, even if that meant straining his system almost to the point of insanity. (birds chirping heavy breathing) Similarly, what I'm saying is, if you let consciousness just take over like that, uhm, it's going to wreck the body. Not out of any intrinsic hatred of it, no. But just out of its nature. It needs to be...I guess the word would be "guided." I don't know, maybe that's just my egotism there. I don't know what to say. It needs to be somehow under the guidance of a disciplined mind. Even that might be wrong, I don't know. I'm fucking wasting this tape.