From ‘Original Dwelling Place. Zen Buddhist Essays’ by Robert Aitken

Strip off the blinders, unload the saddlebags!
- Hsueh-Tou Ch’ung-Hsien



Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
- Walt Whitman



Nyogen Senzaki…..recorded his last words before he died in March 1958.

Friends in Dhamma, be satisfied with your own heads. Do not put any false heads above your own. Then minute after minute, watch your steps closely. Always keep your head cold and your feet warm. These are my last words to you.



“Every act is a rite,” Thich Nhat Hanh had said……. “When you sweep the garden, you are sweeping your own mind,” the [Soen] roshi said to me…



….lines from Tennyson

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be,
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, are more than they.



Thich Nhat Hanh has said that you are like a TV. If you want a peaceful channel, you can turn to a peaceful channel. If you want some other kind of channel, you can turn to that.



We can enjoy the world without exploiting it, and we need not isolate ourselves. I am fond of the line from the Ts’ai-ken-t’an: “Water which is too pure has no fish.”



Tao-hsin made his bows before Seng-ts’an and said, “I beg the compassion of Your Reverence. Please teach me the Dharma way of emancipation.”
Seng-ts’an said, “Who is binding you?”
Tao-hsin said, “No one is binding me.”
Seng-ts’an said, “Then why should you search for emancipation?” Hearing this, Tao-hsin had great realization.



Hui-neng says that with an enlightened thought, you compensate for a thousand years of evil and destruction.



….a key passage in the “Genjo Koan,” the essay that Dogen placed at the head of his great collection of talks and essays, the Shobogenzo…..

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment is continued forever and ever.



The Buddha Shakyamuni taught this apparently complex yet actually very simple complementarity more than 2,500 years ago. With the passage of his teaching through many cultures and languages, the original manner and expression of his Way have evolved significantly in a variety of directions. Yet the archetypal message is the same: “Human beings tend to be miserable because they are preoccupied with themselves. When they are free of their self-centeredness they can find happiness.”



Basho wrote:

The little horse ambles clop-clop

across the summer moor -

I find myself in a picture.

Basho’s disciple Sampu painted a picture of Basho nodding along on his little horse, completely absorbed – subjective and objective fallen away, the inside world enlarged to fill the summer moor; the summer moor filling the inside world.



Something has to give. Either koan study must go, or the path of reason. Thus, early on, the student who elects to pursue the path of Zen Buddhism gives up history and philosophy as basic tools and takes up the way of poetry. The way of poetry is the way of staring at the word or words with only the question “What is it?” occupying the mind. The point either emerges or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, one’s only recourse is to go on staring.



There are many such stories of death used as an upaya, a skillful means of turning the Dharma wheel. Death poems were upaya. Here is Hung-chih’s composition:

Illusory dreams, phantom flowers -

sixty-seven years.

A white bird vanishes in the mist,

autumn waters merge with the sky

Bassui advises a dying man:

If you think of nothing, wish for nothing, want to understand nothing, cling to nothing, and only ask yourself, “What is the true substance of the Mind of this one who is now suffering?” Ending your days like clouds fading in the sky, you will eventually be freed from your painful bondage to endless change.



….Philip Larkin’s despair in his poem “Aubade””

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night,

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

And interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

….Bokkei’s presentation with the famous haiku by Issa, on the death of his baby daughter:

The dewdrop world

is the dewdrop world

and yet – and yet.

“It is true that this world is transitory,” Issa is saying. “All beings are ephemeral. I know this, but when I am faced with the death of my baby girl, I look desperately for something to give me hope and comfort.”



It is Geist that is missing, Landauer says – communal spirit, the volkseele, or folk soul, the larger self of people in a particular region, culture, or nation. It dwells in the hearts of individuals who give themselves over to the unfolding of this spirit as they work together in communal units that interpenetrate to form a “society of societies”. Geist can be compared with Plato’s philia, the friendship of high-minded individuals who are drawn together by their affinity for noble conduct and their rejection of self-centered materialism.



As the acquisitive system burgeons, its collapse is foreshadowed by epidemics, famine, war, and the despoliation of the earth and its forests, waters, and air.

I envision a growing crisis across the world as managers and their multinational systems continue to deplete finite human and natural resources. Great corporations, underwritten by equally great financial institutions, flush away the human habitat and the habitat of thousands of other species far more ruthlessly and on a far greater scale than the gold miners who once hosed down mountains in California.



