A Whole Body Craving For Spiritual Transcendence - A Tremendous Loneliness Precipitates This Psychic Union - Kundalini's Vampiric Effect On Skin Tone - A Little Bit Of Death Now Is A Small Price To Pay To Overcome The Big Death Later - Reflections On Spiritual Transfiguration - Da Avabhasa - A Political Tangent Into Politics Based On Hate And Anger
Kundalini Awakening - Spiritual Signs And Symptoms - November 11, 1994
1994.11.11. Friday. (Tape #22 side B, continued.)
Yesterday I bought some pastries. I was feeling out of control and very depressed. I felt like my work was overwhelming me. There was too much discussion -- too much dialogue -- not enough spiritual focus. I ate 8 ounces of pastries made with refined sugar and refined flour. It was just my emotional disposition of feeling out of control and somewhat self-destructive. I’m thankful I didn’t masturbate. I have to continue looking at where it is I’m coming from -- and seek a greater change.
(later) My brain or pituitary may be responsible for this, although it isn’t intellectual only: I feel my whole being craving God now. I’m letting that craving flow through my whole body. I feel separate, but I want to feel union. This desire is a whole body feeling-- a whole body aspiration. I am going to be nurturing this craving, teasing it to become more urgent. This craving is grounded. I think it will lead me in the right direction. It feels good to feel desiring so greatly. We’ll see how it goes. There is a lot of feeling associated with this craving: my face was just now flushed with a feeling of sadness; there is a feeling of warmth in my stomach and chest. Again, my whole body feels craving, need.
This craving I have -- it’s not intellectual, as it was before. It’s a whole body yearning, the likes of which I have never had before. It’s as if every pore in my skin, every cell in my body, every nerve in my brain passionately craves a radical transformation of the orientation of its consciousness. It is weary -- absolutely weary -- of its sense of separation. My being wants to shed the skin of its self-consciousness. It has outgrown that perception, but it needs God’s help to burst forth into a new relation. My being wants union, and it wants it now. I can’t think of a more holistic and grounded expression of this desire for union than the signal my body is sending now. God cannot keep me waiting for long when every fiber of my being is yoked to this one, unifying desire. (end of tape #22, side B)
1994.11.11. Friday, continued. (Beginning tape #23, side A.)
This craving I’m feeling -- it’s existential; and its totally holistic. It’s aligning my mind, my throat, my heart, my stomach. My whole being is craving release from its contracted state, and the feeling is very sensuous. I’m going to try to let this process, this newfound craving, carry me to its ultimate end. I crave a whole-body orientation toward God. I don’t give a damn about a perceptual change. I don’t care about experiencing inner light or any other psychic phenomena. All I care for is whole body union. I want -- I need -- an existential change. So I am going to try to foster this, nurture this. What is so delicious about this craving is that it is so multi-leveled, so involving of my entire being. While knowledge is a part of it, it is so much more. It’s sadness because I feel so alone. It’s love. It’s a feeling of profoundly deep is-ness -- that this incredible sense of being just is.
I feel hopeful and optimistic. I have a touch of a headache right now -- but hopefully that will go away soon.
(later) I just got back from my hike. I’m very happy that I had that 12 hours of sleep last night. It really nourished me.
For the past several years I have been waking up in the morning feeling quite tired; this is especially the case over the last couple of years. I haven’t been leaping out of bed like I used to when I was younger. I used to always have a great attitude waking up. This change in me is interesting. It’s strange that my body is not in better apparent physical condition than I am. I am not exuding a great deal of physical health, although I hike 4 or 5 hours a day, and I lift weights and do aerobics for an additional hour a day, and I get plenty of sleep, and I eat very well. It seems to me that my nerves and glands are drawing into them a great deal of energy. If this is the case, then it explains the feeling I have in my skin where it feels very sensitive and alive yet dry and dead at the same time. With my lifestyle, with all of this humidity and hiking, my skin ought to feel supple and vibrant like it always used to. My skin, as with the rest of my body, while it feels quite alive, simply doesn’t exude a great deal of health. The only explanation for this that makes sense to me is that my nerves draw life force from the flesh around them. That is, my nerves are becoming vessels or pathways of concentrated life force at the expense of the rest of my body. I am hopeful that this is only a temporary nervous and endocrine system need -- that once they’ve gotten the energy they need, and that they’ve adapted to this process as well as they need to, that they will stop diverting energy from the rest of my body. When that happens, my body will hopefully glow more and look more alive and I will awake with power and zest from a good night’s sleep. In the meantime, my flesh appears to be dying in the furtherance of this process.
Despite this death-like condition, I am yielding to this process. It’s a small price to pay: Take a little death now, to overcome the big death later; or, put another way, give up a little life now, to have everlasting life later. However you want to look at it, it’s a small price to pay.
