meditation 101
That is beyond knowledge.
That is ungraspable.
That is void.
That is beyond conception.
Realize all these
as mere commentary on
That.
Thus [with the mind]
coming to a standstill
there dawns the possibility
of pure perception.
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Notes:
Swamiji and Panditji's original reads as follows:
"That is beyond knowledge. That is beyond grasp. That is Void. That is beyond conception." Realise all this as a mere commentary on That. Thus coming to a standstill, there is the possibility of pure perception.
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Aeons ago, in the mountain vale of Kashmir, in the effortless way lakes reflect night's flow of galaxies, a procession of yogic subtleties appeared.
This yoga of subtleties is not a staid, stolid, mapped-out mental exposition. She is not an unyielding, orthodox, dogmatic, eyes-clapped-shut mental exposition.
She is not a building up, like the erection of a theological system.
She is a licking away, a melting, a lingo of erosion.
She might be snow-blindness, bleaching away our vision of this world.
She might be monsoon darkness, eroding away all forms into a sable sense of shoreless union.
Her roots do not fail, for she is a fast-rooted, dancing tree, a yoga anchored neither in Sky nor Earth but in precisely no place in particular.
She dances into each truly living moment of one's life: a djinn or genie flailing rhapsodically her thousand-thousand arms, pounding out silent rhythms at full-universe scale.
Like a magician, she offers high-wattage, fun, unfussy, vertiginously alluring gardens of awe.
She perceives the world not as solid, but as a web woven of wonderments: of breathtaking astonishment: delight swooning, flickering, fading, dissolving, evanescing, into awakening.
She teases forth our sensitivities to spirit-like impalpabilities . . .
These beckon from within the dark emptiness within water pots and village wells, from within the silence-haunted sounds of the alphabet, from the nothingness indwelling the unending spaciousness of blue sky and all-absorbing darkness, from the silences before and after lightning, from the voids within the circles of peacock feathers, from the boundless space within the heart, from between inhalation and exhalation, waves of mind and their troughs, before and after notes of melody fading away on stringed instruments, before and after the intense delight and astonishment or being tickled and loved, and sweet remembrances of such joys, or the the warmth of reunions, or when immersed within the sounds of misty waterfalls or rapid, thundering rivers, waking fading into sleeping, or when swaying side to side, bouncing up and down — skipping — the vast void of space, before and after a bee’s prick, before and after desire, when awed by a magician’s trick, when lost within puzzles or aporiae, at the beginning and end of sneezing, sorrow or sighing, keen curiosity or hunger, or when intense devotion melts into union . . .
Within each fading, indwelling each unknowing, dwells something, something not struggling to refill the veiled moon with light but, like darkly turbulent convolutions of monsoon clouds, bleeding into midnight'slayered veils of blackness: blackness fractured and interlaced with deep, golden veins of electrified now-ness.
Unknowing is a kind of monsoon yoga, opening to eternities within the subjective convolutions of time, to liftings, like magicians' pauses — wand poised above ephemeral peanut shell — disclosing neither common legume nor coin, but a nothingness poised within all points of all of eternity’s wondrous hatchings.
For at her best, awareness is not stolid and stonelike, but impish, nymph-ish: creation in mid-chaos and chaste stillness: one more impasse, one more node of lotus blooming of inaudible thunder, seeking ever new points of suspension.
A yoga of unknowing requires a certain negative capability, a capacity for drifting within the thin aether of obscurities, uncertainties, riddles, aporiae, mysteries, doubts — without any anxious grasping after facts and reasons.
She is a yoga of voids, of absences blooming up between the cracks between tones, breaths, moods, moments, sips, dreams, kisses, modes of being, ripples of light spreading across the space of the heart, the patterns of lisping patters of rain, peacocks piping pea-pea pew-pew-pew amid the amorous effluvia of monsoon downpours.
For the solid mass of monsoon blackness is forever moving and folding over within her own utter penetralia — with pauses in her misty figurations—dramatic, fractured with fissures, lightning gasps, inter-undulatory naughts, abysses ever-roiling within convolutions of awareness.
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Gazing a few minutes into the above thundercloud’s convolutions, do you notice how haunting, how ghost-like figurations of presence, evershifting — arise? How they "present" themselves by erasing all former "presences," while dissolving, as fresh forms float into vision? How each so-called cloud depends upon and bears within her form the traces of past and future clouds? How — as soon as there “is” some “thing” to see "there," "it" will have always already been swallowed? How there will never have been any central configuration of misty cloud that could be inked in with a capital C ?
How the only real presence — fleeting — among all these enfoldings, fading convolutions, pauses between waves — is pure, vibratory awareness — flashing?
How — like listening to rain — your own awareness assumes a body of steam, your face of mist, your hair, of unhurried lightning, crossing this cloudbank and entering this pause . . .
How — floating, frolicking, leaping between undulations — awareness swallows herself, like an ephemeral fish?
Gazing again, do you notice how, the less you grasp at these risings and fadings, surrendering to their flow, how mist rises, walks away, how fissures flash forth in larger swallowings — formless, luminous, weightless?
Awareness a fish leaping among the green body of river reeds, a poetics of mute thunder melting into the penumbra of a voiceless, formless silence, a Goddess of silence-haunted syllables, her toes curling into rain, her fingers entwined within your own.
She is lightning, appearing from clouds, born from rain, clothed in rain — leaping from chakra to chakra.
A gardenia hidden within cascading ebony tresses, her eyes of rain, her waist of water, her embrace a current. She rushes into river, floating away, one night, O human child, with your heart.
To find her — a thousand years ago — in May, hugging the Malabar Coast: lustrous, fresh blossoming — sandbanks white with masses of pearls scattered “there” by incessant waves . . .
As you sail up the coast, lustrous naïve young women lifting up their questioning faces, will — with rapt eyes — drain deep draughts from your heart.
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When cool, moisture-laden winds gush through your tresses, when the sky darkens to peacock feather pitch, when solid sheets of water fall from sable, seething clouds, when the universe of vegetation sways and writhes in plundering embraces of monsoon winds — young lovers dip their brushes, their hearts bleeding inky love notes, as amorous cumuli melt into one another in posesies of yearning.
As sunless daylight sinks into moonless night, maidens burn jasmine incense sticks which — dying — keep raising their ash-soft necks to humid kisses of night air.
Abandoned to monsoon darkness, to world-swallowing night, to darkness thick enough to touch — young maidens wonder . . . Has the broad shadow of the body of some divinity erased the world?
Has the sky, its soft, thundering folds swallowed Earth with all her seas and mountains?
Fawn eyed, beholding only blackness, draped in sable silk, body scented with sandal and musk, neck encircled with black sapphire necklaces, ears dangling ebony peacock feathers, they steal away to their secret rendezvous.
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