So many times people have expressed frustration over a lack of support in their spiritual paths due to not having living teachers available near them. It has been my experience that support beyond my wildest dreams has been available, but it has come in ways that are difficult to explain...so for the most part I just don’t talk about it.
This might be a good place for the disclaimer, or warning, for those of a mechanistic nature: If you are a person who is offended by the sharing of inexplicable occurrences and mysticism, and feel a need to criticize either the sharer or the sharing, please stop reading now. I have no interest in pushing buttons or offending anyone, nor do I have an interest in attempting to mount a defense of any experience I may share, in any case it would quite simply be impossible.
Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation. We will be sitting from 8:00 to 10:30 PM Eastern Time. It is not necessary to sit for the entire extended time, which is set up to make it convenient for people in four North American Time Zones; sit for as long as you like and when it is most convenient for you. Monday Group Meditation is open to everyone, believers and non-believers, who are interested in gathering in silence. If you are new to meditation and would like to try it for yourself, Mindful Nature gave a good description of one way to meditate in an earlier diary, copied and pasted below:
"It is a matter of focusing attention mostly. In many traditions, the idea is to sit and focus on the rising and falling of the breath. Not controlling it, but sitting in a relaxed fashion and merely observing experiences of breathing, sounds, etc. Be aware of your thoughts, but don't engage in them. When your mind wanders (it will, often), then return to focus on breath and repeat."
Note: You are also welcome to join us on Sunday mornings at 10:00AM for the Dkos Sangha Open Threads which are hosted by davehouck.
A couple weeks ago Francis Bennett shared a post on Facebook about his spiritual lineage and described having experiences with teachers both living and not, of literally feeling the teachers standing behind him. Years ago at a retreat offered by a Theosophist teacher, which took place in a Franciscan university, I had a similar experience of St. Francis of Assisi standing behind me placing his hand on my shoulder. This was a shocking experience, to feel deep unconditional love emanating from the manifestation of St. Francis while in the same moment a good portion of my worldview crumbled around me. I always thought saints were just dead people, and praying or attempting to interact with them was idolatrous, so this experience was fundamentally earthshaking.
Francis Bennett is so firmly grounded, and his explanation was so apt, I’ll share it here:
These helpers and guides in our life are always standing "behind us". They "have our back!" We can count on them to be here for us, even after they die, because their love and support for us is strong, and deep and even "stronger than death" as it says in the Old Testament.~Francis Bennett
After reading Francis Bennett’s post I thought it might be beneficial to share how I was drawn into some of these types of experiences with teachers living and beyond, just to show it’s possible. I do believe everyone has the potential to observe or experience the less than solid nature of the physical in some way or another. It is however, necessary to understand it is possible, to ask for support or help, and to be paying attention. I suspect it may also be necessary for a person to have a balanced relationship between their ego and intellect in order to allow mystic experience to take place as well. When our egos are very much in control of our intellect, we have a very powerful “need to know” that doesn’t arise from deep curiosity, but from a need to have the firm ground of understanding all about pretty much everything, and that doesn’t allow much room for what we don’t understand or know to make an appearance.
It can be beneficial to experience some of this slipperiness as it helps us know we are supported on our path, and when we begin to see physical reality is really not as solid as we have always believed, it becomes easier to loosen our grasp on our judgments about the way things are. On the other hand, it can also be important to know that if we do have such experiences to not let the ego take over and convince us we are the next Buddha, or Christ, or some such thing. :-)
A good way to open to this slipperiness is to read books about spiritual masters who have siddhis, or special skills. It is much easier to find this kind of reading material about teachers in the Hindu yogic traditions, because these yogis have a tendency to openly use their special skills to make a point in a teaching, or to simply demonstrate their mastery to students.
In my experience, Buddhist yogis have every bit as much mastery over the physical, but they don’t exhibit it openly; and when they do make use of a special skill, they never admit to doing so. It is not uncommon to read a student’s account of something happening in the presence of a Buddhist yogi, but for the relation of a shear number of awe inspiring incidents there are several wonderful books about Hindu yogic masters. To be clear, I am not suggesting that you should reach out to any of the teachers I may mention here, the idea is to learn from these books how mystery can manifest in this physical reality. You will know when and where to reach out from a feeling in your heart.
