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Passages from Yoga and the Quest for The True Self by Stephen Cope. It’s going to take me a while to finish this one.

In yogic view, shakti is the energy essence of the phenomenal world, the purely active force in the manifestation of the universe. Shakti is seen as the divine Mother, the essence of the feminine principle, because she brings the world into being. She is also energy, the primordial power that is always at play, creating, preserving, destroying, the world of form. There is no object or event that doesn’t disclose the presence of her power. But the body of a yoga adept is a particularly open channel for the play of pure energy.

The thing is though, that you can’t really understand the action of Shakti in the world without understanding Shiva, Shakti’s consort. Shiva is the masculine principle in creation. He is the pure witness consciousness, the archetypal seer. He is the formless brahman, pure spirit, transcendent, without any attributes. You might think of Shiva as the still point, the absolute subject, the One. And Shakti is the dance. It’s like T.S. Eliot said “Without the still point, there would be no dance.” In the yogic view, the entire universe moves between these two poles – shiva and shakti. Pure consciousness and pure power. Pure being and pure becoming. The still point and the dance. Always arcing toward one another.

Here’s the really cool thing, In hatha yoga-the practice of postures and yogic breathing-the whole drama of the universe gets acted out right within this very earthly body. In this drama all the condensed powers of shakti lie coiled at the base of the spine. This is what we know as kundalini, the essence of divine goddess energy. The kundalini shakti rises up to meet her consort shiva, pure witness consciousness, who resides in an energy center at the energy center at the crown of the head, the so-called crown chakra. The union of shiva and shakti, which is the goal of hatha yoga, is accomplished when shakti moves up through the central energy column in the area of the spine-called the shushumna-and arrives at the crown. On its trip to meet shiva, this highly condensed energy of kundalini shakti awakens all the latent energy centers in the body, and as this happens, the body moves spontaneously into hundreds of postures. The dance that results is the interplay of energy and consciousness, or what yogis call lila-the divine play.

Written by Eckart Tolle

Along the same lines as The Power of Now, this book is about the ego, and how much we let it run wild and take our lives into a negative space. I really can’t type all of my notes to this book, too much. You just have to read it if you’re interested.

The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you. In this way, cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy, love, creativity, and aliveness. They are concealed in the still gap between the perception and the interpretation. Of course we have to use words and thoughts. They have their own beauty – but do we need to become imprisoned in them?
Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much. Language consists of five basic sounds produced by the vocal cords. They are the vowels a, e, i, o, u. The other sounds are consonants produced by air pressure. Do you believe some basic sounds could ever explain who you are, the ultimate purpose of the universe, or even what a tree or stone is in it’s depth?

I was still thinking about her (crazy lady rambling incessantly on train) when I was in the men’s room prior to entering the library. As I was washing my hands I thought: I hope I don’t end up like her. The man next to me looked briefly in my direction, and I was suddenly shocked when I realized that i hadn’t just thought those words, but I mumbled them aloud. “Oh my god, I’m already like her,” I thought. Wasn’t my mind as incessantly active as hers? There were only minor differences between us. The predominant underlying emotion behind her thinking seemed to be anger. In my case it was mostly anxiety. She thought out loud. I thought – mostly – in my head. If she was mad then everyone was mad, including myself. There were differences in degree only.

For a moment, I was able to stand back from my own mind and see it from a deeper perspective, as it were. There was a brief shift from thinking to awareness. I was still in the men’s room, but alone now, looking at my face in the mirror. At that moment of detachment from my mind, I laughed out loud. I may have sounded insane, but it was the laughter of sanity, the laughter of the big-bellied Buddha. “Life isn’t as serious as my mind makes it out to be.” That’s what the laughter was saying. But it was only a glimpse, very quickly to be forgotten. I would spend the next 3 years in anxiety and depression, completely identified with my mind. I had to get close to suicide before awareness returned, and then it was much more than a glimpse. I became free of compulsive thinking and ot he false, mind-made I.

The ego tends to equate having with Being. I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen my others turns into how you see yourself.

Those who are identified with their good looks, physical strength, or abilities experience suffering when those attributes fade and disappear, as of course they will, Their very identiy that was based on them is then threatened with collapse. In either case, ugly or beautiful, people derive their identity from the I-thought that they erroneously attach to the mental image or concept of their body, which after all is no more that a physical form that shares the destiny of all forms – impermanence and ultimately decay.

The conceptual “I” cannot survive without the conceptual “other.” The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of fault finding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said ” Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notic the log that is in your own eye?” At the other end of the scale there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the bible Jesus’ question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.

Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the world makes up so you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some egos that perhaps don’t have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don’t know what you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people, either ito their face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even just think about them, is often part of this pattern. Name-calling is the crudest form of such labeling and of the ego’s need to be right and triumph over others: “jerk, bastard, bitch” – all definitive pronouncements that you can’t argue with. On the next level down on the scale of unconsciousness you have shouting and screaming, and not much below that physical violence.

Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people and addseven more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You regret other people’s greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn’t have done. The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the “fault” that you perceive in another isn’t even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself feel superior. At other times the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.