When we devote ourselves to the Buddha Way, we practice loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity in the market and in our households ….. We internalize these ideals and extend tender care, as Torei Zenji advises us, to beasts and birds – and indeed to plants, pancakes, orange juice, and undershirt. The haiku poet Issa wrote:

Don’t kill it!

The fly wrings its hands;

It wrings its feet

From ‘Mind is a Myth’ - Conversations with U G Krishnamurti

His biological sensitivity (and there is no other kind) is so acute that the movements of celestial bodies, especially the moon, have a visible strong effect on him.



U.G.: The energy you are devoting to the search, to techniques, to your sadhana, or whatever you wish to call it, is taking away the energy you need to live. You are obsessed with finding meaning in life, and that is consuming a lot of energy. If that energy is released from the search for meaning, it can be used to see the futility of all search. Then your life becomes meaningful and the energy may be used for some useful purpose.



U.G.: My interest is not to knock off what others have said (that is too easy), but to knock off what I am saying. More precisely, I am trying to stop what you are making out of what I am saying. This is why my talking sounds contradictory to others.



……..You are interfering with the natural functioning of the nervous system all the time. When a sensation hits your nervous system the first thing you do is to name it and categorize it as pleasure or pain. The next step is that you want to continue the pleasurable sensations and stop the painful sensations. First, the recognition of sensation as pleasure or pain is itself painful. Secondly, the attempt to extend the life of one kind of sensation (pleasure), and to stop another kind of sensation (pain), is also painful. Both activities are choking the body….. The attempt to extend pleasure and stop pain only succeeds in destroying the sensitivity of the body and its ability to respond to sensations. So, what you are doing is very painful for the body.



……..Thought will use any trick under the sun to give momentum to its own continuity. Its essential techniques is to repeat the same thing over and over again; this gives it an illusion of permanency.



……You must build a huge bonfire within you. Then you will become an individual.



U.G.: There are no persons, and no space within to create a self. What is left after the continuity of thought is blown away, is one disjointed, independent, series of interactions. What happens in the environment around me, happens in here. There is no division. When the armour you are wearing around you is stripped away, you find an extraordinary sensitivity of the senses that respond to the phases of the moon, the passage of the seasons, and the movements of the other planets. There is simply no isolated, separate, existence of its own here, only the throb of life, like, a jellyfish.

Q: Can you describe a little of this recurring death process you go through?

U.G.: It is of course defies description. But I can mention that in this death state, the ordinary breath stops entirely and the body is able to ‘breathe’ through other physiological means. Among the many doctors I have discussed this strange phenomena with, only Dr. Laboyer, an expert in childbirth, gave me a sort of explanation. He says that newborn babies have a similar way of breathing.

From ‘The Mystique of Enlightenment’ by U. G. Krishnamurti

The body feels the pain. That’s a very painful process. ….It is a physical pain because the body has limitations ……The energy that is in operation there does not feel the limitations of the body; it is not interested; it has its own momentum. It is a very painful thing. It is not that ecstatic, blissful beatitude and all that rubbish stuff and nonsense! ….. Even Ramana Maharshi suffered after that.

A great cascade – not one, but thousands of cascades – it went on and on for months and months. …..

There were pains all over the body. Thought has controlled this body to such an extent that when that loosens, the whole metabolism is agog. ….there were pains in the marrow of the bones. Every cell started changing. And it went on and on for six months.

And then the sex hormones started changing. I didn’t know whether I was man or a woman ….Suddenly there was a breast on the left-hand side. All kinds of things, it went on and on and on. It took three years for this body to fall into a new rhythm of its own.



Since there is nobody who uses this thought as a self-protective mechanism, it burns itself up. Thought undergoes combustion, ionisations ….. Thought is, after all vibration. So, when this kind of ionization of thought takes place, it throws out, sometimes it covers the whole body with, an ash-like substance.



If I cover the eyelids, there is still light inside. There seems to be some kind of a hole in the forehead, which doesn’t show, but through which something penetrates. In India, that light is golden: in Europe it is blue. There is also some kind of light penetration through the back of the neck. It’s as if there is a hole running through between those spots in front and back of the skull. There is nothing inside but this light. If you cover those points, there is complete, total darkness. This light doesnt do anything or help the body to function in any way – its just there.



The thymus, one of the endocrine glands, is located under the breastbone ….it is active through childhood until puberty and then becomes dormant. When you come into your natural state, this gland is reactivated. Sensations are felt there; you don’t translate them as ‘good’ or ‘bad’; they are just a thud.



