Entry 1,582 - Entry 1,601
Entry 1,585
I remember being in the Loomis house and thinking how the more I became self-realized, felt heaven within, or experienced nirvana, the more I felt possessed.
Now I realize that perception was still from being identified with the ego. I still assumed I was the ego and that the higher aspect of me was not myself.
I still had not deprogrammed from fundamental Christian doctrines around living authentically. Also, this was coupled with my ego's desperate attempt to remain in control and not be subject to the higher aspect of myself.
Entry 1,586 - December 30th
To something outside of you, the realization that one can experience enlightenment through oneself transcends the use of substances, such as drugs, to trigger a pseudo-awakening.
Entry 1,587
What one considers intelligent is based on one’s particular consciousness. Even someone below average intelligence could consider people above them as stupid. Even people with higher intelligence could perceive the people below them as smarter. Intelligence is multifaceted. Realistically, it’s based on one's perception.
Entry 1,588
I think perceiving the world with good guys and bad guys is way too basic because, realistically, all people are good and bad at times.
So my question is, what if life isn’t so dualistic until we perceive it that way?
Especially for the invisible world ruled by religion… What if the perception of life is closer to how the majority of Jews perceive it, where God truly doesn’t have enemies as Christians believe God does? (Jews don’t believe that 1/4 of God’s angels fell.)
Entry 1,589 - December 31st
When did it become normal to bring dying flowers to the ones we love?
Where we look forward to cutting a flower from its source of living sustenance to flatter someone else until it withers away in a slow and dreadful death?
That is the full expression of selfish possession—only thinking about what the flower can do for us at the expense of its own life.
This behavior causes us to treat flowers as if their life is meaningless and their death is meaningful.
With this mindset, we cannot see how our actions are hurtful to their living.
Entry 1,590
I see my mind as a program needing an upgrade, not as the embodiment of sin.
Entry 1,591
David Hawkins asserted that by simply holding loving intention towards something or someone, you can raise the calibrated consciousness of that which you are putting energy towards.
So then, that would mean all tests are truly subjective in some manner if intention has the power to recalibrate based on the observer's intention, not just based on the muscles.
Entry 1,592
After people drink alcohol weekly for most of their adult lives, eventually they’ll look in the mirror and wonder why they look 20 years older than their actual age.
Alcohol not only is scientifically proven to age you, but it’s a literal toxin. It hurts memory retention, it’s addictive, it damages cells, and it can cause cancer, yet somehow it is still socially acceptable.
I promise it’s not worth the adverse health effects. There are so many better things to be “addicted to” like cuddling, chocolate, and movies.
Don’t fall down the rabbit hole, but if you do, Alcoholics Anonymous is great. Remember, alcohol is literally addictive, meaning one craves it. You can curb the crave by substituting it with a less harmful object of happiness until you find that within you.
Entry 1,593
Entry 1,594 - January 1st, 2023
Wouldn’t it get boring having the same people be the prime help in your liberation? Yes, I do think it is possible, but I think we also seek change and diversity within our unique experiences.
So the whole idea that you are “in debt” to the guru who helped liberate you in one of your incarnations is a strange way to look at it, which in my opinion breeds unnecessary attachment to an old life rather than being present in this current one.
Maybe in another life, you really resonated with their teachings, aura, or presence, but in this life, they just don’t have the same connection to you as they did in a past life.
There is nothing wrong with noticing that certain gurus or teachers don’t impact you the same way they did in a past life. Apparently, Yogananda was my guru in a past life, but in this life, I really do not vibe with his particular work as much as I do with other gurus and teachers.
It simply doesn’t resonate deeply with my current blueprint in this incarnation. It doesn’t mean I don’t like him; it simply means the connection is not as strong as with other teachers such as Adyashanti.
After reading 500 pages of Yogananda and going to months of retreats, I might have felt moved, but simply after two quotes from Adyashanti, I feel a superb shift in my being. After one online course with him, my ego is begging to not be dissolved into my expansiveness, and I am on the brink of a transformation that I don’t even know if I can handle.
This is just my current reality. Wasting time feeling bad that I don’t have the same connection with Yogananda as I did in past lives does no one good. I accept that it is not as strong in this life, and I’m grateful for the other lives in which it was.
But now I explore what it is like having help experiencing liberation with the teachers who now extremely resonate with my current incarnational self, such as Adyashanti.