Non Reaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond the ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of non reaction if you can recognize someone’s behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it’s not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned. At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection is being conscious. Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Non reaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for non reaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.
The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only about other people but also about situations. What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation: make it into an enemy. The implication is always: this should not be happening; I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be doing this, I am being treated unfairly. And the ego’s biggest enemy of all, is of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.

Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake or deficiency so it can be put right. And to refrain from complaining doesn’t necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or behavior. There is no ego in telling the waiter that your soup is cold and needs to be heated up – if you stick to the facts, which are always neutral. “How dare you serve me cold soup”, that’s complaining. There is a “me” here that loves to feel personally offended by the cold soup and is going to make the most of it, a “me that enjoys making someone wrong. The complaining is in service of the ego and not of change. Sometimes it becomes obvious the ego doesn’t really want change so that it can go on complaining.

See if you can catch, that is to say, notice, the voice in your head, perhaps the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a conditioned mind pattern, a thought. Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you are the awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background there is awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind. The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old conditioned mind pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. The old mind-pattern or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while because it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human unconsciousness behind it, but everytime it is recognized, it is weakened.

There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position – a perspective, an opinion, a judgment, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right. In other words: you need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger sense of who you are. Not only a person, but also a situation can be made wrong through complaining and reactivity, which always implies that “this should not be happening.” Being right places you in a position of imagined moral superiority in relation to the person or situation that is being judged and found wanting. It is that sense of superiority the ego craves and through which it enhances itself.

Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even agression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth in any case needs no defense.

All religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them. You can use them in the service of the ego, or you can use them in the service of the Truth. If you believe only your religion is The Truth, you are using it in the service of the ego. Used in such a way, religion becomes ideology and creates and illusory sense of superiority as well as division and conflict between people. In the service of truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened humans to assist you spiritual awakening, that is to say, in becoming free of identification with form.

When Jesus said “I am the way and the truth and the life.” They are most direct and powerful pointers to the truth, if understood correctly. If misunderstood, however, they become a great obstacle. Jesus speaks of the innermost I Am. When you are in touch with that dimension within yourself – and being in touch with it is your natural state, not some miraculous achievement – all your actions and relationships will reflect the oneness whi all life that you sense deep within. This is love. Laws, commandments, rites, and regulations are necessary for those who are cut off from who they are, the Truth within. They prevent the worst excesses of the ego, and often they don’t even do that. “Love and do what you will,” said St. Augustine. Words cannot get much closer to the Truth thatn that.

Both sides of the conflict are equally identified with their own perspective, their own “story,”
that is to say, identified with thought. Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective, another story, may exist and also be valid.

Here it becomes obvious that the human ego in its collective aspect as “us” against “them” is even more insane that the “me,” the individual ego, although the mechanism is the same. By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego. One can go as far as to say that on this planet “normal” equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say ego.

omg. i still have 7 journal pages on this book. i am not transcribing it all. needless to say, i dig this kind of psycho-babble.

By Benjamin Hoff.

You can’t help respecting anybody who can spell Tuesday, even if he doesn’t spell it right; but spelling isn’t everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn’t count. One sometimes gets the impression that those intimidating words are there to keep us from understanding. That way, the scholars can appear Superior, and will not likely be suspected of Not Knowing Something. After all, from the scholarly point of view, it’s practically a crime not to know everything. But sometimes the knowledge is the scholar. It’s a bit hard to understand because it doesn’t seem to match up with our own experience of things. In other words, Knowledge and Experience do not necessarily speak the same language. But isn’t the knowledge that comes from experience more valuable than knowledge that doesn’t? It seems fairly obvious to some of us that a lot of scholars need to go outside and sniff around – walk through the grass, talk to the animals, that sort of thing.

The Busy Backson is always going somewhere, somewhere he hasn’t been. Anywhere but where he is. For a reward, perhaps. Our Busy Backson religious, sciences, and business ethics have tried hard to convince us that their is a great reward waiting for us Somewhere, and that what we have to do is spend our lives working like lunatics to catch up with it. Whether it’s up in the sky, behind the next molecule, or in the executive suite, it’s somehow always farther along than we are…just down the road, on the other side of the world, past the moon, beyond the stars.

Now, one thing that seems rather odd to us is that the busy backson society, which practically worships youthful energy, appearance, and attitudes, has developed no effective methods of retaining them, a lack testified to by an ever increasing reliance on the unnatural. False Front approach cosmetics and plastic surgery. Instead it has created countless ways of breaking youthfulness down and destroying it. These damaging activities that are not part of the search for the Great Reward seem to accumulare under the heading of Saving Time.

Practically speaking, if time saving devices really saved time, there would be more time available to us now, than ever before in history. But, strangely enough, we seem to have less time than even a few years ago. It’s really great fun to go someplace where there are no time saving devices, because, when you do, you find you have lots of time. Elsewhere, you’re too busy working to pay for machines to save you time so you won’t have to work so hard.

Written by Mitch Albom

The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in. We think we don’t deserve love, we think if we let it in we’ll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said, ‘Love is the only rational act.’