Class Notes – SRV Oregon & Prison Classes

When, in your practice of involution, you arrive at the element ether, you are at the subtlest place in this physical realm.  Piercing through it opens a gateway to the other akashas.

The psychic prana is to be looked upon cosmologically, philosophically, and anthropomorphically.  People are of different temperaments and will recognize this prana in different ways.  You have to be flexible.  When you give yourself a “checkup from the neck up,” it will not be the same checkup your neighbor is doing.

When you go seeking the Origin that ultimately does not exist, you have to prove this to yourself.  It is not enough that others have proved it for themselves.

From a satsang:
Question:  I’ve been contemplating this concept, “Signal to noise ratio” — It is like Brahman is the signal and everything else is noise or static.  Can you say more about this with regard to dissolving the mindstream?
Babaji: What is wanted is to have experiences of the formless, not just revelatory experiences.  The noise of the mind only ceases when the formless is “seen.”  Otherwise there may be peace, but not realization.

The direct disciples stated, “Ramakrishna made us who we are by awakening in us the desire for spiritual practice.”  Spiritual practice is what sets the Ramakrishna Order apart from most other organizations (many of which are coming to no good and falling apart in these days) and from religion in general.

As some of you may know, I grew up here in Portland.  I like the cold.  As a boy I ran around the fields and forests with my dog — wet and rained on — and I never cared.  My mother would scold me, “you put on a coat or you’ll get a cold.”  If I knew then what I know now, I would have replied, “Mother, don’t you know that the cause of all disease is rebirth?”  And the second cause is lack of discriminative wisdom.  Thankfully she helped with that — like helping me to discriminate about the wisdom of putting on a coat......

In the Vivekachudamani, the two main statements are Tattwamasi (Thou art That), and Brahman is real, the world is false (Brahman satya, jagad mithya).  When people hear this they get all upset that the world is not real.  But you have passed over the main thing:  Brahman is Real.  Jagad mithya, the world is false or unreal.  How?  It is changing.  Maya, name and form in time and space, is the queen of all four-letter words.

You have to awaken from the waking state to the ever-awake state.  Bhakti is the slow scenic route to God.  If combined with wisdom samadhi it becomes a swift vehicle, a rocket ship.

The Kingdoms of Heaven — all knowledge is within you.  You have to access this.  But there are barriers to this: the 8 Fetters, the 6 Passions, the 3 Gunas, etc..  Meditation, study, devotion, sacrifice — these are all ways to purify the mind to access what is within.

The difference between a seer and an ordinary person going into deep sleep is that the Seer takes his Consciousness with him and the ordinary person leaves Consciousness back with the senses or dream senses, thus leaving Consciousness outside the door of deep sleep.

We are not really awake because our Consciousness is dumbed down by our senses.  Awakening refers to the opening of the third eye, jnana chakshu.

Prakriti is like an iceberg.  The tip is what we see all around us.  The rest of it is unmanifest.  But the tip melts and some of the part below then comes above the water….so everything returns, like Buddha said.

When Buddha sat under the Bo tree, first he shut down the senses and their penchant for the objects, then he shut down the tanmatras, the pranas, then the mind, then he stopped the process of creation, preservation and dissolution — then he merged in Om.  Every great soul does this in one way or another, no matter what the methods or terms used.

You have to have a cosmology in order to do the meditation of involution — dissolving the mindstream.  Otherwise one is not aware of what to dissolve, or even if dissolution is necessary.