Here in the west, it seems as if Christianity has some kind of monopoly on religion. As years go by, however, the concept of the holy trinity and Jesus being the son of God isn’t sitting well in the minds of the youth. Catholicism and Judaism do not prove to be a satisfactory alternative, either. Instead of looking inwards for the answers, kids would rather claim there is NO God and don the robes of an Atheist.
For most of my childhood and going into my young adult life, I found myself disgusted with religion and everything involved with it. Too many atrocities happened to me as a kid growing up, so in my mind the possibility of this loving god was futile. For me, the writing was on the wall. Santa Claus seemed like an alright dude, minus the fact that he was taking notes of all the nice and not so nice things I’ve done throughout the year. The tooth fairy and the Easter bunny seemed alright with me too, although we never really got to establish any kind of relationship over the years.
When you were young, growing up under the care of your parents, you were more or less forced into trusting them. They were the sole purveyors of your survival, so NOT trusting them wasn’t even an option. I don’t know how well most kids deal with their parents lying to them their entire lives about this trivial matter. I understand that it’s all just supposed to be harmless fun…but in this case of Santa always watching over you.. well, that can cause some serious neurotic behavior.
Try to put yourself in a child’s shoes right now. To the best of their knowledge, there is a man with a white beard looking jolly as hell, always, that is watching their every move. He flies through the sky with magical reindeers and comes down through the chimney to deliver presents to all of the kids that were nice for a whole year. Sounds magical, doesn’t it? If all of this is possible, then imagine the possibilities!
Eventually comes the age of accountability, and your parents have to break the bad news to you so you don’t get beat up in school, talking about what presents Santa Claus brought you this year. Hopefully, the kid was not raised in a Christian family, for many different reasons. All of the miraculous acts of Santa Claus and the tooth fairy could be compared to the miraculous acts of the Old and New Testament. Consider the similarities: Your parents were the ones to tell you of the existence of both Jesus and the Easter bunny. Your parents were the ones to tell you about Jesus walking on water or raising from the dead or feeding 9,000 men from scraps of food. Your parents were the ones that told you that Santa flies through the air on a magic sleigh.
In mostly all western adopted theologies, there is a big guy in the sky that is judging all of your actions, condemning them either as good or as bad. We are taught that Santa also is always watching us, somehow, judging our actions and labeling them “good” or “bad.” You can see where it would be very easy for a child to mistake God and Santa for one in the same… at least that’s how it was for me growing up. It wasn’t until I realized that Santa was bullshit that I ever questioned the existence of the Creator. Since Santa had Godly qualities, it really threw me off when I figured it all out. Now I have the same people that told me they lied to me, telling me that there IS a God. At an extremely young age, I could see the 10,000 year old lie right in front of my face. The mythic Santa Claus that possessed the same qualities as the elusive God himself was just another lie that was passed down from generation to generation. As a child, I drew the very same conclusions I draw today. Most people use God as an insurance policy. They will sometimes go to church, so that if shit hits the fan they will be okay because they have paid their premium. I made a decision around the age of 12 that there probably isn’t a God, and if there was one, that he didn’t give a shit about me. From that age forth, I was genuinely disgusted with religious people that spoke of God and lived their life for Jesus. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that these people KNOW that Santa Claus is bogus, and yet still consider themselves religious. I was incapable of understanding that level of ignorance.
From that day forward, I had a bitter disgust towards religion and any person that claimed to be religious. I was young when I made that choice. You see, not once in all of these years did I ever think of the possibility of a God that existed that was not lie the God of the Bible. I was just as bad as the people that were believers. I never actually believed the existence of a creator, and when I did talk of a creator I was limited to my understanding of the Bible. It wasn’t until I was 23 years old that I considered the possibility of a creator that wasn’t described in the Bible.
