A Place for Doubt

Guest article

By Robert Buswell  
Distinguish Professor of Buddhist Studies, UCLA

The 9/11 terrorist attacks were fostered in no small measure by the certitude of a handful of religious zealots that their religious beliefs alone were right and all others wrong.  In early Buddhist texts like the Atthakavagga (The Octets), the Buddha bemoaned the pernicious hold that extremist views, and especially religious blind faith, have on people.  By presuming that only my beliefs, practices, and perceptions are correct and unassailable implies that all others ipso facto are incorrect and controvertible.  

As the tenth anniversary of this heinous act of religious terror approaches, it is perhaps refreshing that an eminent figure in a tradition that places doubt at the very core of religious teaching and practice will be visiting New York City.  He is Ven. Jinje Seonsa, the leading Korean Zen (Seon) master of his generation.  

In Buddhism, by abandoning the personal point of view that is the self (atman), the Buddhist experiences a state that transcends dichotomies such as enemy and friend, orthodox and heretical, and thus clings to nothing from this conditioned world.  Even attachment to "Buddhism" itself, the Buddha says, must ultimately be abandoned to truly understand Buddhism.  Attachment to views is considered to be the root source of the disputes that separate one group from another and lead to conflict, a position certainly taken to the extreme by the 9/11 attackers.  

But it doesn't take a terrorist to operate from viewpoints of prejudice, hate, or misunderstanding.  We are all impeded by thoughts and emotions that affect our understanding and actions.  But if we are willing to cut through those value judgments by deploying the tool of doubt, we can experience that fundamental nature that transcends all dichotomies and inequalities.  

The Korean Seon tradition places pride of place in doubt rather than faith and the teachings of Seon Master Jinje epitomize the sense of questioning that, he insists, is at the core of authentic religious practice.  

Remember those colorful if not blasphemous sayings of the Zen masters?  

"'What is the Buddha?' 'A dried sh** stick.'" (Yunmen) 
"If you meet the Buddha, kill him!" (Linji). 

"'Why did Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen, come from the West?' 'A cypress tree is in the courtyard.'"  (Zhaozhou)  

These kinds of enigmatic statements of the masters of old are specifically intended to help overcome the attachment to views, even the view of what constitutes "Buddhism" or the "Buddha" himself.  The Korean Seon tradition uses these kinds of statements as "topics of inquiry" (hwadu) in order to raise that sense of questioning, which the Koreans call technically "the sensation of doubt" (uijeong).  

This Korean technique is akin to the Japanese Rinzai Zen training in koans (Zen "cases"), which is better known in the West, but Korean Ganhwa Seon developed prior to, and completely independently from, the Japanese Zen traditions.  In Seon Master Jinje's presentation of Ganhwa Seon, this questioning component is paramount and is what distinguishes this Korean style of meditation from other forms of Buddhist meditation such as vipassana (insight meditation).  

Such hwadu challenge one's most deeply held beliefs, including those about religion, by engendering questioning.  This sensation of doubt eventually becomes so intense that the mind becomes utterly absorbed in the topic of inquiry.  The meditator becomes oblivious to everything in one's life except this questioning, which becomes so second-nature that it flows effortlessly and continuously in one's mind, like water running downstream.  

Seon Master Jinje commonly teaches neophytes to Ganhwa Seon practice to contemplate the hwadu "What is your original face before your parents gave birth to you?"  By asking this fundamental existential question about what "we" were before we were even conceived, this question opens up a whole series of further questions about what constitutes ourselves if "we" are not our physical bodies, thoughts, emotions, and experiences.  The intensity of this questioning eventually creates such pressure in the mind that the doubt shatters, removing the limiting point of view that is the self and leaving the mind receptive to the influence of the unconditioned and open to the boundless perspective that is enlightenment.  

On the heels of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I think it is fitting that we all open our minds to the value of doubt.  By challenging our own fundamental beliefs, challenging our own understanding of self and other, right and wrong, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and enemy and friend, Korean questioning meditation thus opens the possibility of a entirely new way of perceiving the things of this world, a new way of thinking in which clinging to our own views alone does not hold sway.  

According to Korean Seon teachings, this is the ultimate paradox of religion: to truly have certitude one must first have doubt.  

