What I Bring Back

Published on 2021-1-5 by Michael Stanton


Happy New Year folks! I'm just pasting in a journal entry from a few days before Christmas. I want to remember it because it captures an inflection point in my thinking about this meditation stuff. If you are curious about these things, I highly recommend the book "Advanced Yoga Practices" by Yogani. It starts small. Sit two times a day for 20 minutes.

Don't settle for experiencing the Cosmos intellectually. It permeates us, and we deserve to know it in our bones.

I felt that I am inviting pure, undifferentiated consciousness into me with I AM. Then, in Samyama, with a seed word ("Love"), I request that undifferentiated consciousness to become the word I say. To live as that.

This is consistent with the truth that matter is only repeated, hardened, stereotyped thought. There is an "upstream" from matter, a place where pure consciousness is invited to coelesce what It Is into the idea from which form evolves.

I am sitting by the still pond of it, in a high crag in the clouds. I speak a word, and the waters become the form of it. The undifferentiated consciousness is:

And so, by this practice, one may fully understand an idea by allowing that consciousness you've invited in to form itself into the right "shape."

This is true understanding. It includes intellectual understanding, but also the highest, most loving expression of the idea at hand, because this consciousness lives without the burden of personality and ego. Therefore, it loves all that it perceives, and all that It Is. It is now "idea X," and in its love, it will express the idea in its purest form.

Pieces of my words here come from my reading, but I am beginning to inhabit these ideas experientially. That is, my words beome more true each day because there is a little less of me in the way. I will continue my practice!

The wise man works as far upstream as he can. When he goes to the Source, to God, then he cannot work in error, for the Source is high in mountains where there is no oxygen to fuel his thoughts. Without thoughts, the ego cannot live. It lies dormant at the lower reaches of the mountain.

When he returns, he should not speak of his work. For to speak requires thought, and his ego hangs on thought. It will clamor and scheme, it will take credit, it will seek to influence the evolving creation to suit its own ends.

The wise man therefore does not speak, for the first enemy of the Lords work is as close as skin.

To do work at the Source is already enough to know the work is good and necessary. For without the ego this man is no different from his Creator. He moves as his Creator moves, and does not move when there is no need of movement. Truly, there is no "him" left, he is purely instrument.

One found sitting by the high pool is one to be trusted with the Work, because only God can live there. In order for you to visit, you will drop all that you thought of as you along the way.

And yet only what was real in you remains secure. You have lost nothing. You have only gained your birthright.

We humans must walk the same road many times. Our errors are only perceived in increments. Yes, they may become visible "in a flash," but only because of the steady accumulation of events filed away uncertainly.

Our successes are attained similarly. First the dim idea, hovering over and behind the foreground of your habitual rythym. Then, small changes in routine, which in turn reveal more avenues for action. Meanwhile, if the idea is strong enough, your own consciousness submits to its imperative, and forms itself accomodatingly. This then, by the principle of upstream and downstream, makes new avenues, modes, contacts, capabilities and conditions conducive for the physical manifestation of the idea in the lives of a group of humans -- radiating from you into the World.

It will travel through this network long after you've moved on...after you've formed your consciousness differently...come to believe the opposite, or died.