In order to consider yourself a Christian, there are a few things you must do first. First things first: you must be baptized. The importance of baptism is emphasized in the New Testament. It is symbolic and is used as a form of initiation into Christianity. The water can be seen as the holy spirit, so as you are being baptized you are allowing the “holy spirit” to wash over your soul. Baptism sets the stage for repentance. The root word of repent can literally be translated into “change your thinking,” so you must repent before you can seek forgiveness of your wrongdoings. In order to be a Christian, you must admit that Jesus was the son of God and that he died on the cross for the sins of man and the salvation of mankind. Christians claim that Jesus was an incarnation of the creator himself. Once you make the outward claim that Jesus was the son of God and that he died on the cross for your sins, you are saved. Saved from what? Christian theology claims that unless you accept Jesus as your Lord and savior, you will burn in the fiery furnace of hell for eternity. Common sense tells us that fire is bad, and to be burned totally sucks… so the choice is simple, really. Most liberal Christians will tell you that they have a hard time digesting the stories in the Bible. They are too stubborn to admit they have no idea what nay of this even means, but they’d much rather say that they believe and not burn in hell opposed to the alternative.
After spending the last half of my life disgusted with religion, I now find myself fascinated by it. After my first AA meeting almost 10 years ago, I’ve been looking for “God, as I understood him.” My first experience of AA left a terrible taste in my mouth. When the meeting concluded, I was convinced that it was just a secretive Christian cult dedicated to brainwashing former alcoholics into thinking that they cannot stay sober without the help of God. I’ve seen over a handful of people quit smoking or drinking on their own without the help of any groups or God.
It wasn’t until I had relapsed four times that I even considered the possibility that my addiction was a monster that was much bigger than me. It came as no surprise to me when I had realized I was utterly powerless over getting fucked up. I could not stop by my own volition. In the program they say that you cannot stay sober by yourself. You need the help of the people in the program that have maintained long term abstinence from mood alter chemicals. That, and the help of a power greater than yourself. This power is “God as you understood him.” There are no rules in the program to choosing a God that works for you. The guidelines for this so-called “God” is that it is loving, caring and greater than yourself. There is much wisdom in those guidelines, and it took me many years of struggling to see that. My first choice was to use music as my HP. Unfortunately, there is not much that is loving OR caring about the music I love. It didn’t take me long to realize that was not going to work. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve held the hands of those around me and accepted Jesus into my life as my lord and savior. Damn near every time I went to jail or rehab I did this.. as I felt that I wasn’t sincere enough the last time I did it. Surely, I REALLY mean it this time more than the last time. Alas, less than 30 days out I am back to sticking a needle in my arm. I felt as if I wasn’t sincere enough, every single time that I had tried. Finally, I decided to check out the other major religions of the world to see if there was anything in their scriptures that moved me. Be it too much common sense, or the inability to see past the endless contradictions I found in the Bible…whatever the case was, I could not sincerely accept the fact that Jesus sacrificed himself on the cross for the sins of mankind. Jesus was murdered.
I researched the major religions of the world exhaustively. To a theologist, it probably would not come as surprising to know that I was moved deeply by Buddhism. I say that, because anyone that knows anything about Buddhism will tell you that the ideals that Buddhism was built on have absolutely nothing to do with God or any kind of faith in the unseen. For quite some time, I was disturbed that anybody could consider Buddhism a religion. I never saw the three letter G word in any of the Buddhist scriptures, so how could it possibly be a religion? Finally, I received my answer in a book by a Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh He said that a set of rules/moral guidelines a person can live their life by is what meets the criteria to be considered a religion. “God” does not determine a religion. The Buddhists have something similar to the 10 commandments. They are the four noble truths and the eightfold path. Ironically enough, if you choose to dismiss the four noble truths and the eightfold path, you are not threatened by eternal damnation in the lake of fire. The four noble truths state quite simply that to breathe is suffering. There is a cause for suffering and there is a way out of suffering. Ignorance is the chief contributor to suffering, so remove the ignorance from your life and life in reality. That is the only way out.
