Hawaii Sankhya Retreat Reflection: A Poem

Who can describe the eternal?
That fairy land of delicate peace
Where the mind is so big it is gone
And no reason exists to describe it at all.

Who can explain freedom's feeling?
Where there is no thought of explanation
Where diamonds shine on every leaf
And vistas vast are where we are home.

I meet myself in meditation
I watch the mind as it roams
I meet my own lost soul
The soul that can take me home.

Namaste
Kathy

Sankhya Yoga Winter Retreat in Hawaii
by Annapurna

[The first class of a retreat is always one of my favorites.  We’ve had our first meditation together very early, complete with chanting of the Gita.  Silence has reined the whole morning and finally we meet together in the classroom, waiting expectantly.  The energy builds.  All the preparations that have gone into preparing the teachings and all of Babaji’s thought and intention for the students charges the atmosphere and we are ushered into a realm of peace, discernment, and Truth. What has been night to us in the distractions of our daily lives now becomes our pristine daylight.  “Why don’t we always live like this?” some are heard to ask. Here are a few selections from my journal from that first day of our Sankhya retreat.]

Who were the Rishis?  They were Seers of Absolute Truth.  And how did they attain this lofty realization?  Through Peace.

The Seers look upon the worlds and see they can go outwards or inwards.  They evolve out of the subtlemost cosmic principles to the grossest and then involve back again.  But this represents duality.  Beyond inward or outward is the Divine Mother Herself, Pure Intelligence, Pure Light, Pure Bliss.  In That the Seers are established.

Behold!  The mind is not part of your Soul/Purusha; the mind is in Nature (Prakriti).  Yet here people are trying to realize that highest Principle in the mind.  [Purusha is Spirit and Prakriti is matter, gross or subtle.]

Don’t take maya and put it outside of you.  It comes out of you.  As Swamiji stated so clearly: “You are never in maya, maya is in you.”

So India has passed through many phases: Yoga, Vedanta, etc., and Sankhya has influenced them all.  In the formalization of Vedanta philosophy, Shankara took Kapila’s tattvas (his delineation of the 24 Cosmic Principles) and arranged them into The Three Bodies (gross, subtle, and causal).  Why? First to show that we have more than one body.  And also to show that what we think of as the Self is always changing, whereas the Self is unchanging.  There are two essential principles in Advaita Vedanta: Ajativada and Aparinami.  These are Vedantic koans I’m giving here.  Birthless and deathless, and non transformation.  There’s no transformation; Brahman alone is.  A person who lives in the nondual Truth feels the underlying changefulness.

“The prana spills out of the Atman like its shadow,” states the Prasno Upanisad.  If you are focused on prana or anything else to the exclusion or forgetfulness of Brahman, then you are living in the shadow play.

Here’s the predicament of modern man.  All phenomena has come out of you and then you get lost in it.  Next,  you put yourself in slavery to ancestors or to deities.  What does it mean to become illumined?  To take back these territories that are yours alone.  How can you ever lose your Self?

The beginning of true spiritual life is not singing and dancing or chanting the names of the Lord --  not in my experience in the West.  The beginning is discrimination between the Real (the Self) and the unreal (everything else).  

This is how far we’ve fallen in the Kali Yuga, that we have to try to convince people that God exists, when God is Existence.