lazyyogi

[lazyyogi]

The veil was not placed over your eyes; it was woven by your seeing.

Awareness isn’t hidden— it’s what you’re using to search.

Nothing is concealed, only misread.

[lazyyogi]

Language didn’t evolve to describe reality. It evolved to coordinate confusion.

Who and what you are precedes and exceeds description.

Each name you accept replaces perception with a symbol.

You’ve never needed words. You’ve needed permission to stop using them:

Do not seek yourself within the alphabet— then the alphabet cannot bind you.

To recognize yourself, you must lose interest in being anything.

[lazyyogi]

You can’t be free by becoming more of what needs freeing.

[lazyyogi]

Language didn’t evolve to describe reality. It evolved to coordinate confusion.

Who and what you are precedes and exceeds description.

Each name you accept replaces perception with a symbol.

You’ve never needed words. You’ve needed permission to stop using them:

Do not seek yourself within the alphabet— then the alphabet cannot bind you.

To recognize yourself, you must lose interest in being anything.

[lazyyogi]

You can’t be free by becoming more of what needs freeing.

[lazyyogi]

Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate “other.” You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is. By “forget,” I mean that you can no longer feel this oneness as self-evident reality. You may believe it to be true, but you no longer know it to be true. A belief may be comforting. Only through your own experience, however, does it become liberating.

Eckhart Tolle

[lazyyogi]

We shrink away from the experiences that make us feel squeamish: fear, awkwardness, shame, self-consciousness, and the like. Not knowing how to manage the involuntary cringe, we try to force a deliberate ignorance to make it go away. We avert our gaze, cover our face, or look at our phones.

Some people want so badly to avoid feeling cringe that they will carefully shape their words and actions, continuously monitoring and censoring themselves until it becomes conditioned into their consciousness.

When we kill the part of ourselves that is cringe, we become rigid and contrived. We lose access to the freshness and authenticity discovered in unconditioned spontaneity. As a result, we also become predictable and more easily manipulated.

What is the alternative? Freedom, of course.

If instead of hiding you stay with the experience, feeling all the cringe and enduring all the squeamishness, you create the opportunity to see through its illusion. You weaken and eventually break the power these experiences had over you.

Continue on that path long enough and you will awaken from the cringing fake self entirely.

[lazyyogi]

Your awareness of existence is the Realest thing you have ever known.

Reality is that which is known without relying on any other means outside itself.

Awareness knows the body, but cannot be known by the body.
Awareness knows the mind, but cannot be known by the mind.

Only Awareness knows Itself.

Thus: Awareness is Reality—and Reality is Aware.

[lazyyogi]

“Consider yourself lucky if your mind is fed up with worldly objects.”

— Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj

[lazyyogi]

A Spirituality Booklist

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

The Places That Scare You by Pema Chodron

I Am That by Nisargadatta Maharaj

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Suzuki Roshi

Rebel Buddha by Ponlop Rinpoche

The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Be As You Are by Ramana Maharshi

Self-Knowledge by Nome

Master of Self-Realization by Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj

Silence of the Heart by Robert Adams

Final Talks by Annamalai Swami

A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night by the Dalai Lama

The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda

The Avadhuta Gita, translation by Sri Purohit Swami

The Ashtavakra Gita, translation by Thomas Byrom

The Dhammapada

Be Here Now by Ram Dass

Tantra: The Supreme Understanding by Osho

Any poetry by Rumi or Hafiz

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

The Bhagavad Gita

The Idiot’s Guide to Hinduism (first book on spirituality that I read)

[lazyyogi]

Lazy, I find myself in a strange place in my spiritual life and am not quite sure how to go forward. Most of my adult life my spiritual practice has been based around Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village lineage of Buddhism, and the Classical yoga of Patanjali. The new year has brought a revitalization to my practice. After months of not engaging with Buddhism, I’m back to a disciplined morning and most evenings meditation, chanting, and sutra recitation practice, and study of Buddhist teachings and attempting to live them. At the same time I’ve been getting into folk magic and Catholicism as a result of beginning to connect with my ancestors. I’ve been slowly beginning to engage Catholic contemplative practices, the rosary, praying the hours, etc. I’m feeling a bit like Ramakrishna: I know the truth of Buddhism, and something is drawing me on to a practice of contemplative/folk Catholicism. I feel like I need to, at least temporarily, choose one or the other. Yet the idea of setting aside my Buddhist practice feels like setting myself adrift, and I can’t seem to let go of Catholicism

Truth is not found within Buddhism or Catholicism or Yoga.

Truth is found in and as Reality itself.

This is known through our own direct experience--and nowhere else.

To the extent that we awaken from the illusion of an individual self, Reality is discovered to be Here already. The Real has always been Real, will always be Real, and is Real even now.

Such realization may come as consequence of practices or teachings but not because they themselves contain truth. You are the truth and you are what is revealed. It's only a matter of what it will take for you to realize that.