I had learned some breathing exercises and tried to learn meditation. Meditation is practiced by Buddhists all over the world. It was actually through meditation that the Buddha became the Buddha. The word “Buddha” literally translates to “The Awakened One.” To acknowledge the existence of the Buddha is to also admit that we are all more or less in a state of sleep. As the story goes about 2,500 years ago a man by the name of Siddharta Gautama was born a prince into a royal family. As he got older, he couldn’t help but have a seemingly pessimistic outlook on life. He noticed a few facts about life that are inescapable…like getting sick or becoming old. We cannot prevent eventually becoming fatigued. He saw these people that were suffering due to their old age, and he saw that someday no matter what, that was his future. Like any normal person, he was married at the age of 29. Around the time of the birth of his son, he left his wife and son behind to live the life of austerity. Here we have a man that had all of the material wealth and gain he could ever need, and yet he saw the emptiness that is material gain. He left the palace with hopes of having his questions answered. He was a seeker of the ever elusive enlightenment. He had come across a group of radical ascetics, people that would deprive their flesh of food and shelter. They felt that the body was their main barrier to the Divine. They would cut and brutalize their own bodies. It is said that he would eat only a single nut or one leaf a day. This bodily neglect caused him to collapse someday near a river. In agony, he recalled a childhood memory that put him in a mild meditative state. Having felt the bliss and sheer brilliance of the moment, he then realized that he was doing it all wrong. It is said that he then went and sat under the great Bodhi tree and promised himself that he would not get up until he attained Enlightenment. After a reputed 49 days of meditation, at the age of 35 Gautama achieved enlightenment. For the next 45 years, he traveled and taught the four noble truths and the eightfold path.
In the Buddhist texts, the Buddha never claimed to be God or anything that can be seen as different as you or I. He explained this again and again to his devotees, and yet still to this day, there are people that claim the Buddha was God and that enlightenment was for him ad him alone. I was enticed by the story of the Buddha. More days than not, I feel like him.. depressed by the current condition of the world and the inevitable suffering that comes as a byproduct of breathing.
I remember my first time I ever had to detox in jail. One of the guards felt pretty bad about my condition, so much so that he actually told me a few breathing techniques to help me make it through my panic attacks. At first, I just wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. That night as I was lying down, I gave it a shot. I noticed that it had helped tremendously. I made a habit of being sure I did it at the same exact times, every day. I continued to do it even when I had gotten out of jail. Later, I had found out that I was doing nothing more than practicing meditation.
Having spent a huge majority of the last few years researching spirituality and different religions of the world, I have made a few conclusions. Since I started meditating three years ago, I’ve had some wonderful experiences that are extremely difficult to put into words. I’ll try to explain the process of meditation: I sit down. The smell of incense is heavy, and the pain in my legs is very real. I’ve got my palms facing upwards, rested on top of my legs pointing towards the sky. Generally, it helps to have some kind of devotional music playing, or a candle lit in front of me. Insert here the onslaught of thoughts that come as a result of me making an active effort to quiet my mind down. I’ve got my eyes closed, and my head is angled upwards a little bit towards the sky. On the inhale, I say to myself with eyes closed: “I am not the body” which is followed by an exhale and the soft words in my mind: “I am not even the mind.” This goes on for about 12 minutes. I try to put all of my focus into the cool sensation of the tip of my nose as I inhale and exhale the air. The first 15 minutes are the hardest to get through without giving up. The strength of our mind can be overwhelming at this point. In my experience, my mind knows all too well what is about to happen. During meditation, the mind appears to be a separate entity all by itself. I believe it’s not until we sit and try to quiet our mind do we realize the strength of the hold our mind has on us. When I sit, my mind goes into survival mode. It is as if it knows that I am trying to do without it, and it doesn’t like it so it fights to stay alive. Perhaps on day you’ve been laying in your bed and sleep felt impossible because your mind just wouldn’t’ stop. It’s like that except intensified to the max. I advise everyone attempts meditation at least once in their life, if only to see how our mind is a totally separate entity by itself and how little control we have over It when we don’t exercise our authority over it.