This article originally appeared here


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Who Was Abraham?

Discovering the origins of Abraham and the religious precedent credited to him has been a keen affinity since childhood, his influence greatly affecting what we know of as the Western world today.  What surrounded him that contributed to the religious origins he's credited with today?  

Of all my discoveries on the Internet, Gene Matlock's essay remains in my top 10 best finds of all time, contributing to my life-long journey to learn of Abraham's origins.  In the essay below, Gene explores evidence and implications from various sources pointing at South Asian origins of Abraham and his cult.  His premise includes the presumption that Rama was an actual historical figure, whereas Rama and the Ramayana were stories, katha, to convey lessons, and in this case, stories created by Aryans, originating from the Steppes, to induce inferiority complex among Dravidians and others while conveying them as subhumans, as monkeys, as sham, despite Dravidians and Austrics having a far more evolved society than the Aryans.  

That Abraham and Judaism originated from larger Indian influences has been rather common knowledge in the region for millennia while it has been so long since his presence on Earth so much of what occurred then has been obscured with time.  

To the contributions from this essay I can add a few bits of information from my guru.  Judaism originated in a small village in southern area of what is known as Afghanistan today.  While Matlock refers to extensive flooding, perhaps a continuous monsoon, contributive to Judaism's journey westward, the westward migration also had to do with people of that village converting to Shaevite Tantra.  Others in the surrounding area retaliated toward them, initiating the first of a string in the story line of Judaism about "persecution".  I anticipate that the village was surrounded by Zorastrians, one of the oldest religions in the world, extant today, and among the earliest to postulate or assert monotheism, as does Tantra.  


The hexagram, commonly known as Mogen David in Judaism, had long been an important device in Shaevite Tantric practice for thousands of years before Abraham, and was quite common in Egypt and areas north of Egypt before the arrival of Judaism to the area.  Shaevite Tantra is Tantra further systemized by SadaShiva nearly 7,000 years ago, Tantra evolving thousands of years before that, originating from Dravidian, Mongolian, and Austric cultures, applying scientific methods to every realm of life, not just inanimate physics as is often the conceit of modern times.   

It has been said that Abraham could directly communicate with God.  Dhyana is how he did so, part of core of yogic practice, of Ashtaunga yoga, the Eightfold Path, a birthright to practice for all humans.  Dhyana and dharana were taken to China by Bodhi Dharma, a key part of his introduction of Tantra and Buddhism to Taoist practitioners of the time, a meditation method which later became known as "Chan" in China's monosyllabic language, and later known as Zazen in Korea, and as Zen in Japan.  


Before its desctruction, the temple in Israel of which the "Wailing Wall" remains had a chamber for initiates within which descriptors of the Universe were engraved, including the acoustic root of the Universe, the phoneme "aum", "om", "omn", "the word", om'kara in Sam'skrit. Reciting the sound, in prescribed manner, greatly facilitates psycho-spiritual development, intuitional gestalts.  
  

Guest article

Who Was ABRAHAM?
A paper by Gene D. Matlock, B.A., M.A.  


Gene D. Matlock, B.A, M.A.  

In his History of the Jews, the Jewish scholar and theologian Flavius Josephus (37 - 100 A.D.), wrote that the Greek philosopher Aristotle had said: "...These Jews are derived from the Indian philosophers; they are named by the Indians Calani."  (Book I:22.)  

Clearchus of Soli wrote, "The Jews descend from the philosophers of India.  The philosophers are called in India Calanians and in Syria Jews.  The name of their capital is very difficult to pronounce.  It is called 'Jerusalem.'"  

"Megasthenes, who was sent to India by Seleucus Nicator, about three hundred years before Christ, and whose accounts from new inquiries are every day acquiring additional credit, says that the Jews 'were an Indian tribe or sect called Kalani...'" (Anacalypsis, by Godfrey Higgins, Vol. I; p. 400.)  

Martin Haug, Ph.D., wrote in The Sacred Language, Writings, and Religions of the Parsis, "The Magi are said to have called their religion Kesh-î-Ibrahim.  They traced their religious books to Abraham, who was believed to have brought them from heaven."  (p. 16.)

