AWDTH CCC

 

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SADHVIJI

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

Sometimes a walk in the woods is the only prescription needed.... I have found that so much of that which seems insurmountable, unmanageable and overwhelming in life can shift profoundly with a simple walk in the forest. There is something about connecting to the absolute perfection of the universe and connecting to that within US which is one with the perfection of the universe.... suddenly the unmanageable becomes manageable. I have found throughout my life that the forest brings “Yes And-ness” into my experience of my life. Yes, that difficult situation is taking place. AND everything is perfect. Yes, that struggle is present. AND everything is perfect. Yes, there is suffering. AND everything is perfect. It is the experience of the AND-ness which I find almost immediately upon losing myself in the trails of trees.

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What does that mean exactly? Once again, it is impossible to explain with words since the experience this book points to exists beyond the limitation of symbols, which is what words are. Every concept you have ever learned is based on the law of duality, which is the belief in two, or separation. But what if everything you have ever learned about the world is false, or based on a false concept? If the foundation of something is flawed then everything built upon that foundation is flawed as well. It will inevitably collapse and fall.

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There are, however, a handful of physicists who have developed theories positing that there is an all-pervasive field of consciousness throughout the universe. Our level of consciousness is obviously different from that of a dog or other animal, but could all matter be conscious? Could plants and trees be conscious? What about stars? Panpsychism may be the answer to those questions.

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When Dada Mukerjee visited Canada and the U.S., he said that the biggest miracle he had ever witnessed—and he had witnessed many with Maharajji—was meeting numberless Westerners who had not met Maharajji in the body, yet had the same spiritual connection to him as those who spent time with him in India

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HPOC

Panpsychism is the idea that everything that is material has a certain level of consciousness. Everything down to subatomic particles has a relative level that is different from the consciousness that we experience, but nonetheless consciousness

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NKB You may have looked at his picture and burst into tears, your heart overflowing, and yet doubted his presence.

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So once again, there is very little hope in you grasping the concept of non-duality intellectually, mainly because non-duality is not a concept. It is the experience of what is and what has always been True, and if you let this Truth penetrate your heart, like incense seeping through a cracked door, you will transcend every concept you have ever learned before now. Then you can put this book down and revel in what has always been true — the un-compromised experience of your innate wholeness.

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NKB In Vrindavan, local inhabitants addressed him by the name of Chamatkari Baba ("miracle baba").

He and his traveling companions had disembarked at Mathura railway station where he began convulsing and requested being taken to Shri Dham Vrindavan.^[15][16]

They took him to the emergency room at the hospital. In the hospital, the doctor gave him injections and placed an oxygen mask over his face. The hospital staff said that he was in a diabetic coma but that his pulse was fine. Maharajji roused and pulled the oxygen mask off his face and the blood pressure measuring band from his arm, saying, “Bekar (useless).” Maharajji asked for Ganga water. As there was none, they brought him regular water. He then repeated several times, “Jaya Jagadish Hare” ("Hail to the Lord of the Universe"), each time in a lower pitch. His face became very peaceful, and all signs of pain disappeared. He was dead.^[17]

Baba would say that attachment and ego are the greatest hindrances to the realisation of God and that “a learned man and a fool are alike as long as there is attachment and ego in the physical body.” 

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Epicureans believe that pleasure is the ultimate goal of life. On the other hand, Stoics like Epictetus argue that we should focus on virtue and inner peace, rather than seeking pleasure. I feel given the current times, till your life goals aren't certain, follow Madhyamik marg of lord Buddha. Try to seek pleasure in moderation, avoiding both overindulgence and asceticism

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Traditional science might find an idea like this to be implausible, but philosophical proponents like David Chalmers, point out that typically science will tell you how something acts, not how something is. The intrinsic nature or characteristics of matter are not of concern if they can describe their behavior.

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It is the EXPERIENCE of non-duality we are focused on here, not the intellectual understanding of it.

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WINTERING 

[Since childhood] we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.

When you start tuning in to winter, you realise that we live through a thousand winters in our lives — some big, some small… Some winters creep up on us so slowly that they have infiltrated every part of our lives before we truly feel them.

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To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical.

We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.

The dropping of leaves by deciduous trees is called abscission. It occurs on the cusp between autumn and winter, as part of an arc of growth, maturity, and renewal. In spring and summer, leaf cells are full of chlorophyll, a bright green substance that absorbs sunlight, fueling the process that converts carbon dioxide and water into the starch and sugar that allow the tree to grow. But at the end of the summer, as the days grow shorter and the temperature falls, deciduous trees stop making food. In the absence of sunlight, it becomes too costly to maintain the machinery of growth. The chlorophyll begins to break down, revealing other colours that were always present in the leaf, but which were masked by the abundance of green pigment: oranges and yellows, derived from carotene and xanthophyll. Other chemical changes take place to create red anthocyanin pigments. The exact mix is different for each tree, sometimes producing bright yellows, oranges, and browns, and sometimes displaying as reds or purples.

But while this is happening, a layer of cells is weakening between the stem and the branch: this is called the abscission zone. Gradually it severs the leaf from access to water, and the leaf dries and browns and in most cases falls off, either under its own weight or encouraged by wintery rains and winds. Within a few hours, the tree will have released substances to heal the scar the leaf has left, protecting itself from the evaporation of water, infection, or the invasion of parasites.

Most trees produce their buds in high summer, and the autumn leaf fall reveals them, neat and expectant, protected from the cold by thick scales… from the sharp talons of the beech to the hooflike black buds of the ash. Many trees also display catkins in the winter, like the acid-green lambs’ tails of the hazel and the furry grey nubs of the willow. These employ the wind or insects to spread pollen, ready for the new year.

The tree is waiting. It has everything ready. Its fallen leaves are mulching the forest floor, and its roots are drawing up the extra winter moisture, providing a firm anchor against seasonal storms. Its ripe cones and nuts are providing essential food in this scarce time for mice and squirrels, and its bark is hosting hibernating insects and providing a source of nourishment for hungry deer. It is far from dead. It is in fact the life and soul of the wood. It’s just getting on with it quietly. It will not burst into life in the spring. It will just put on a new coat and face the world again.

Here is another truth about wintering: you’ll find wisdom in your winter, and once it’s over, it’s your responsibility to pass it on. And in return, it’s our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us. It’s an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out. This may involve the breaking of a lifelong habit, one passed down carefully through generations: that of looking at other people’s misfortunes and feeling certain that they brought them upon themselves in a way that you never would. This isn’t just an unkind attitude. It does us harm, because it keeps us from learning that disasters do indeed happen and how we can adapt when they do. It stops us from reaching out to those who are suffering. And when our own disaster comes, it forces us into a humiliated retreat, as we try to hunt down mistakes that we never made in the first place or wrongheaded attitudes that we never held. Either that, or we become certain that there must be someone out there we can blame. Watching winter and really listening to its messages, we learn that effect is often disproportionate to cause; that tiny mistakes can lead to huge disasters; that life is often bloody unfair, but it carries on happening with or without our consent. We learn to look more kindly on other people’s crises, because they are so often portents of our own future.

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