After the first 12 minutes, I then take a deep breath in, and during my exhale I left out a long, drawn out “ahhhhhhhhhhhhh” until I have totally expelled all of the air in my lungs. While I am making the vowel sound, I focus my attention around my navel, concentrating on the vibratory sensation that lies just behind my belly button. Typically, I wait until the 12 minute mark to do this, but if I feel like I’ve made no progress in this fight against my mind, I’ll postpone. When the time comes and I feel like I am making progress, I’ll let out the vowel sound seven times in succession. One of the things I’ve implemented over the years is pretending like my thoughts are happening in my head on a TV screen. Sometimes, I’ll actually visualize a TV screen in my head that has been turned off. When a thought comes in, I consciously turn the TV screen off. After the seven “ahhhhhs,” I just sit and concentrate on my breath. The whole process is 3 sections that are about 10 minutes each. Eventually, I get to the point that I have established control over my mind. It’s at this point in time that I lose all concept of time. Once mind stops, time stops. It’s also at this point that I no longer feel the overwhelming pain in my legs. Once mind stops, I start to fell a very subtle buzzing like humming vibration that goes all throughout my body. The very moment a thought comes in is the moment I lose the touch of this subtle sensation. I’ve gathered that this sensation is always happening inside of each and every one of us, we just never feel it because we are too lost in our thoughts. I’ve also established that this subtle buzzing/humming sensation is the very thing that keeps our hearts beating. It is the electricity that runs the engine of our body. I try to keep focus on this sensation and on my breath simultaneously as it is that both of these sensations complement each other. When I start to analyze these feelings and question what it is that I am experiencing, the feeling starts to go back to being so subtle that I could no longer recognize it. The trick is not to analyze what I am experiencing and just go with it. The hard part is actually getting to this point successfully. Practice does make perfect, but it is extremely deflating when you do not feel like you are making any progress. Your very own self can be your best friend or your greatest enemy. I have compared sitting in meditation to going to the gym and lifting weights many of times. Our mind tends to listen more when we’ve made a habit of telling it what to do.
When I get to the point of experiencing the subtle vibration, I am just a moment away from the most intense blissful experience could ever imagine. Even your imagination could not paint a reliable understanding of the extent of peaceful blissfulness that can enrapture your entire body at the point in a moment’s notice. My first encounter with this feeling came by surprise and totally on accident. This first happened to me five months ago during an AA meeting, and it totally changed my life. Since my first experience, I have felt it maybe 10 times, and each time it has caught me by surprise. It has been many months since my last experience, and since then I have been in a state of blinding depression. After my first taste, I had made some very bold statements that, as of now I find myself unsure of. I had told others that I had tasted the divine, that I had experienced God and God’s limitless grace. For a man that has angry tattoos from head to toe, well something extraordinary must have taken place. This is how it comes about for me:
The subtle vibration that I’ve been talking about, when I first feel it, it more or less feels mildly chaotic. It’s moving about my body all sorts of willy-nilly, uncontained with no rhyme or reason. It’s a pulsing/throbbing sensation that is inconsistent. The sensation is similar to if someone was to lightly touch you with a feather, varying in pressure, all throughout your body from the inside out. The feeling is so subtle, that you actually wonder if you are feeling something, or if your mind is just playing a trick on you. Its intensity seems to come in waves.. a dull throbbing almost. It’s as if your body wants to fix the inconsistency, and over time it becomes less and less subtle. The energy is getting more intense, the waves get heavier. Now the question of the validity disappears and you’re becoming overwhelmed by the situation. Thoughts are now a thing of the past, as well as time. The intensity of the situation grows by the second, and I become frightened. It’s at this moment that I have a choice to make: Either I try to analyze what is happening to me and lose the entire experience, or I completely surrender and let go of the inherent idea of right and wrong. If I manage to let myself go further down the rabbit hole, the vibrational humming is now undeniable. The chaos now has meaning. It’s as if I can feel the change, out of focus and blurry to absolute clarity. If my head wasn’t pointed up towards the sky, it starts moving backwards as if to lock into position to blast off. The intensity of the vibrations is felt strongly in my genitals, and I become erect as if sexually stimulated. The build up to this moment is NOT of this world and unlike any drug experience I have ever encountered. Then it happens: an explosion of energy similar to that of an orgasm, in-between my eyebrows. The energy shoots up from the base of my spine up to the mid-forehead area of my head and explodes like a firework. If my eyes were open, I would look cross eyed. For a short moment in time, everything makes sense. I feel as if someone were to touch me, they would be electrocuted or shocked into bliss. I have become totally present. The earth feels like it has stopped spinning. I am in absolute grace. If my head wasn’t already pointing towards the heavens, it is now. In fact, it’s the locking of my head tilting back that allows this experience to happen in its entirety.