There are certain striking similarities between the Hindu god Brahma and his consort Saraisvati, and the Jewish Abraham and Sarai, that are more than mere coincidences.  Although in all of India there is only one temple dedicated to Brahma, this cult is the third largest Hindu sect.  

In his book Moisés y los Extraterrestres, Mexican author Tomás Doreste states,
Voltaire was of the opinion that Abraham descended from some of the numerous Brahman priests who left India to spread their teachings throughout the world; and in support of his thesis he presented the following elements: the similarity of names and the fact that the city of Ur, land of the patriarchs, was near the border of Persia, the road to India, where that Brahman had been born.  

10 Effective Ways to Optimize More Conscious Awareness

Guest article

by Steve Pavlina
stevepavlina

What does it mean to become more conscious?  It is the progressive realization of conscious mastery over your mind.  

The challenge is that it takes consciousness to grow consciousness.  But you needn’t worry about this because you already have the seed.  Think of it like fire.  You have a flame, and you want to turn that flame into a huge blaze.  How do you do it?  You add fuel.  The following list includes examples of how you can add fuel to your flame of consciousness to become a raging inferno of consciousness.  Well, OK, the analogy sort of falls apart there, but you get the idea. 

So here are 10 ways to raise your consciousness: 

1. Truth 

Truth raises your consciousness.  Falsehood lowers it.  

First, accept the truth.  Whatever you’re afraid to know lowers your consciousness.  Step on the scale to see how much you weigh.  Have a long talk with your spouse about the status of your relationship.  Take a deep look at your career.  In every case accept the outcome.  Don’t just acknowledge the current status and dismiss it.  Really accept it as the truth.  Think about what it means for this to be true.  Also accept your feelings about the truth, whether you like them or not.  

Secondly, speak the truth.  If honesty is a challenge for you, it’s because you aren’t being honest enough with yourself.  Lies you tell others are shadowed by lies you tell yourself.  Take note of those areas where you feel incapable of genuine honesty, and dig deep enough to find out why. You’ll find that you uncover a part of yourself you’ve been unwilling to accept. You don’t lie about the parts of yourself that you accept 100%.  

The more you’re able to accept and speak the truth, the more conscious you become.  Raise your consciousness by uncovering and dumping all traces of falsehood from your life.  Allow this to be a gradual process.  As your consciousness increases, genuine honesty will come more easily to you.  

Yes, there may be consequences when you switch from lies and half-truths to the full truth, but highly conscious people know that crossing that bridge is well worth the effect.  A short-term adjustment is nothing compared to the joys of living honestly and openly.  It’s so much easier and less stressful to be yourself and allow others to do the same.  Not everyone will appreciate the real you, especially if they’ve grown accustomed to a false version, but that won’t matter once you accept and appreciate yourself.  

2. Courage 

Courage raises your consciousness.  Cowardice lowers it.  

Courage is the gatekeeper between unconscious growth and conscious growth.  As long as you remain on the unconscious side, life will keep throwing problems at you until you step up and take charge.  When you face your fear, the fear vanishes, and problems transform into opportunities.  But when you run from your problems, your fear only grows.  

A powerful guiding principle to adopt is, “Whatever I fear, I must face.” The more fears you face down, the more conscious you become.  As you master this lesson, eventually courage becomes less necessary.  Once you develop the courage to face any fear life throws at you, you stop attracting so many fear-based experiences into your life.  This is why courage is the dividing line between unconscious growth and conscious growth.  The mastery of courage gives you the power to decide how you’ll grow instead of being a victim of the whims of fate.  

3. Compassion 

Compassion raises your consciousness.  Cruelty lowers it.  

A great way to become more conscious is to search for signs of unconscious cruelty and disconnection in your life.  This can be very difficult to do since it also requires courage.  We naturally resist facing our own cruelty, but it’s there just waiting to be uncovered.  

Compassion is the root of unconditional love, a feeling of connectedness with everything that exists.  Do you feel connected to yourself?  To others?  To animals?  To all living things?  To everything that exists?  The more you develop this connection, the more conscious and aware you become.  