You feel as though you need to choose between a Buddhist path and a Catholic path.

My advice? Choose Reality.

Be guided not by attachments to or fascinations with any particular path but by whether its methods are sufficient to overthrow the momentum of your illusions and to establish contact with Reality. That may include both Buddhism and folk Catholicism--or maybe neither.

Allow yourself the freedom to explore whatever feeds your devotion to Reality and brings truth into your direct experience.

Do not worry about setting yourself adrift. How can you, when you are not the boat but the ocean itself?

May all beings realize their true nature with diamond-like clarity and thunderous certainty.

May all beings be free.

Much love, my friend!

LY

[lazyyogi]

The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: “I think, therefore I am.” He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind.

Eckhart Tolle

[lazyyogi]

Ultimately, prayer is contact with reality.

Prayer is about opening up—psychologically, emotionally, attentively, and intuitively.

When we engage in prayer, we empty our hearts and minds. In doing so, we make the heart-mind available to receive.

It is Vulnerable. But also Venerable.

Knowing that we live in ignorance, prayer becomes a practice in which we touch reality and allow reality to touch us. That reality may be called truth, divinity, awareness, or something else entirely.

Sometimes we ask for help when we pray—healing, blessing, the strength to overcome an obstacle or to endure a hardship.

Sometimes we ask for guidance.

If done correctly—with the right balance of heart sincerity and openness of attention—it doesn’t matter to whom you pray.

What matters is that you know how to listen without preconception or expectation. Then you will receive.

[lazyyogi]

I had the pleasure of seeing Flow months ago at the Woodstock film festival. My girlfriend had picked about five movie options for us to attend—many good options with Anora among them. I chose Flow because Cat 😅

We loved it. I was unbelievably happy when it was recognized with an Oscar. To be able to tell a story without dialogue, without narration, and still manage to capture audiences’ attention and hearts is such an achievement.

Highly recommend.

[lazyyogi]

Q: How I can detach myself from someone?

Detaching from anything, be that a person, object, or circumstance, means coming back to yourself. 

Attachment isn’t a real experience; it is a product of confusion.

Generally it means someone has knowingly or unknowingly assumed something to be permanent that by nature cannot be so.

You aren’t physically bound to this person. The experience of attachment is an occurrence in the mind. It has to do with the mind’s thoughts and the body’s reaction to those thoughts. Or, conversely, the body’s emotions and the mind’s reaction/interpretation regarding those emotions. 

When attachment is a force in our life, it is because we have begun to use temporary phenomena as a way to orient and understand who we are and where our happiness resides. It is an indication that we have misattributed some sense of who we are and the joy of that Being to something derivative and external. When that phenomenon’s role in our life changes due to the impermanent nature of this shifting world, it can provoke confusion within us that results in suffering.

Most people “fix” this by going from one attachment to another. Perhaps finding a new boyfriend, pursuing sensory gratification in myriad forms, or fixating on worldly achievement. They play out the same old pattern of delusion but in different ways all while expecting a different result.

I suspect this is why so many of our elders make us sad rather than inspire hope and wisdom—their lives end more with regret than with transformation, peace, and insight. 

To discover real peace means loosening this tendency to grasp at the world for happiness and identity, instead turning within to uncover the real meaning of your aliveness when we talk about “life.”

Daily meditation is an essential part of altering your way of living such that you aren’t so much trying to fill a hole within you but rather you are allowing something to come through you into this world. Instead of trying to get happiness from life, you bring happiness to life.

When your way of life becomes an opportunity to express and share the peace and happiness you are finding within, everything changes. There is less fear, more love. Less attachment, more freedom. Less confusion, more peace. 

On a more immediate level, try this:

Notice the primary form your attachment takes. It could be thoughts, emotions, or both. 

When that attachment begins to express itself, shift your focus from the story you have built in your mind to the feeling of being in your body. 

This feeling of inhabiting the body includes both the sensations in the body but also the space in which those sensations occur. 

For example, when you feel your hand from the inside out, there is the sensation of the energy-consciousness in your hand but there is the internal spaceless space of awareness in which that sensation presents itself. 

By abiding with your attention filling your body in this way, you avoid getting swept up in mental loops of the thoughts that once acted to renew your feelings of pain. 

At the same time, it allows the feelings of pain to be there and to be fully experienced without being overcome or swept away by them.

Make this practice persistent so long as you are suffering from the experience of attachment, or really any form of mental anguish. It always subsides into peace, sooner or later. 

Lastly, a book I would highly recommend is The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. 

Namaste :) Much love

[lazyyogi]

We’ve been watching My Roommate Is A Cat. It’s such a cute, funny, heartening anime. Highly recommend. It will provide feels.

[lazyyogi]

“It is rather more noble to help people purely out of concern for their suffering than it is to help them because you think the Creator of the Universe wants you to do it, or will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it. The problem with this linkage between religion and morality is that it gives people bad reasons to help other human beings when good reasons are available.”

— Sam Harris