In the natural state there is no entity that is co-ordinating the messages from different senses. Each sense is functioning independently in its own way. When there is a demand from outside which makes it necessary to co-ordinate one or two or all of the senses and come up with a response, still there is no co-ordinator, but there is a temporary state of co-ordination. There is no continuity; when the demand has been met, again there is only the uncoordinated, disconnected, disjointed functioning of the senses. ….Once the continuity is blown apart – not that it was ever there; but the illusory continuity – its finished once and for all.



…it is thought that provides the build-up without which no sex is possible. …. In the natural state there is no build up of thought. Without that build up, sex is impossible. And sex is tremendously violent to the body. The body is normally a very peaceful organism, and then you subject it to this tremendous tension and release. Which feels pleasurable to you. Actually it is painful to the body.



What makes one person come into his natural state, and not another person. I don’t know. Perhaps its written in the cells. It is acausal. There is absolutely nothing you can do.



…..the animal becomes a flower. That seems to be the purpose – if at all there is any purpose in Nature ….We have only a handful of flowers, which you can count on your fingers: Ramana Maharshi in recent times, Sri Ramakrishna, some other people …..



These glands are outside the control of thought. The Hindus call them ‘chakras’. The glands are located in the exact spots where they speculated the chakras are……. I don’t want to use the word ‘chakras’. I would call them ‘ductless glands’. Unless they are activated, any chance of human beings flowering into themselves is lost



You have to become completely disillusioned, then the truth begins to express itself in its own way.



So all your morality, and all your practicing this, that and the other, has no meaning. That is why the Upanishadic seers never talked of morality or sadhana, whereas the saints have emphasized them because they are second-class imitators……. And I maintain that it is genetically fixed: only in such a man does this kind of thing happen.

From ‘A Land of Two Halves. An accidental tour of New Zealand’ by Joe Bennett

….New Zealand appears to be a land of contradictions. It has a masculine image but it was the first place in the world to give women the vote. It sits in the South Pacific but until recently it traded almost exclusively with Great Britain. It sent soldiers to Vietnam but it has banned American warships. It promotes itself as a virgin paradise, but it has destroyed 90 per cent of its native bush. It’s a rural country but most of its people live in cities.



……the shot of the waterfall in the bush or the sun rising, and the uplifting spiritual apophthegm. God always gets the credit for the good bits. I have yet to see a poster of a pox-raddled beggar’s corpse in Delhi, labeled ‘I am the way the truth and the life’. God’s gone down the same route as nature. Just as nature has turned from implacable enemy into colourful David Attenborough entertainment, and an ingredient in shampoo, health food and happiness, so the fierce father of the Old Testament has turned into a celestial Care-Bear. It’s a form of cuddlification, like making a musical about Jack the Ripper.



Over the course of the Gallipolli campaign, 8450 New Zealand soldiers disembarked, 7473 of them were either killed or wounded.



…..population of the country had reached four million……Auckland houses over a quarter of the country’s people. The North Island, including Auckland, houses three quarters. The South Island, which is roughly the size of England, is home to just over one million people.



…..internet café in Owaka …..Several hundred emails await my attention. Most want me to enlarge my penis, though there are also several inviting me to study other penises at work. All the rest are concerned with money or drugs. Collectively they offer me an inspiring view of the human condition.



A woman in lycra strides ferociously past, driven by an angry devotion to health.



Its an Old English pub which, of course, is neither old nor English but it does employ a barmaid so cheerless, discourteous, inattentive, inefficient and unremittingly idle that there is almost no point in asking her where she’s from. But I do.

‘Barnstaple,’ she says, and manages to turn its three syllables into ‘fuck off’. It evokes a feeling in me that approaches nostalgia.



….Wanaka ….To get some idea of the place, take the English Lake District, heighten the mountains, file their edges, fold them more tightly, cover most of them with snow, iron that snow, enlarge the lakes, intensify the brightness of the light by a factor of ten, banish all drizzle and shoot fourteen out of every fifteen people.



My driver lives and works in Wanaka ……’….Great place to live though, I mean,’ and he gestures out the window at the mountains, ‘look at it.’ ………

…. ‘Look,’ and here he pauses to search for a way to say something that is clearly there in his head, but wordless. ‘Look, sometimes I come home from work and I’ve had a shitty day and I’ve got a head buzzing with shitty little worries and I go outside and I look at the mountains. And I think, shit, those fuckers have been there one fuck of a long time. And then I feel better.’

