The Torn Page

Excerpt:  "Most religions are the worship of a yogi - they are constituted by that….  Christ was a yogi – Buddha was a great yogi – Mohammed was a yogi – Moses was a yogi… and so most of the religions today are either worshiping the yogi or worshiping the book that the yogi wrote, or was channeled through him… but religion was originally simply the act of becoming a yogi… so the religions that we have today are indirect and there is certainly benefit in worshiping a great yogi, but that is very different from attaining the state of consciousness that Christ attained or that Buddha attained….  And so merely worshiping and trying to imitate the life of a great yogi, while an important step, keeps one within the ego… it doesn't transcend the ego into direct God realization, and that is what we are here to do… to become the goal that those great yogis pointed at for us….  Christ would have considered Christianity to be heretical – he never said worship me – be one with the Father – I and the Father are one - you and the Father are one – we are all one - but then that gets misinterpreted….  Or in the Islamic religion, there is one prophet only and one holy book and then it stops, as if God got some inability to write after that – writer's block or something – couldn't produce any more testaments – not true….  But humans have gotten yoga block… humans have blocked their own access to the transcendent dimension of our own self, and that is what we are here to unblock… and we do that simply by silencing the egoic chatter that acts as a buffer and an obstruction between our consciousness and that of God's…..  And that is the original and authentic purpose of prayer… to create a mental pathway and a link between the individual consciousness and the universal consciousness…"  Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 12, 2012.

Student Question:  If Jesus and Buddha were both great yogis then why did they both reach different conclusions about God?  Jesus spoke about his Father yet Buddhism denies God.

Student Question:  Do Vāsanās and Sanskaras have the same meaning?

Student Question:  Do we just have to sit in silence long enough to dissolve the discomfort that arises, or do we need to analyze it?

Student Question:  Why is it that when I have a deep or a good meditation I sometimes want to cry?   Aren’t I supposed to be experiencing bliss?

Student Question:  In meditation when I finally reach some silence it is common that I will then be immediately disrupted or thrown out of it and I don’t really understand why that happens?  I even experience the sensation of losing balance.  Do you know why that is?

Student Question:  In your talk tonight you spoke about going through this mirror of unbearable knowledge, but do you go through it or do you witness it?

Student Question:  How do we learn when on an everyday basis we are in this whirlpool of being aware and wanting to transcend the ego but then at other times being really chaotic. Sometimes that chaos manifests itself physically and then the next day you can be peaceful again so how do we learn to stay in the silence?

Student Question:  Is it possible that Gods Lila is really creating all the suffering in the world?

When you talk about missing your window of opportunity and synchronicity I don’t really understand how that fits in with gods perfect plan.  How is it that you are able to miss a window of opportunity if at the end it is only one step in the path of the perfect plan?