I’m taking all these classes through Kriyananda to christen the lessons I received from a past life on devotion and selflessness and, most importantly, for Kriya Yoga. I must experience it in this life as well.
Entry 1,595
Yogananda focuses a lot on divine love in his teachings, but for the masses, how do they focus on love when they haven’t realized it yet through experience? How can they differentiate between divine love and egoic love when they are still very much identified with the ego?
That’s why I feel it has been more effective for me to practice being present because when you are present, then you experience divine love. It doesn’t stay as an intellectual thought where you conjecture if you are truly loving divinely or egoically. You then know through experience the difference between the two.
I think Yogananda was able to help many, but teachers who teach about the power of the present moment are able to help others experientially realize the deeper truths of love more rapidly than those who are told to “give up your material attachments and love God.” The potent power of the present moment is that it takes no time to experience the present moment. All time dissolves in the ever-expansive Now moment, so it is extremely powerful at conveying truths beyond the intellect that become experientially realized.
Unless one takes a truth into the present moment beyond the ego, it stays as an intellectual teaching that your ego will try to figure out but always come short of truly understanding. It becomes a potential sword, a potential attachment where one longs for this divine love that they already are. Since the ego is incapable of understanding the expansiveness of divine love, it will always grapple for it as if it is far away and impossible to have, creating feelings of inadequacy for the person who is identified with this limited ego. Thoughts like, “I don’t know if God really loves me,” or “I just want God to save our family,” and “I don’t want to end up in hell” are all byproducts of not realizing God’s divine love as an inherent reality.
One has to go beyond the ego to the point where one’s identification with the ego dissolves like a mirage, or else people who are still identified with the ego will assume they are loving God from the divine expansiveness part of themselves, but it’s really from the limited perspective and capacity of the ego. For some, that dis-identification with the ego can last minutes, hours, days, or as long as a master of this incarnation so desires. But just one opening brought forth through the power of being present is more than enough in getting a glimpse of love through experience beyond the limited capacity of the ego. That one glimpse will change anyone’s life from then on.
One won’t need to “try to give up attachments to materialism,” for it will be as if they are no longer important. The person who has experienced this deeper reality will forever be changed in their incarnation. Their primary “goal” is, once again, to feel, experience, and realize divine love. These people have tasted eternal love and want nothing more than to realize it again.
Entry 1,596
Interestingly enough, growing up and hearing the demonization of material goods has contributed to me buying gifts for myself and for others.
Entry 1,597
“Yeah, you may have to get punished for a little bit, who cares? But it’s alright,” and “God will forgive you” show me the level of consciousness Kriyananda was operating at in his later years when he was filming Ways to Awakening.
The concept of punishment vibrates at a lower level of consciousness than someone who realizes non-duality within the duality of life. Assuming you will get punished for mistakes shows that one still perceives mistakes as “bad” and success as “good.” Then assuming God will forgive you is assuming God perceives mistakes as real rather than as illusions bound in space and time—temporal in nature for temporary exploration.
If we were to use David R. Hawkins’s Map of Consciousness, Kriyananda would likely be somewhere in the upper 400s. Hawkins said in his book Power vs Force, “The shortcomings of this level involve the failure to clearly distinguish the difference between symbols and what they represent, and confusion between the objective and subjective worlds that limits the understanding of causality.”
Kriyananda talks about a lot of concepts and symbols within his religious sect, but based on how he talks about them, it seems he is oftentimes stuck to their one-sided meaning within his mind. Kriyananda views mistakes as equating to punishment from God. It’s great that he accepts life as it is, regardless of what he calls it, but it doesn’t help him evolve when he views it as punishment rather than as an experience one has attracted by one’s own free will to better know oneself. His viewpoint is a very religious perspective that many within religion also get tied to.
This is the downside of concepts. People get roped into viewing things from one perspective and sticking to it religiously until they die. Instead of freeing themselves from the limits of their definitions, they define themselves and others by them with strict adherence. It causes people to still view things very “black and white” rather than seeing “the black in the white and the white in the black.”
Entry 1,598
I think the reason why it can be hard to watch Kriyananda at times is possibly related to the idea behind the Map of Consciousness. When you are around those with a lower consciousness than yourself, one must try really hard to focus on the level that is evident in everyone, regardless of their consciousness.
However, the person will use words, concepts, and ideas that go against the expansiveness of love, so you are constantly alchemizing what they are saying and refocusing on the divine love that everyone has. The part that can be hard is if you’re not on your A-game. Instead of alchemizing any unnecessary concepts or symbols that detract from love, you absorb them into your being and adopt their mindset, which then lowers your current level of consciousness until you become aware of that idea, belief, or thought they gave you and rid yourself of it.