It’s pure Wordsworth. Wordsworth might have put it more decorously, but he could hardly have put it more honestly……



‘Nice place, New Zealand, but some of the towns, well, you’d find more life in a cemetery.’



…the assorted songs of the bellbird, none of which sounds remotely like a bell, are all of such ineffable purity and unlike any bird song I have heard anywhere else in the world ….some travel writers have been known to go just a little over the top







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….even though there are more bookshops per capita in New Zealand than in most European countries, publishing here remains a precarious business, largely because there are so few actual capita. The only sure way to make money is to publish biographies of All Blacks or books like Your Guide to Ultimate Incredible Outdoor Experiences.



On 31 August 1865, E. Mallard, Charles Brookes and Charles Cuiped were charged with being ‘in a state of vinous elevation, totally inconsistent with their own wellbeing and the public peace’. Good to know that the law was as pompous then as now.



Their monstrous backpacks have littler backpacks attached to them like suckling young.



The North Island ….has a different history, a different geography, and a different climate. Seventy per cent of all New Zealanders live there, and ninety per cent of Maori. Crudely put, the North Island thinks of the South Island as scenery dotted with yokels. The South Island thinks of the North Island as Auckland. And it thinks of Auckland as hell.



The evening takes off its tie and rolls up its sleeves.



I wake at five in the position that corpses adopt for detectives to draw chalk lines around them.



We start with formalities couched in maiden-aunt English. Then Peter drops in a ‘bullshit’. I don’t react, deploy a ‘bastard’ of my own. Soon Peter unleashes a ‘fuck’ and it’s implicitly, semi-consciously, agreed that there are no linguistic taboos. I like that process of feeling out the territory. It’s a type of courtesy.



Trout were introduced to New Zealand in the nineteenth century by groups known as Acclimitisation Societies who imported wildlife from Europe for reasons of sport or nostalgia or food. What they achieved was catastrophe. The rabbits, for example, bred like rabbits. Instead of the farmers eating the rabbits, the rabbits ate the farms. So in came the stoats and weasels to control the rabbits. They cheerfully tucked into the rabbits, until they discovered the native birds. They proved particularly fond of kiwi chicks. Just about the only exception to this catalogue of disaster was the trout.



…..the panoramic view of the volcanoes, the lake, and the little township parked decoratively at its northern end ….. Each home is designed to exploit the view, and each does its bit to spoil it.



Rugby Union springs from the great British public schools, where it combined with cricket, the Church of England and militarism to form a four-pronged defence against masturbation.





The haka belongs. It is unique to this country, and its ferocity and masculinity and bellicosity are entirely apt to the circumstances. It fires the blood.

….The haka that the All Blacks perform was supposedly composed by the warlike chief Te Tauparaha when he was hiding from pursuers in a kumara pit. The early settlers feared and hated Te Tauparaha, but his haka is loved. In translation it goes:



It is death. It is death.

It is life. It is life.

This is the hairy person

Who caused the sun to shine.

Abreast. Keep Abreast.

The rank. Hold fast.

Into the sun that shines.



They are wise to perform it in Maori.

















Though Auckland houses more than a quarter of the country’s population, that’s not much over a million people, a number dwarfed by the world’s major cities. And yet Auckland occupies an acreage larger than either Paris or London.



Hamilton ….city …. Its civic motto is Hamilton. More than you’d expect which is less a motto than an admission of defeat.

From ‘In Search of the Miraculous’ by Osho

The mind has a faculty ……. to dream, to create illusions, to project. That is why it is good to proceed in meditation completely unaware of kundalini, of chakras. If you stumble upon them, then it is good…….. do not make any intellectual effort to understand beforehand; no pre-notion is needed. Not only is it not needed, but it is positively harmful.



….it is not necessary to pass through chakras…… one can just bypass them. It is also not necessary that you will feel kundalini before enlightenment. …… kundalini is only felt if you do not have a very clear passage. If the passage is completely clear-cut, then the energy flows but you cannot feel it….. So the person who feels more kundalini is really blocked: there are many blocks in the passage.



Buddha never talked about kundalini…..he never felt it. Mahavira never talked about kundalini.



The space where the life force is stored is like a kunda, a pool near the sex center; that is why the energy is known as kundalini …..it looks like a snake coiled and sleeping.



…with the upward rise of this energy, many things will happen. Please see that you don’t get scared when they happen, because new experiences are frightening.



Look at the trees and the clouds and the seas; they don’t give rise to any thoughts in you.



