I’m in print! Click here!

Visit the above link to get a free “Look Inside” preview of my new book,
Meditation Q & A.   The subtitle is, “Questions submitted to online forums,
answered by Prahas.”  Enjoy!

Beyond Information

In a world awash with data, please remember:  there is something immensely valuable beyond information.  A beautiful, divine silence exists beyond the mind-stuff.

There is a miraculous, subtle force in play which moves us gently toward this silence.  This is the story of how this force worked on me.

In my twenties, I was steeped in the intellectual world.  I was reading spiritual texts, but they did not penetrate.  When I turned twenty nine, I moved to a suburb of the city in which I was living.  This move lessoned to a large degree the noise and distraction to which I was subjected.  In astrological terms, I was in my Saturn return, so the miraculous force had the stars on its side.

One night, at a dinner party, I exchanged a few words with a new acquaintance.  She mentioned she spent six months in the U.S. and six months in India.  I didn’t think much of it.

A few weeks later, I was standing in line at a cafe, and I caught sight of a group of four people laughing and enjoying.  Upon looking more closely, I noticed the woman I had met at the dinner party.  I was wearing a tee-shirt with the logo of a theatre company with which I had worked.  My acquaintance said, “I didn’t know you worked in theatre.  This man is a world-renowned theatre artist from Germany.”  Introductions were made, and I sat down with them to have a coffee.

Two minutes later, I was crying my eyes out.

I have no recollection of what transpired between the introduction and the crying.  However, I do remember, after I finally calmed down, the German artist saying, “You are ready.”

There is an ancient saying.  The student does not find the Master; the Master finds the student.  In this case, the Master used one of his disciples to find me.

A few weeks later, I was immersed in a Zen Theatre course, which combined theatre exercises with meditation techniques.

Shortly thereafter, I became the disciple of an enlightened Master, and began to learn the methods which helped me to have a glimpse of that which lies beyond the spoken word, beyond the zippy thoughts, beyond the emotions, and beyond the sensations of the physical body.

It only took one glimpse of this peace, this silence, this blissfulness, to know that in the end, this is all I need.

Saying no.

Click here to see the latest musings…  Enjoy!

Becoming aware of awareness

Click here for my latest musings…  Love.

Consciousness and Mind

There is an interesting conversation online (recording available on YouTube) about the relationship between consciousness and mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLbSlC0Pucw

Sean Carroll, a physicist, takes a scientific materialist point of view, and Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar, takes a more “spiritual” point of view.  Wallace suggests that consciousness exists beyond mind, and is somewhat unexplainable.  Carroll objects, saying no one can explain the mechanism by which this “unexplainable” phenomena of consciousness interacts with the human mind. In my view, the two’s disagreements may be bridged as follows:

Carroll, in another lecture, presents the idea that every “everyday life” phenomena can be explained by a complex formula he calls The Core Theory.

(The other lecture online:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x26a-ztpQs8)

The Core Theory equation, which contains terms which reference quantum mechanics, spacetime, gravity, other forces, matter, and the Higgs field, certainly addresses all known frequencies of electromagnetic forces (EMFs).

So here’s the bridge:  it is an established fact that ki energy (an energy which many people work with in the healing and martial arts, and which is directly related to consciousness, according to many people versed in various forms of spirituality) can be measured, and is an EMF which resides in the infrared spectrum.  Here’s one of many scientific papers asserting this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1193556/#b19

From the introduction of this paper:  “Many people believe that ‘Ki-energy’ (life-energy) is a ‘superpsychological’ or ‘supernatural’ phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to provide evidence that ‘Ki’ is a ‘natural’ phenomenon. If it is a ‘natural’ phenomenon, it can be studied scientifically.”

What Wallace refers to as “unexplainable consciousness” is in fact an EMF.

How does this energy interact with a human being?  It is well known that when the mind “has a thought,” an electrical charge passes through the brain’s neurons.  That is to say, an EMF of a particular, measurable frequency passes through the brain.  And there exists a mechanism which translates the series of charges into thought, behavior and action.  Thus, we know there exists a way in which an EMF interacts with the matter of the human being.

It is not hard to postulate that neurons (or perhaps other biological structures in the human body) are capable of interacting with EMFs of a different frequency — according to the study cited above, in the infrared spectrum (where they located and measured ki energy).

We may not be able to measure the interaction between ki energy and physical structures in the body, but there is certainly no reason to rule out the possible influence.

(While I say “we may not,” I actually suspect, in the “those who know do not talk” department, Carroll and others are well aware of the inter-relationship between ki and the mind, and have simply been trained not to talk about it.  Mystery schools down through the ages, including the Masonic Temple, have taught their members to not talk about “inner world” phenomena.)

In any case, if we think of consciousness as an EMF, then there is no problem explaining its existence, its propagation through space, and its interaction with dense matter (like the human body), using Carroll’s Core Theory equation.

how many times have i sat by this river?

Click for the full text — a gorgeous collection of letters…

A brief excerpt:

***

My gate has a sign posted on it:

Do not look back, move forward,
do not open your eyes, feel your way into this garden.

Do not smell the flowers, listen to them;
do not taste the fruit, sleep with it;
do not till the soil, plant your body deep within it.

***

The cover:

 

A couple of wonderful writings, from 1993

Writings

The Pitchforks are Coming…

“If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.”

Ultra-Rich Man’s Letter

A good read.

Star Wars

I finally broke down today and went to see, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”  I’ve been resisting because it is so violent, and I didn’t want to bring more violence into my world and by transitivity into the world around me.

But I broke down and I went because the fact of the matter is the most conscious most wise most present people I know are in near-constant battle.  They fight amongst themselves and with other great humans around the world.

They don’t fight with guns and bombs; no red blood is spilled.  Rather, they have heated arguments over lofty principles and visions of the future and the direction of the planet and the allocation of global resources and the teaching methods most deserving of investment and on and on and on…

Their light sabers and laser guns are filled not with highly super-charged photons, but rather with beam-like, concentrated mental and psychic energy.

They fight and they fight and they fight, and if we possessed the power to perceive the beams of energy, we would see the skies around us and above us filled with the criss-crossing patterns of electric blue and red light.  We would see the dark grey smog which arises as the beams interact with the nano-sized particles of pollution in the air:  a thick soot choking out the healing rays of the sun.

Why did I go see Star Wars?  Because Star Wars is what my experience is.  Star Wars is what is happening in my life. Star Wars isn’t creating the violence:  it is art mirroring life.  It is making the invisible visible.

It may be a John Lennon-esque thought, but if we put all of the resources we put into fighting into meeting the needs of everyone who joins the wars, we could create need-free people, who would then largely lose the impulse to fight in the first place.  And — I assert we would have lots of resources left over, because I suspect it is a lot cheaper to give people what they need (and to a degree what they want too) then to pay for all of the battles.

May the Force be with us all, everyone of us!