This is what I know with absolute certainty: you do not need to confess your sins and accept Jesus as your lord and savior in order to be saved or have a spiritual experience. It may sound good and all, it may even bring about some kind of everlasting experience. The truth is, whatever your experience has nothing to do with what you choose to believe in. A “spiritual experience” is quite simple to achieve, really, so long as you can surrender. This is why confessing your sins and accepting Jesus as lord yields any kind of results. It’s just that, in order to honestly accept Jesus into your life you must surrender. Surrender is a term that is alien to most of us. In fact, men are taught to do quite the opposite growing up. To surrender is to be weak. To experience any emotions outside of anger or happiness is to be weak. It’s no surprise that the process of surrender does not come easy for a man.
Surrender is not so much an action as it is a state of mind. Anybody can say “okay, I give up. I surrender.” Just vocalizing it will never been enough. Imagine the process of surrendering in terms of warfare to the enemy. You throw-down your weapon and put up the white flag. You were certain that if you kept fighting you would definitely die, so you gave up. There is a good chance that the enemy can still kill you, and the thought of that terrifies you. Despite your best efforts, you still had to give up. In order to surrender, you had to feel defeat all the way down to your core, in every fiber of your being. Some half-hearted attempt of surrendering would definitely see that you are killed, and so it is.
This is why it is so easy for people that are serving an extended term in prison to find religion. They have forced themselves into recognizing that their way does not work. It’s much easier to feel like you’ve got nothing left to lose when you, in fact, do not have anything. To surrender is to admit “I don’t know!” with great conviction. Sadly, most of us will never reach this point without losing something that is dear to us. If we can manage to put some space in-between ourselves and our thoughts and surrender HONESTLY, the results are astonishing. I’ve seen people do this and have watched the tears just stream down their face. These are not sad tears, they are tears that come with a very deep feeling of peace and understanding. I’ve seen other people laugh as if they were mad.
Many people will say that you have to cry out to God and ask for his help and forgiveness for your wrongdoings. This is not true either. If crying out for help makes you feel more powerless and helpless, then by all means do what works for you. The secret catalyst for the surrender process is to start putting some gaps of silence into your thoughts. Our minds just go and go nonstop, from the moment we open our eyes in the morning until the moment we close our eyes for the night. It’s almost as if our thoughts have a mind of their own. Have you ever tried to stop thinking before? It feels hopeless and is extremely difficult. Most of us feel like we’ve lost the upper hand and are slaves to the workings of our minds. Some of us have never put any thought into how little control we have over our minds. The truth is, we waste most of our energy throughout the day to our endless internal dialogue. If you speak with a recovering drug addict that is fairly new in their recovery, they’ll tell you that sometimes their thoughts feel like a separate entity, entirely by themselves.
In Paramahansa Yogananda’s book “Autobiography of a Yogi” Yogananda explains that our thoughts are very much the same as a radio frequency. Our bodies can be seen as identical to an antenna that can broadcast or receive certain frequencies. If this is true, that means we can affect those around us by our thoughts alone. Have you ever walked into a room right after two people got done arguing, without knowing they were arguing? You can feel it in the air, it’s almost like an awkward suffocating kind of feeling. If what Yogananda is saying is true, we can broadcast our thoughts to others without having to say a word. Distance is also not a factor. Could you imagine what it would be like to tune into peoples thoughts?
The mystics and philosophies of the east have been telling us from time unmemorable that every being on Earth has their own aura. Trained eyes and clairvoyants alike can tell us what is going on with us just by looking at us and our aura. Our “aura” is composed of our habitual thought patterns and our habits, along with our emotions. Our aura surrounds us at all times. Do you remember a time you felt stuck in a funk that lasted several days, or even months? This has mostly everything to do with the quality of our thoughts. The “secret” of the power of attraction is becoming less of a secret as days go by. We attract what we put out into the universe. To put it simply: If you’re having suicidal tendencies, it’s because you’re thinking about suicide. If you find that you’re depressed most of the time, it’s because you’re thinking depressing thoughts. Our positive/negative emotions that we experience daily are just a byproduct of what’s going on in our heads. That’s it. It is said that spirits are attracted to similar auras. Eastern mystics have said that there are spirits in the world that died with severe addiction problems. A common problem for a spirit is that it has no means to an end. A ghost cannot spark a cigarette and get their fix, so they are naturally drawn to an aura that says “I love nicotine.” These spirits latch onto similar addictions, and the spirit feeds off of them. The person becomes their means to a temporary end. When I’ve been in active addiction and also new in sobriety, it felt almost as if I was possessed by some kind of evil spirit or something. When I was fresh in sobriety, it felt like world war three was going on in my head. Here I have a large part of me that wants to stay sober, and then another part of me that is tormenting my thoughts.. convincing me that it’s okay to get high every once in a while. More times than not, I would give into the terrible voice(s) in my head. If only to shut them up for a bit and catch a break. I’m not trying to minimize or justify my actions as a drug addict. The thought of being possessed by spirits seems like it could be a very realistic scenario, judging some of the more messed up things I’ve done for the next fix.