…if during meditation your body begins to twist and turn in a particular way and you try to prevent it, you will damage the inner state of meditation, and then it cannot make any headway.



If possible, have a separate room for meditation, and use it exclusively for meditation …… It may be a small room, but keep it under lock and key. If any members of your family want to join you, allow them on the condition that they meditate with you and not do anything else….. a separate room for meditation will have many advantages….. it will be charged with meditative energy. And whenever you enter it you will find that it is not an ordinary space.

We continually radiate our energy all around us; we send out rays of our mental energy all around us. And the space around us, even inside a room, absorbs this energy. That is the reason that some places remain holy for thousands of years. If a man like Mahavira, Buddha or Krishna sits in a particular place, it takes on their extraordinary vibe, their unearthly impact, which can last for thousands of years. From such a place one’s entry into the other world, the spiritual world, becomes much easier.



….the kundalini will awaken. And with its awakening, extraordinary experiences will begin to happen, because all the experiences of all your past lives are associated with the kundalini.



Now if the kundalini, as you are breathing and asking “Who am I?” reaches the spot where your experiences as a tree are located, you will suddenly come to know exactly what this tree experienced when it was raining. You will really feel that it is raining. And then you will be frightened, very frightened…… And only then you will understand why sometimes you feel like an ocean and sometimes like the winds …. As a result, your aesthetic capacity – and many other capacities, of which you had no idea whatsoever – will begin to unfold.



……ways of hammering the kundalini….the way of shaktipat, or transmission of energy. ….it needs a medium…. The other person does not have to do anything, just his presence is enough. He becomes a vehicle, a catalytic agent.



Shaktipat works like a flash of lightning. A flash of lightning does not light your path….it only gives you a flash, a glimpse of the road ahead and its surroundings. But this single glimpse is very precious; now your feet are firm, now your will is strong, now your resolve to reach your destination is hardened. You have seen the road and you know it is there, and that you are not wandering aimlessly…… So the effect of shaktipat is indirect, and therefore you need it again and again



For shaktipat to happen, it is essential that the seeker is in the right state to receive it, and that the medium is a right medium….this is a matter of technique.

Grace comes uninvited….. You cannot ask for it, you cannot order it. …. It is an event that happens once in a great while, and happens on its own.



Firstly, I will say only as much publicly as can be recorded without any risk…. And what needs to be treated and preserved as secret teachings will never be disclosed to the public. I will transmit them to deserving individuals who will keep them in their memory.



There are techniques which awaken the energy instantly and suddenly; they are called the techniques of sudden enlightenment. And there is always some inherent danger in practicing such techniques, because the onrush of energy may be too much for you to bear; you may not be prepared for it.



….two kinds of religions evolved throughout the world – one based on meditation and the other based on prayer. Religions committed to prayer are those that experience God to be above, in the skies….. On the other hand, there are religions which believe that we have to raise something up from within ourselves, that there is something asleep at our roots, and it can be raised only if we do something about it…… over time, religions of prayer have been losing ground and dying out. There is no future for them….. And religions of meditation are growing daily, they have an enormous future ahead.



Oxygen is a great help in awakening the kundalini. This is why we have always given such great importance to morning meditation. The reason is that in the morning, even a small breath carries a large amount of oxygen with it. The earth happens to be in a very unique and extraordinary state for a full hour after sunrise, and to take advantage of this situation, morning has been chosen all over the world as the finest time for meditation.

The more you hammer the kundalini with your fast and intense breathing, the more quickly it will awaken.



The cave is used because it provides many kinds of protection to the seeker. It not only protects him from the din and bustle of the outside world; it also protects him from various vibrations that are harmful to yoga. A cave of a particular kind of stone is very significant. Particular stones, like marble, prevent many vibrations from entering the cave. That is why marble has been widely used in the construction of temples…. There are stones which absorb special kinds of vibrations, preventing them entering the temples. Othe stones deflect or repel these vibrations. And there are stones that attract vibrations conducive to spiritual discipline.



If a number of seekers have used a particular cave for their sadhana, that cave acquires extraordinary significance, and new seekers can benefit a lot from it. So some caves have been used continuously for thousands of years.



In Tibet, dead bodies of great bodhisattvas, highly advanced souls, some of which are thousands of years old, have been preserved in very deep and secret caves.



As you go deeper into meditation your breathing becomes slower and slower; as if it has rarefied. It is because you don’t need any oxygen at that depth of meditation. …. As long as the kundalini is not awake, you will have to use the key of breathing with all your strength. But as soon as it is awakened, breathing becomes unnecessary.