Entry 1,599
In my opinion, “humility towards God” is dictated by the same illusion within separation.
First, it must assume that you are not one with God and thus have something or someone to be humble towards.
By assuming you are not God, one with God, or part of God, you assume a level of separation exists between you and God/Source/I.
Second, by being humble towards God and believing you are not God, then who are you? If you are identifying with the ego, which is a temporal program utilized to create this experience on Earth, then you are feeding into the belief in division.
The ego could experience humility, and it would make sense because the eternal Source is, and the temporal nature of a program (ego) is not. But we are not the ego, so partaking in humility from the perspective of the ego shows that the person still needs to transcend those limited beliefs they are identified with.
The definition of humility is “a modest or low view of one's own importance; humbleness.” To view oneself lower than God rather than a divine spark of God, one with God, is to devalue God’s extension of yourself. It is to perceive yourself as something similar to the ego, which is temporal and doesn’t truly exist. It is also a devaluation of God. If you are part of God but then you devalue that part of God, you are essentially devaluing God.
So, in my opinion, humility towards God does not make sense and causes one to uphold beliefs of unnecessary separatism, which further complicates their journey of evolution in consciousness.
Entry 1,600
Spirituality and religion to me are no different than psychology, therapy, and counseling, with the added belief of something or someone out there—oftentimes perceived as a god or a goddess—either doing something to you or you doing it to yourself.
The point of difference is: where does it come from? Conditioning from the parents? Society? Religion? God? Karma from past lives? When did we accept these beliefs? When did we allow these beliefs to become a part of us?
Regardless of what concept one picks for something or someone doing something to you, spirituality, religion, and modern therapy all agree that something outside of us is related to something happening within.
That’s why I believe the mere belief in a religion or a very precise spiritual group is not necessary for “enlightenment,” “nirvana,” or what some coin as “self-realization.” If a particular concept or symbol of an idea were necessary to experience nirvana, then the saving power would be in the concept rather than from within yourself.
Having the added beliefs within religion, in my opinion, can further complicate things. If you were born into it, you have to take extra time to separate who you are from your religion to find the parts of you that were influenced by your religion rather than your truth. If you’re not born into it, there’s nothing wrong with exploring religions and spirituality. I do that myself! I do it to learn how to further connect to others, understand where they come from, empathize with them, and more. I see religion oftentimes as an extension of culture, so when I study someone’s religion, I study the culture they were either born into or adopted through active choice.
No religion full of concepts, symbols, or doctrines can save you from yourself. Only you can set yourself free because only you have the power to imprison yourself. Total free will accepts the idea that we are fully responsible for coming to Earth and for leaving it. We are fully responsible to the extent to which we are liberated. Thankfully, no one can truly take that away from us because our power has never left us.
The Buddha rightfully saw the entanglement of so many people in these unnecessary “concepts” from religion, causing further unnecessary confusion. That’s why he did not stress the belief in God to be saved but rather walking the path of liberation being our own personal responsibility. Religion can’t do something for us that we won’t do for ourselves. It’s created by men as a tool, as further exploration of the human mind, as another place to experience particular concepts with a community. It serves the human, not the other way around.
To assume only religion can save is like assuming a fish toy (religion) can save a fish from dying. The fish is already in water, so it’s technically “already saved” by being in the water. However, until it realizes that (nirvana), it will continue to seek out its salvation from within or from without.
Entry 1,601
When you touch a doorknob (or something else made of metal) that has a positive charge with few electrons, the extra electrons want to jump from you to the knob. That tiny shock you feel is a result of the quick movement of these electrons.
I watched this video of Dr. Bob showing how he could alter our brain waves simply by rubbing a mechanical pencil in his hair to build up a charge and then pulsating it in the direction of the people. Depending on how slow or fast he was moving it, he was actually able to make people feel different.
This made me think about the charge we all carry within us and how it changes us and those around us.
When we have more electrons on our body, are we more magnetic? Do we suck people in like a black hole? Or do we deflect people with our charge?
I notice after giving people rides, if I feel an urge to send extra energy their way, I’ll deliberately try to make contact with them, either through a handshake or a fist bump.
Or even after dropping them off, I'll make movements with my hand that mimic the pulsation of the pencil but with the intention to send that person help with their endeavors.
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