4. Desire 

Workshop in Subtle Mind Learning Skills

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Psychologists and other scientists are discovering new elements to the human psyche, neurology and all around human potential, while tantra has 'been there' already for thousands of years, including practices for cultivating subtleties of mind as yet unexplored by prevailing medical paradigms.  

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Light movement exercises will be included, wear loose clothing.  

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Guest article

Psychophysics: Are We Biological Billiard Balls?

by JAG BHALLA

OCTOBER 23, 2014

Psychophysics secretly permeates our people-sciences (it assumes we’re motivated by physics-like forces).  But as every infant—each a great causality detector—knows, but many scientists ignore, people aren’t biological billiard balls.

1. Locke become “the Newton of the mind,” (emulating his friend) by seeking the mind’s laws of motion (e.g. pleasure’s pull was basically “gravitational”~1689).  

2. Bentham’s utility principle declared “pain and pleasure… alone…determine what we… do” (1789).  Utility became the keyword that locked away libraries of work on our complex motivations.

3. Fechner (1860) used the term psychophysics to describe quantifiable experimental psychology (he studied variation of intensity of sensations with stimulus).  

4. Darwin (1871) contra Bentham wrote: “The common assumption that men must be impelled to every action by experiencing some pleasure or pain may be erroneous.”  Many acts are independent of “pleasure or pain felt at the moment.”

5. JS Mill (1877) declared “Laws of mind and laws of matter are so dissimilar…that it would be contrary to all principles of rational arrangement to mix them.”

6. But utility remains attractive: Kahneman’s Nobel work included the “psychophysics” of utility (2002).

7. Clearly, people obey the laws of physics.  But nothing in physics chooses.  Its rigid causations have no liberty.  And physics (like the best Buddhists) feels only the present and it’s forces. But human psychology is different precisely because it evolved to choose between the attractions of different futures.

8. Physics was developed for situations like: Everything of type X always does Y under conditions Z, where X, Y and Z are mathematically related.  Imagine how complex Newton’s “billiard ball” law (every action has an equal and opposite reaction) would be if every action had many different possible reactions (depending on each billiard ball’s feelings that day).

9. In psychology, the same physical stimulus doesn’t always cause the same reaction. E.g. consider Darwin’s observation that a “Hindoo…[can be] stirred to the bottom of his soul by [eating]…unclean food.” The same food eaten unknowingly, or by an unbeliever, doesn’t cause that same reaction.

10. One-year-olds use “contingency patterns” to distinguish things (with physics-like regularities) from people (exhibiting agency).  They’re on Mill’s side.

11. Unmathematical narrative-like beliefs and contingency patterns influence our reactions and decisions.  Their if-then, unrigidly causal, multifactor logic differs from that typical of the number-struck physical sciences.

Free will, real or not, changes practical predictability.  More scientists should be as practical as babies.  

Illustration by Julia Suits, The New Yorker cartoonist & author of The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions

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For Creative Intelligence, Connecting Memory with Unrelated is Essential

Guest article

by Maria Popova

“In the course of creative endeavors, artists and scientists join fragments of knowledge into a new unity of understanding.”

Literature is the original internet — an endless rabbit hole of discoveries, with each citation, footnote, and allusion essentially a “hyperlink” to another text, another idea.  I was recently reminded of this by a passing mention in Ronald Kellogg’s 1994 book on the psychology of writing, which led me to a fantastic 1985 volume titled Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking (public library).  In this masterwork of insight, psycholinguist Vera John-Steiner cracks open the minds of 100 different creative individuals — writers, artists, composers, choreographers — via original interviews and an analysis of their existing notebooks, journals, letters, and scientific records, shedding light on the central elements and essential patterns of creative thought.  

While John-Steiner expanded on seminal work like Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner’s model of creativity and Howard Gardner’s influential theory of multiple intelligences, she pioneered a new framework for understanding creativity based on qualitative research and interdisciplinary perspective.  An early champion of an idea now ubiquitous in today’s ever-growing catalog of books on creativity, John-Steiner approached her research with visionary clarity of conviction: “That ‘creativity’ is beyond analysis is a romantic illusion we must now outgrow.”  

Illustration from 'Neurocomic,' a graphic novel about how the brain works. Click image for more.