For Samadhi, breath has no meaning …… Samadhi is where everything comes to a stop.

So when a seeker enters deeper states of meditation, every precaution and care should be taken to keep him alive. Many people are needed to help him through that critical hour, otherwise he may disappear, he may be lost in that immensity known as Samadhi. … Ramakrishna often reached this state. For days he used to be in Samadhi …. and it became difficult for him to come back to life.



There are ancient temples and caves which have hardly any doors and windows, they have no ventilation at all……This is because those who lived in them did not need much air. In fact, they did not want much air to enter their sanctuaries, because the vibrations of the outside world carried in the air could have destroyed the astral vibrations of the cave…..



And once in a great while, in a state of extreme weightlessness, the body actually levitates.



When your mind senses imminent danger and panics, be aware that it is the most decisive and precious moment of meditation – the moment of fulfillment ….. It is precisely the moment when you have to bring all your energy into action. If you miss that moment you may miss for years.



So if by chance a person suddenly happens to be in a state in which grace can suddenly descend on him or a sudden situation is created in which shaktipat happens to him without a medium, then there is every possibility of his going crazy or becoming insane.



In the case of shaktipat the chances of an accident are very few, almost nil, because there is a person who is functioning as a medium …. Passing through a medium the energy becomes gentle and mild, and the medium can also regulate the intensity of the energy.



So it has happened time and time again that many people like Ramakrishna left this world without giving their message. They could not. It is a very rare combination for a person to know and be able to convey. When this rare combination takes place we call such a person a tirthankara, an avatar, a prophet. It does not mean that there have not been any other such people; there have been, but they could not communicate.



…the significance of solitude is to relax your ego and help it to let go. It is for this reason that you are more at ease near a tree than in the company of another person.

This is why, in countries where tensions between people are becoming greater, they tend to live with pets. It is easier to live with animals than with men, because they have no “I”.



Gradually man tries to break his relationship with others and establish relationships with objects because they are easier to handle. So the mass of objects is increasing day by day. There are more articles in the house than people ….objects give no trouble. ….The presence of trees, rivers, and mountains is no trouble, so we feel at peace near them. The reason is simply that the “I” is not standing in full strength before us, so we feel relaxed.



The greater the crowd, the harder and more condensed your ego is. Therefore, it has long been a practice to get out of the crowd and try to drop the ego in solitude. But man is strange: if he stays under a tree for long he will begin to talk to it and address it as “you.”



When you approach a plant in anger, its psychic state changes, and when you approach it in love then again it changes. So it will not be out of place if we discover in the next fifty years that we can also talk to plants – but this will be a gradual development.



The custom of cremation was also the idea of psychic people, because they believed that the soul had difficulty in taking a new birth if the body of the previous life still remained: it then hovered around the old body. If the body is burned to ashes the soul will be rid of this encumbrance – because once it sees the body turning to ashes, in the next body it will perhaps realize that what is considered to be its own was after all only a destructible object.



…..words that produced beautiful vibrations…… Words are thoughts that are manifested. However, unmanifested words also carry a resonance and we call them thoughts. When you think about something, a particular kind of resonance is created around you, a particular kind of vibration surrounds you. This is why you find sometimes that when you go near a particular person you feel sad for no apparent reason …. All around you there are thought waves, and the whole twenty-four hours they keep on entering you.



Our thought waves touch matter and transform it …. The waves are so subtle that it takes them millions of years to be discharged from the object. This is why graves and samadhis came to be constructed.



….in India we have the custom of burning our dead but not our dead sannyasins. An ordinary man’s body is burned so that his soul does not go on hovering around him. But the sannyasin is not cremated because his soul had already stopped hovering around his body while he was still alive. …. We wish to conserve his body, because the body of a man who has spent years experiencing the divine will diffuse the same thought waves for thousands of years. His burial spot will be meaningful; it will yield results…



…this country has made many more discoveries in the spiritual field than other countries, because in other countries the seeker was all alone. ….this country had at one time employed thousands of its geniuses and intellectuals, in the science of the soul.



The energy always flows from the male to the female. …the male body is …..not receptive; it is always aggressive … The female is receptive. She can take but she cannot give….