When we look at our thoughts and the quality of our thoughts objectively, it’s plain to see how they govern our emotions. I really believe that if we made an effort daily to put some space between ourselves and our thoughts, we would be a lot less miserable. Even if we dedicated just 10 minutes a day, the benefits are insane.
Eventually I had met an Indian man that was well versed in meditation and grew up with Hinduism as his religion. This friend of mine turned me on to the wisdom of his Guru Sadhguru. Everything that my friend shared with me about his Guru really resonated with me. His explanation of life and death was extremely similar to that which the Buddhists talk about. The reason for this is because Hinduism is the oldest religion on the planet. Buddhism originated in northern India and a great deal of Buddhism has commonalities with Hinduism. It’s safe to say that many of the Buddhists from 5th century B.C.E. were practiced Hindus.
The idea of eternal paradise or eternal hellfire never really sat well with me. I cannot say with any conviction I am certain what happens to us when we die. Scientists have been telling us for quite some time now that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. I feel obligated to subscribe to the Hindu belief of reincarnation, it’s the most practical idea I’ve heard in regards to life and death. The Hindus believe that the cycle of samsara (birth and death) exists because of our karma (action). It is our karma that determines where and when we will be born next. When most people think in terms of karma, they think there is good karma and there is bad karma. There is no such thing as good or bad karma. At the end of the day, karma will only be karma and that’s it. Karma is not sure of good or bad. Our actions create karma and it is karma that keeps us attached to our gross material bodies. The word karma can literally be translated to “action.” So long as we keep producing karma, we will keep being born again and again.
What I find particularly fascinating, is that for all of India’s 1.252 billion people, they probably have 1.252 billion Gods, and nobody cares who or what someone wants to worship. From the beginning of time, India has been known to produce saints and mystics alike. Still to this day there are mystics living in caves in the Himalayan Mountains. Sadhguru is one of the more radical mystics India has given birth to. He has said that his life’s purpose was to build the Dyanalinga temple, a task that has eluded him his three previous lifetimes. The Dyanalinga itself has more of an elliptical shape to it. It is 13”4 tall, and is made of high density black granite type rock. The rock is filled with liquid mercury. The temple was built 33” high using only bricks and cement stabilizing mud mortar. The temple gates are open to all, and are not subscribed to any particular religion. In front of the temple you will find a stone structure with all of the different symbols dedicated to all of the different religions that are welcome. The purpose of the Dyanalinga was to create a space that would instantly put anybody into a meditative state and help bridge the gap to the divine. The consecration process the linga endured lasted over 90 days and needed to be done with three people. In every human, there are 7 sacred energy vortexes. These vortexes are called chakras which can be translated into “spinning wheels.” Sadhguru manipulated energy in such a way, which allowed him to place 7 fully functional chakras into the granite linga. For the first time in history, he had created a living body of energy and trapped it into a space FOR ETERNITY. A hurricane could destroy the physical aspect of the temple, and yet the energy that is the Dyanalinga will never be destroyed. Thousands of years from now, people can go to the temple and still feel the same thing they feel today. That just blows me away. Human life on our planet could cease to exist, and a million years from now when aliens visit the earth, the Dyanalinga will still be there to put them into a meditative state.