One of the most important and enduring of John-Steiner’s insights on the “invisible tools” that propel a life of creative work and set artists apart from the rest is the concept of memory and how it empowers us to connect seemingly unrelated ideas — one of the defining characteristics of the creative mind and the basis of combinatorial creativity. She writes:  

Among the invisible tools of creative individuals is their ability to hold on to the specific texture of their past.  Their skill is akin to that of a rural family who lives through the winter on food stored in their root cellar… The creative use of one’s past, however, requires a memory that is both powerful and selective.  

Mozart, she notes, called this his “bag of memories” — a mental reservoir of experiences and impressions “accumulated during the childhood years of intense wonder, a source to which many creative people return again and again.”  Similarly, Ingmar Bergman wrote that “to make films is also to plunge again by its deepest roots down to the world of childhood.”  She cites author Judy Blume, for whom this mental library of memories is especially dependent on sensory impressions:  

I remember smells, feelings.  I will walk in a house and say, this is B. N.’s home.  This is the way his house smelled on a winter morning.  All the sensations are there to be brought back.  

This highly selective nature of creative memory is a supreme testament to the fact that memory is not a recording device and that, as legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks would put it decades later, “memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.”  John-Steiner quotes the English poet Stephen Spender, who captured this beautifully:  

Memory is not exactly memory.  It is more like a prong, upon which a calendar of similar experiences happening throughout the years, collect.  A memory once clearly stated ceases to be a memory, it becomes perpetually present, because every time we experience something which recalls it, the clear and lucid original experience imposes its formal beauty on the new experiences.  It is thus no longer memory but an experience lived through again and again.

Illustration by Ralph Steadman from 'Alice in Wonderland.' Click image for more.

But certain domains of creativity, like science or the sort of writing that relies on a heavy use of research and historical facts, demand that the creator’s access to memory be a lot less abstract and a lot more methodical.  Indeed, this need explains the odd strategies many famous authors employed in organizing their ideas.  John-Steiner points to Darwin’ particularly obsessive organization strategy, possibly one of his techniques for alleviating his chronic anxiety — he “carefully indexed all the books he had read and organized the material into portfolios that he consulted at the beginning of each new project.”  Reviewing other examples of similar practices, John-Steiner puts it in no uncertain terms:  

A powerful and personally developed structuring of information — an active and selective memory — is as necessary for scientists as it is for poets.

But perhaps the most potent use of memory in the creative mind is the cross-pollination of accumulated ideas and the fusing together of seemingly unrelated concepts into novel configurations — something Stephen Jay Gould, arguably the greatest science essayist of all time, captured when he said that his sole talent is “making connections.”  John-Steiner quotes a similar sentiment by the Polish-born mathematician Stan Ulam:  

It seems to me that good memory — at least for mathematicians and physicists — forms a large part of their talent.  And what we call talent or perhaps genius itself depends to a large extent on the ability to use one’s memory properly to find analogies, past, present and future, which [are] essential to the development of new ideas.  

Returning to Judy Blume’s approach to writing, which includes writing manuscript pages and taping them into a notebook for later use while the author’s mind “races head to this or to that,” John-Steiner points out how this technique bespeaks the fact that “the human mind is multi-channeled not only in the way in which we record experience … but also in the way in which writers, poets, and composers think while engaged in a new work”:  

While Blume composes her narrative in a focused forward movement on her typewriter, she is also aware of the more diffuse associations that accompany her writing.  

She cites her interview with the legendary composer Aaron Copland, who remarked that when this associative process works in an optimal state of flow, “all different musical materials run to their proper places.”  

Illustration from 'Neurocomic,' a graphic novel about how the brain works. Click image for more.

This utilization of remembered ideas and their combination into new concepts, John-Steiner argues, can occur both consciously and unconsciously — the latter best evidenced in the unconscious incubation stage present in just about every formal model of the creative process.  This is powered by our multiple modes of analyzing and retaining information — sensory, perceptual, semantic, and episodic.  She explains:  

An experience is processed in multiple ways, as each type of memory “storage” has its own special characteristic.  The stories of one’s life are recorded in episodic memory, and these are tagged according to the time and place of their occurrence.  More abstract knowledge lacks such coding; instead it is recorded in a more formal structure such as biological taxonomies or other facts, which are organized according to hierarchical concepts.  