…since the female is receptive she can never become the giver of shaktipat; shaktipat cannot take place through her. This is the reason why there are so few female masters in the world, nor are there any female gurus of the stature of Buddha and Mahavira. …. not a single woman of the stature of Krishna was ever born. …..Therefore, though it is man who is the herald of religion it is woman who always protects and preserves it; it is woman who saves religion on earth. Men only pioneer religion.

…shaktipat is also difficult from man to man because the male meditator is not receptive…. There are cults in which a man performs his spiritual practice taking himself to be a woman. This is a method of making him receptive….. A woman….is already surrendered; it is in her nature…. She is very receptive. Therefore, shaktipat from a man takes place easily within her. From man to man it is very difficult and from woman to man nearly impossible. From man to man, thought difficult, it is possible. If there is a powerful man he can reduce the other man to a near female condition. Shaktipat through a woman is practically impossible, because in the moment of transmission she tends to absorb the vital energy herself.



….the use of wooden platforms for meditation had no other purpose than the fact that they were nonconductors. Deerskins and leopard skins were used for the same reason; so that the energy that is released through meditation should not give a shock. … A man can be killed by this electric shock. Therefore, the meditator put on wooden sandals and slept on a wooden platform.



…the body has its own magnetic force. If it can be properly aligned with the magnetic force of the earth, it is very beneficial…..So if you are in a particular state seated in a particular posture at a certain special moment, a particular star will cause your body to become especially magnetized.



…..if everything in the room were coloured red, the blood pressure of all of you sitting here would rise ……..The colour blue causes the blood pressure to fall….The water in the blue bottle will remain fresh for days whereas the water in the yellow bottle will turn foul immediately. The yellow color is the color of death and it brings about disintegration.



If a person dies after his fourth body is activated he is born on the plane of the devas, the gods …..If the fourth body is merely activated and one is not conscious we call it the plane of the pretas, evil spirits; if it is activated as well as fully conscious we call it the plane of the devas, godly spirits …..the preta can cause a great deal of harm both to itself and to others with the activity of its fourth body; because unconsciousness can only bring harm……. He whose fifth body becomes active goes beyond the existence of devas. The fifth is the spiritual body. …..The preta has to return in order to break its unawareness, because for this a human form is absolutely essential. The devas have to return, because in their existence there is no suffering whatsoever…. When there is no suffering there is no thought of transformation or of attainment….. In the lives of Mahavira and Buddha there are descriptions of devas coming to them in order to be taught, but these are very exceptional happenings. It is strange that devas should come to human beings because it is an existence above the human existence. It seems strange but it is not, because the existence in heaven is a static existence from where there is no growth. If you wish to go ahead then just as you take a step back before you jump you have to step back into the human condition and then take a jump….. The realm of the devas is very peaceful, there is no disturbance of any sort. So ultimately the return from the realm of the devas can only be out of boredom….. This is why it is said in the Puranas, the ancient texts, that the gods yearn to be born as human beings…. Human existence is at the crossroads; all journeys are possible from it.



From the viewpoint of Yoga, when inner intercourse becomes possible the instinct for outer intercourse immediately disappears. The reason is that this inner union is completely satisfying and fulfilling. The images of coitus depicted on temple walls are indications in this direction.



…..many surprising methods have been developed in Tantra…… For instance, when there is intercourse between a complete man and a complete woman there will be no loss of energy; there cannot be, because each forms a complete circuit within his or her own self….

The pleasure experienced in the physical intercourse at the time of orgasm is invariably followed by the experience of pain. The gloom, the anguish, the fatigue, the remorse that follows the loss of energy is inevitable. The pleasure passes in a moment but the loss of energy takes twenty-four to forty-eight hours or more to be regained……

If intercourse without ejaculation is possible….Tantra has worked very courageously in this direction, with amazing results….It becomes difficult to talk about tantric practices openly and directly, because our moral beliefs have made this very difficult.



….there are methods and systems for prolonging intercourse. If intercourse exceeds half an hour the electrical circuit can be seen encircling the couple. ….. The more tension-ridden the mind, the more momentary the intercourse

……As soon as the circuit is formed the couple engaged in intercourse is no longer two separate entities. They become a flow of one energy, one power…… Depending on the intensity of this circuit, the desire for intercourse will lessen and its interval will increase. It can happen that once the circuit is formed, for one full year there may not be any desire for repetition, because such fulfillment has happened.



Sex is not such a problem for a female seeker as for a male seeker ….The reason is that a woman’s sex is passive. Once it is awakened it becomes a problem; if it is not awakened she can go through a lifetime and never feel that there is any problem.