If society were organized differently -- if the demands and the expectations it placed on individuals were more consistent with their spiritual needs -- this process I’ve been involved in would be much less debilitating -- much less catastrophic.
(date??? next day ?? )
(hiking) I’ve been thinking for the last 15 minutes about spiritual transfiguration. But I’ve been doing it egotistically -- so I have a headache. It’s just in my mind. I really have no feeling about it. I have no instincts about transfiguration -- no deep feeling, no concreteness for the thought to connect with. All I can relate to it is as a demonstration of competency and power: The ultimate expression of contact and transmission of the divine in the human form. The mere thought of this state is overwhelming.
Although I’ve pursued spiritual development for several years now, I haven’t had many specific goals in mind. All I knew for sure is that I wanted to feel closer to God: to know, at every moment, that I lived in a world suffused with love. I didn’t know how to get there, and I didn’t know what being there would be like. But I knew it was possible because of various testimonies I had read while in college. Aside from this feeling of love, all I really wanted was to be more human, to be empowered to do more good in this world, and to overcome the problem of psychological death. And I wanted the feeling of real freedom while you’re alive. But now I am considering the possibility of transfiguration -- something that is far greater and far more incredible and miraculous than anything I had ever contemplated before. Transfiguration is an outrageous and incredible truth: It is the ultimate expression of divine compassion. What more could anyone ask for than the ability to overcome physical death altogether?
Transcending psychological death, through an enlightenment of the central nervous system, is already a great thing. But even someone who is enlightened is still left with the problem of the physical body. The only way to overcome this is for the physical body to become so imbued with spiritual force that it is entirely consumed by spirit -- in a brilliant flash of light. Da Avabhasa talks about transfiguration. The mere thought of this event makes my whole body shake and shout with desire. Transfiguration is miraculous! It is amazing! It’s also scary. It’s the same force at work in transfiguration that is also responsible for the burst of energy and heat upon the kundalini’s initial awakening. It’s extraordinarily powerful. My feeling is that once the circuit is completed -- and I’m experiencing the initial levels of full-body enlightenment -- that this process continues and deepens over a lifetime. Transfiguration represents the most mature phase of this process. But I don’t think you would be hit with some kind of involuntary spiritual combustion. This final act would have to be somehow voluntary. Inside of you is a pressure valve. Up to this point in my life, that valve has been the pituitary gland: It is highly effective in exerting a controlling influence over this process. Kundalini is (usually!) very responsive to the commands of this gland. My hypothesis is that transfiguration would be enabled by this valve or controlling function of the pituitary giving the “go” signal to this energy -- sort of a raising of the spiritual floodgates. That is, at a point of your choosing, you allow the full force of spiritual awareness to course through your system, allowing it to increasingly elevate your vibrational level until your whole body and mind dissolve in light. After a lifetime of adapting to increasing levels of this force, your body will be in a position to receive, to harness, and to radiate the full force of this process until, at the final point, the body spiritually and spontaneously combusts. There would be no ashes remaining; although a Buddhist farmer near my house described transfiguration as the “rainbow body,” a process that leaves only fingernails, hair, and metal fillings behind. It’s a pure, unaccountable explosion.
I was thinking about holding a major press conference at the time at which I decide to undergo transfiguration -- with live video feeds to television stations across the country. The point would be to have this process be fully authenticated. Even if those present didn’t understand what transfiguration is, they would at least have felt and seen something that defies explanation in our mechanistic, scientific worldview. Seeing me go up in light would give them pause to consider the shortcomings of our modern assumptions. Were that process or event to be fully understood -- and respected -- it would initiate a massive gestalt shift in our nation’s consciousness.
[a political tangent]
What I am going to say now shouldn’t need to be said, but I am going to say it anyway because I am proud of my political beliefs and there are people who need to hear them. I was talking to a guy I like a lot about the recent elections that were held. He’s an interesting and intelligent person; but we’re at opposite ends of the political spectrum. He voted republican. He said that things need to change -- that our government is ruining us -- morally, socially, and economically. In particular, he disliked “Welfare,” the government program which gives food and money to the needy. He said it is ruining us fiscally as well as killing the motivation for its recipients to do anything for themselves: Whether it be to seek an education or to pursue spiritual knowledge, such people would not have the integrity of self and self-reliance necessary to accomplish their goals. This man spoke of many other things. Basically, what he communicated to me was a great deal of anger -- anger toward what he called, “lazy, good-for-nothing people.” I expressed many differences with him, but allowed him, in his anger, to steer most of the conversation.
He was pro-business and not pro-environment. That is, to him, environmental standards should be subservient to making money. If a business needs to dump toxins in a river, or level a whole mountain by strip mining, that is okay.
He was anti-women: women are inferior to men, not as intelligent as men, and are unfit to govern.