Each domain of creativity prioritizes a different mode of memory as a primary source of raw material.  Citing painter Paul Gauguin’s self-admitted “remarkable memory,” John-Steiner notes the importance of “a precise visual imagination that activates the exceptional abilities of this artist-designer”:  

Mental images are an important resource for the working artist’s talent.  

Illustration from 'Neurocomic,' a graphic novel about how the brain works. Click image for more.

Noting that memory is a crucial resource in “keeping one’s knowledge current by linking the known to new ideas and insights,” she adds:  

In the course of creative endeavors, artists and scientists join fragments of knowledge into a new unity of understanding.  This process is demanding; it calls upon all the inner resources of the individual — active memory, openness to experience, creative intensity, and emotional courage.  It demands self-knowledge in the use of expansion of one’s talents.  

In the remainder of Notebooks of the Mind, John-Steiner explores the many “invisible tools” of creative work, including the role of revision, the interplay of anxiety and ambition, the power of finding the right mentors, and the importance of working from a place of love while remaining open to all your feelings.  Complement it with Jerome Bruner on the six essential conditions of creativity and the psychology of optimizing your brain by honing emotional memory.  

Maria Popova invests her creative intelligence researching and writing about mind, neurology and human potential at BrainPickings.org

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Cakras and Glandular Influences Regarding Subtler Realms of Mind and Some Samadhis

Mind, Brain, Neurology, and Yoga

What are you most capable of doing?  What are you most capable of being?  What is the ultimate possibility of human excellence, and can or will you access such potentialities, in this lifetime, and how may such be achieved, and what to do with it when arrived at?  

This brief article covers realms of life, progressing from crude toward subtle, our glands, cakras and human potential, including samadhi among such possibilities.  

Human Potential

Truthful seekers may ask themselves, "where, how and upon what continuities, thoughts and actions can I achieve, deliver myself to such greater thresholds of excellence, make them real in personal life, grace others with such potentialities?"  

Humans, indeed every living being, is in search of greater thresholds of being, predicating why we wake up, why we eat, why we explore, even why we breathe.   For humans particularly exploring such possibilities is particularly germane, for by whatever means the achievement of human form and psyche, it is within human potential in longing for infinity to actually deliver one's self into greater thresholds of excellence and positively affect all of posterity through the explorations of matter, psyche and spirit, laying precedent for posterity to meet and exceed such deliverance into subtler realms of being as the new base from which to launch further explorations.   

Realms of Being: 'From Crude Toward Subtle' 

In the three realms of life, physical, psychic and transpersonal, which arenas give the most satisfaction, make a person glad to be alive, have the most lasting effect?  

Physicality, both within one's body and the material world, are integral to, instrumental of a vehicle through which the mind acts, experiences, and evolves in sharing this manifest universe resplendent all around.  Can physicality, will inanimate objects be our ultimate goal, or is the mind subtler, while being in need of physicality to express itself?  Can, will object accumulation deliver you to the ultimate possibilities that are you?  If you owned the world, 'could there be more'?  If not, more of 'what'?  

Of our mind, our conscious mind, we reach toward greater thresholds of subtelties -- subtler mind, subtler thoughts.  What of those thoughts are the most lasting?  Is history full of ideas reaching their obsolescence?  Which, if any, are most lasting of all?  An idea today, relative to circumstances surrounding it, may not be so relevant in the future or in other places or among other people concurrently.   

In the trifarious realms of time, place and person, the vicissitudes of life play, fluctuating in each of these variable factors while operating also within the physical and psychic realms.   

Transpersonal, spiritual realms are characteristically pervasive throughout the universe and at all times, with all beings in all places.  Can such a lasting arena with constancy throughout every time, place and person in the universe deliver ever subtler thresholds far beyond those of our subtle minds?  

The three realms of physical, psychic and transpersonal or spiritual are operative all the time, the cruder realms are necessary vehicles for the ever subtler realms and potentialities to find expression, conjugate their potentialities.  Conscious attention toward subtler realms does not necessitate neglecting more mundane realms of life, though attending to them from such subtler realms of being optimizes experiencing the more mundane realms of life with extraordinarily greater richness.  