When the kundalini awakens within, the body will have to assume all kinds of unusual positions to make way for the energy. The spine will bend itself in various ways to allow the energy to ascend… The body assumes such postures as have never been adopted before.



………..entering the gurudwara or mosque with the head covered. …. It has its uses. When the energy awakens there is a possibility of the head becoming very heavy. If you have covered your head with a cloth, this energy is not likely to flow out……If you meditate with your head covered you will feel the difference at once. Then what can be accomplished in fifteen days can be accomplished in five.

From ‘The Spiral Staircase. A Memoir’ by Karen Armstrong

I made some startling discoveries. A disturbing number of eminent scholars agreed that Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion. He had preached only to his fellow-Jews and there was nothing strikingly original aboiut his teaching, which was in line with other strands of first-century Judaism …..the early Christians still regarded themselves as forming an exclusively Jewish sect. It was St Paul, who had never known the historical Jesus, who had first marketed the faith for the non-Jewish world of the Roman empire. ….It was St Paul, not Jesus, who was the founder of Christianity…..I….discovered that Paul’s epistles are the earliest extant Christian documents and that the gospels, all written years after Paul’s own death, were penned by men who had adopted Paul’s version of Christianity. … The only Jesus we knew was the Jesus bequeathed to us by Paul. …. Some of the most misogynist passages…..were almost certainly written by Christians some sixty years after Paul’s death.



Hyam Mccoby …told me that in most traditions, faith was not about belief but about practice. Religion …..is about doing things that change you. …..purpose is to compel us to act in such a way that we reveal our own heroic potential.



As a very early Buddhist poem puts it: ‘May our loving thoughts fill the whole world; above, below, across – without limit; a boundless goodwill towards the whole world, unrestricted, free of hatred and enimity’…. We are liberated from personal likes and dislikes that limit our vision, and we are able to go beyond ourselves.



In most traditions – certainly in Judaism and Islam – religion is not about accepting a complicated belief system, but about doing things that change you. ….The Koran is very skeptical …about theology, which it calls zanna: self-indulgent guesswork

From ‘Synchro Destiny. Harnessing the infinite power of coincidence to create miracles’ by Deepak Chopra

So the physical world, the world of objects and matter, is made up of nothing but information contained in energy vibrating at different frequencies. The reason we don’t see the world as a huge web of energy is that it is vibrating far too fast. Our senses, because they function so slowly are able to register only chunks of this energy and activity, and these clusters of information become “the chair,” “my body,” “water” and every other physical object in the visible universe……..

At the quantum level, the various chunks of energy fields vibrating at different frequencies that we perceive as solid objects are all part of a collective energy field. If we were capable of perceiving everything that was happening at the quantum level, we would see that we are all part of a great “energy soup,” and everything – each one of us and all the objects in the physical domain – is just a cluster of energy floating in this energy soup. At any given moment your energy field will come into contact with and affect everyone else’s energy field, and each of us responds in some way to that experience



At a deeper level, there is really no boundary between our selves and everything else in the world. When you touch an object, it feels solid, as though there was a distinct boundary between it and you. Physicists would say that we experience that boundary as solid because everything is made up of atoms, and the solidity is the sense of atoms bumping against atoms. .... An atom has a little nucleus with a large cloud of electrons around it. There is no rigid outer shell, just an electron cloud…… When we touch an object, we perceive solidity when the cloulds of electrons meet. This is our interpretation of solidity, given the sensitivity (or relative insensitivity) of our senses. Our eyes are programmed to see objects as three-dimensional and solid. Our nerve endings are programmed to feel objects as three-dimensional and solid. In the reality of the quantum domain, however, there is no solidity….. when you touch another object. Your energy fields (and electron clouds) meet, small portions meld. Although you perceive yourself to be whole, you have lost a bit of your energy field to the object, and have gained a bit of its energy field in return….. we can see how connected we are to everything else in the physical world….. all of us, at this quantum level ….are all connected. We are all correlated with one another.



All living cells have a cellular consciousness and are able to communicate with other cells of the same or another species even when they are a distance apart. Moreover, this communication is instantaneous.



….Upanishads declare, “You are what your deepest desire is. As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.” Our destiny ultimately comes from the deepest level of desire and also from the deepest level of intention.



Don’t stand by my grave and weep,
For I am not there.
I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamonds glint on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn’s rain.
In the soft hush of the morning light
I am the swift bird in flight
Don’t stand by my grave and cry,
I am not there,
I did not die

- Unknown Native American author