The first one of these books I recommend is the classic Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. (When I read this book the only edition available was one that had been altered posthumously by one of Yogananda’s devotees. The edition in this link is the restored original version plus one additional chapter Yogananda wrote after the first edition was published, this edition reads the way Yogananda intended.) This was the first place I encountered historically recent first person accounts of what might be considered miracles, or unbelievable events. My favorite account in this book is the occurrence with some melons Yogananda offered his guru and the simple minded man, and I’m not giving it away. If you are at all curious you will have to read the book. :-)
Then there are a number of wonderful books in the Tantric lineage of Swami Rama, Touched By Fire by Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, an autobiography with a wonderful account of how Pandit Tigunait met his teacher. Then another book by this same author At The Eleventh Hour, which is a biography of Pandit Tigunait’s teacher Swami Rama. Finally Living With The Himalayan Masters, Swami Rama’s wonderful account of receiving his own spiritual education, and his life in general. All of these books are quite wonderful, however for reading jaw dropping accounts of the amazing Swami Rama’s book would be hard to surpass.
Finally, I suggest the books about Sathya Sai Baba written by Howard Murphet. The link takes you to Amazon’s Howard Murphet page where you can see the books listed in order. Murphet, a writer, and his wife Irene were invited in to Sai Baba’s inner circle in the early days before things around Sai Baba expanded so much and became rather chaotic. Initially a skeptic Murphet eventually came to believe that the seemingly unbelievable events and occurrences he saw Sai Baba manifest were real.
From my own experience one afternoon during a particularly bad migraine headache I reached out to Sai Baba asking for help, whether that meant lifting out of my body for a few minutes of relief or whether I had to die to get relief from the pain, I didn’t care. Sai Baba appeared at the foot of my bed for just a few moments and touched the soles of my feet through the bedding. A wave of heat moved up through the left side of my body and then down through the right side. I was so hot I thought I would combust and I threw the covers off. Then I became so cold I thought I’d freeze. It took every ounce of energy I had to sit up and reach for the covers I’d just thrown off. Immediately following I fell into a deep sleep until the next morning. When I awoke, I was free of the normal migraine “hangover,” my head was clear and I’ve never had another migraine since.
It is probably necessary before I close to talk a bit about teachers and controversy. Both Swami Rama and Sathya Sai Baba, and many other spiritual teachers, have been accused of behavior inappropriate to spiritual mastery. You don’t have to dig very deep online to find a lot of unattractive stuff written about spiritual teachers in general, and certain teachers in particular. I’ve no interest in defending bad behavior, but I feel obligated to point out that thinking any spiritual teacher is, or should be above human fallibility is a mistake. As long as anyone is in a human body they have the potential to exhibit human failings. It is important for each of us to be aware of that, to be careful on our own paths to not give our power away to a teacher, or to surrender our common sense in order to have a teacher. (Talking about common sense really seems like an oxymoron in relationship to the topic of this post, doesn’t it?)
I think Ken Wilber has the best idea for how such highly realized teachers can exhibit such poor behavior in his theory of Lines of Development.
“Lines" are intelligences or capacities that develop through multiple stages. Whether cognitive, interpersonal, moral, emotional, or aesthetic, these lines, these intelligences unfold in stages.~Ken Wilber
It is simply not possible to offer a list of actions to open a person up for unseen support. Different traditions have divergent ways of talking about this, some traditions call it working with the inner guru, some traditions merely explain these types of experience as manifesting Grace, and in most sects of Buddhism, the mysterious is simply not a topic of discussion. There are reasons for this, however just because it isn’t addressed does not preclude its possibility.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.~Shakespeare
When we enter the realm of mystery, or slipperiness, we lose the potential for being definite about much of anything. Honestly, I don’t know what is possible for each of you, and I don’t know what is ultimately possible for any of us. I do know that when we don’t have access to living teachers, this kind of help can be a tremendous boost. What I can relate definitely is reading these types of books instilled a powerful heart’s desire in me to establish a relationship with a teacher.
I hope some of you might be intrigued enough to read some of these books, and that they might establish a desire in you to connect with a teacher. Take a chance on relaxing your grip on the solidness of this physical world. Open to slipperiness, invite a teacher into your life in a way you’ve not previously considered, and let go of expectations regarding how this kind of support might appear in your life.
I’ve shared a couple of my experiences so you can see that it doesn’t just happen in books. Perhaps the experience I shared with Sai Baba is atypical for not necessarily being a teaching experience, but it was not uncommon for him to respond to requests for help like the one I made. Finally I suggest that everyone has the potential to experience the slippery nature of physicality. Invite mystery into your life and perhaps you might begin experiencing life differently as a result. It won’t necessarily happen in the ways I’ve related here, and you have to really be paying attention, because these experiences don’t come with bells and whistles announcing their presence, they slip-slide in and out, and even when we are paying attention sometimes we are left shaking our heads and wondering, “Did that really happen?”