He was racist.
He supported the ruling elite model, by white upper classes. The rest of the people were scum unfit to govern.
He wants to reduce taxes on the wealthy. Repeal capital gains tax -- which is wrong. All that selfish stock speculation is done by upper income people. Does not stimulate economy. Lines their pockets. Their gains should be taxed hard, much harder than wage income. They don’t give a fuck about the business they’re investing in -- they’re looking for short-term gain. We should have a law whereby if you hold an investment for less than 2 years you get zapped if you pull out. If you’re there for the long-term, there should be another tax rate for those gains. What it’s about is supporting the company; it’s having a commitment to the vision and the product of the company. You can’t have that when you buy and sell within a 2 month period. It shouldn’t be about financial gain. At least, that shouldn’t be the ultimate criteria for an investment.
There is so much ugliness in the republicans. Their misanthropic elitism is without end. Republicans are halting an investigation of the tobacco companies, now that they’ve regained leadership of a Congressional subcommittee. The democrats, while far from perfect, would have at least tried to hold the tobacco industry accountable for lying to Congress and the American people about many addictive, chemical additives that are illegally put in cigarettes. All the republicans care about is whether revelations of misconduct will harm industry profits. The republicans will cut back on Welfare assistance. They won’t touch the billions of dollars of tax breaks corporations and the wealthy receive, but they’ll go after what little assistance the poor are getting. To these moral and economic elitists, the poor and the downtrodden are an expendable population. The poor don’t wield the clout to fight back. Maybe the poor will throw rocks through windows in protest, but then the elites will have them gassed and incarcerated -- by the 1000s if need be.
This guy thinks that the democrats have maliciously destroyed our nation via the welfare system. I don’t think that’s the case at all. The Welfare system was a sincere way to help.
A lot of our skeletons are coming out of the closet now. We’ve come a long way in terms of dealing with racism, gender inequality. I hear horror stories coming out of Missouri and Alabama. In such places it is still the Dark Ages: interracial couples fear for their lives.
So, when we talk about the problem of welfare, we are talking about a dysfunctional society that in some ways has gotten better.
My whole point is that whatever we do, our actions must be grounded in compassion -- not in rage. It seems that rage dominated much of the discussions arising from the recent elections. Idiot anger-mongers like Rush Limbaugh had center stage. But many hate-filled, self-righteous religious zealots -- so called, televangelists – joined him in driving wedges into the body politic.
The only way to move forward is to act with compassion.
For example, if we are going to make changes to the welfare program, we shouldn’t do so based on a vilification of welfare recipients. We shouldn’t say, “Welfare recipients are lazy good-for-nothings who don’t deserve assistance and who ought to get a job.” No. That’s not the proper perspective. The proper perspective is, “Hey, we want to help you. But we see that this free assistance is not helping you. We want to help you become more independent -- less needful of government assistance. But we will help you in your transition from dependence to independence.”
We shouldn’t toss people off the welfare roll like President Reagan did the asylum inmates. We have a deluge of homeless people now, largely because they were turned out from their institutions.
Similarly, if we cut people off from the welfare support they had been receiving, and provide no interim support or transition assistance, we could have another wave of homeless people.
Unless we deal with the root of the problem, superficial approaches will just shift problems from one place to another. Like attempted slayings of the Hydra, chopping off the head makes two more come up. You have to deal with the root. So maybe the federal government will save money by reducing the welfare rolls, but then local governments will be saddled with additional burdens of increased crime, homelessness, child neglect, and hunger. Quality of life indicators -- such as optimism for the future, feelings of being safe, and so forth -- will plummet. But since it is hard to put a price on such things, arguments to limit government do not usually consider them.
Although I sympathize with some republican causes -- such as fiscal responsibility -- because their motivations are based so much on hate and fear I would never consider myself one of them. But the government is spending too much money. We do need to tighten our belts. But before we cut social programs, we should look at the bloated military budget, which accounts for over half of our federal expenditures. But people who hate need a huge military, so republicans won’t touch the military budget.
I’m all for being fiscally responsible. But that does not mean giving money back to the rich, as the republicans would have us believe. It’s about having a truly fair tax system, and about not spending more than you take in.
I could comment on a whole lot of other things, but I don’t have the time or the expertise to tease out their import. There is so much I haven’t a clue about. I was impressed with C-SPAN’s coverage of Congress. There was in-depth coverage of how a bill is formed and how appropriations are made. It’s a complex process with lots of loopholes for corruption to take over. As to how to fix all that, I don’t know. I am no expert in political matters. There are lots of details missing from my analysis. I’m just looking mostly for broad outlines of problems.
(Pause) A feeling of rage seems to be predominating among men, especially white men, today.
(more to this entry? need next entry for tape #23 side A -- after 1994.11.11)
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Notes
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