Everything that you know right now is based on one of two things. Either you know something directly through experience of it, or somebody else educated you on the matter. That’s it. Growing up, you may have trusted your parents about the whole Santa Claus thing because you had no choice. Santa Claus would have never been a part of your life experience if they chose not to lie to you. Now, just imagine how Santa Claus has manifested himself in your life, in all different types of ways. Think about all of the shit that you see in the media that is NOT actually part of your life experience. Think about all of the stuff that is going on right now, and nobody has a clue. Eventually you get to graduate and there is no filter on what people want you to know. The internet plays a significant role in information technology. For the first time in the existence of mankind (that we know of) with a few clicks of a mouse, a large wealth of over one billion opinions is at our fingertips. There was a time in history when, if you didn’t see something with your own two eyes, you had no idea of its existence. Great white sharks and lions were considered folklore. I sympathize with the parents of our modern age, which will probably be discarded as a reliable source of information once the child knows how to conduct their first Google search.
Until now, everything that you ever wanted to know was either taught to you in school, or learned because you had a fiery passion about it. You were a seeker of knowledge and wisdom. Why is any of this information relevant? I want you to image just 100 years ago. When people found out that we were building machines that were going to let us fly through the sky like a bird, there were many nay-sayers that would claim flight was for the birds and only the birds. They couldn’t see the possibility of someday taking to the sky, it wasn’t possible to them because it was not yet in their experience. As of today, there are at least 5,000 planes sky at any given point over the US alone, and over 87,000 flights conducted a day. A tiny glimpse into the past, and we can be certain with all things considered that the only thing that will remain constant in life is change. Does it blow your mind, walking around any heavily populated city with its skyscrapers – that from the dawn of time, we already had everything we needed to make that a possibility?
I want you to imagine all of the possibilities of an impossible existence. I want you to understand that everything you know is total bullshit and were filtered by the higher ups because they only want you to know what they want you know. There is a vast wealth of untapped information that exists in the minds of the saints and yogis all around the world. Here we have people that can manipulate matter and the very same energy that keeps your heart beating. There is information out there that is available to us all, that can help us significantly increase our quality of life. Yet, we don’t know this because the only yogi we are familiar with is a bear that robs people of their picnic baskets. We don’t know because most people don’t know.
Did you know the term yoga literally means “union”? Union can be seen as “to bring together.” So what is it that you’re joining forces with? In the East, yoga and meditation go hand in hand. Meditation is also a form of yoga, so you could even go and rightfully claim that you are practicing yoga via meditation. As of right now, our life energies are flying around all willy-nilly, and believe it or not, most of our energy is spent on our nonstop compulsive thinking. Yoga is an ancient method in which you get your life energies to flow more in sync and harmoniously. Coupled with meditation, you have the recipe for some amazing side effects.
When people die of old age it is not just because they are old. Essentially they are dying because their batteries have run out. Their prana has depleted. There is a yogic system that allows you to control your life energies, but right now the feeling is too subtle for you to feel… so you may just think I am blowing smoke. It is in fact this life energy that allows for healing a damaged body. The reason, I believe, most people have never felt this energy is because we are always too lost in our thoughts. I promise you, if you made a habit of putting some distance between you and your thoughts, some amazing things would happen to you. You would then have questions that are actually worth a damn. Ignorance does have some blissful qualities, although we never experience it as bliss. Hindsight allows us to feel like life was better when we didn’t know better. In fact, it was not better, because you didn’t know any better. It just sucks now because you know you cannot live that life of delusion anymore. Sadly, most people would rather live in ignorance to the truth as opposed to seeking satisfactory answers. The problem is the seeking process and what it entails. We are creatures that love to bear the fruit of our actions. How many times have you dedicated a great deal of your time to something without a greater purpose in mind or a reason for doing it? I’m pretty sure we aren’t wired to do stuff like that.
If we control our thoughts, we can control our emotions. If we can control our emotions, we can control our destiny. We need to place more importance on our thoughts and the quality of what is happening in our heads, consciously. If we could do this on a global scale, the world would change into a much more beautiful state. Any problem we encounter in life can be rooted in our minds. What can happen to our problems if we don’t think about them? How long can we be angry at the person that just cut us off in traffic when we do not brood over it? What would happen to us if we stopped thinking for extended periods of time? Outside of physical pain, suffering cannot exist without our mind. Please see that we’ve relinquished control over our thoughts and in turn, we suffer tremendously. Having been physically and mentally dependent on substances for far too long, I got to see this truth manifest itself in many ways for too many days. If you meditate for only 10 minutes a day, you will see what I am talking about.
Frank Ardito 