How much more resplendent are your mundane tasks during or after having been anointed with the fertile waters of mutual respect and love with another being?  A child awakens from deep sleep within a safe environment harbored in the loving embrace of a caring parent whisking them into the bathroom, washing up, scurrying to a delicious nurturing breakfast and hastened into a morning of joyous play and sharing.  Each person recognizes, acknowledges the happiness of each other, each's dignity, sharing of resources and fealty in love flowing freely without pretense carrying each and all to greater gestalts in the synergy of their mutuality.  

Such is the living evidence of subtler realms than physicality and psyche, an essence in precedence to our individual separateness, a mutuality within which we are conceived into life, and replicate in most every thing we do, including carrying on the perpetuity of life through the exponential growth of bringing forth more life.  

In our loving embraces, among the mysteries of our bonding there's a threshold where we lose track of where we end and the other being begins, melded into the singularity of our love, moving in unison without objective thought as to what limb or digit goes where, when or how.  We are symphonies in bonding, arriving at greater thresholds of excellence synergized in the mutuality of our love.  

The operative functionality of all of our organs, both motor and otherwise, are controlled, centristically, by the strengths and capabilities of our glands.  The core of our being psycho-physically is our neurology, our spine, and the subtle centers along its length, common to all vertebrates, "plexii" in many languages, or "cakras" in Sam'skrit.  Our glands are next in line, toward the more mundane direction, from the plexii or cakras along the spine, of which there are seven primary cakras, along with hundreds of subordinate cakras.  Optimizing our glands and cakras positively affects our physicality, our psyche, and our psycho-spiritual parallelism.  

[Aside from describing cakras individually, I will say, reserving greater details for future articles, that much of the descriptions people commonly read about cakras in modern time are misleading, inaccurate, often wrong, and outright dangerous -- information that can be damaging to your wellbeing when utilized.]    

Realms of mind have both direct and indirect relationships with the cakras, with each cakra harboring both subtler sentiments and subtler realms of mind, of being, up to and including the top cakra, the crown cakra or sahashrara cakra at the top of the head.  As each cakra is optimized, ever progressively and concurrently, along with each realm of mind polished in such a progressive manner, new thresholds of human excellence may ensue, greater splendors in one's wellbeing and greater rapport, greater intimacy with the universe.  

Glands are particularly optimized by what we eat, characteristics of our choices of thoughts and actions, and by progressive scientific glandular massage as through asanas, commonly referred to as yoga postures.  This is the real reason why yoga postures, asanas, were invented, plus conjugating thought, word and deed as a singular symphony delivering you into subtler realms of being, predicated upon love and universality.  

Our psyche is optimized through psychic exercises cultivated in a progressive manner, which also include conjugating the parallelism between body and psyche as well as the parallelism between psyche and transpersonal realms.  Progressively designed intuitional science, meditation techniques involve optimizing each realm, and their tangencies with other realms, while merging each threshold, from crude toward subtle, into the next subtler realm of being which is delivered to the ultimate threshold in the constancy of the universal disposition.  

Directly and indirectly this includes optimizing the pineal gland as part of the process, about which the following material addresses a specific form of samadhi in relation to the pineal gland's influence.  

Types of samadhis, individuated samadhis exceed thirty, some of which are cakra-specific while the two samadhis of greatest relevance to all vertebrates, all but a couple of which only humans can will themselves to experience, are savikalpa samadhi -- merging with, ultimate rapport with the manifest universe -- and nirvikalpa samadhi -- merging with and ultimate intimacy with the universe beyond its manifest essence.  

There are many different variations of samadhi, all of which are affected by our glands, both directly and indirectly, while below I've selected one samadhi that is particularly pineal-caused.    

Anindya'nanda Rasasama'dhi

[by Mahasambhuti]

To control the various propensities of human mind there are various glands and sub-glands which form certain nerve centers inside the spinal column.  They are called cakras in Ta'ntra.  Each and every plexus regulates a certain number of propensities.  The hormones secreted from these particular glands influence the concerning sub-glands, the other lower glands, and the propensities, vrttis in Sam'skrit, controlled by their respective glands.

The food and drink we take every day is converted into rasa (fluid), rakta, flesh, fat, bone marrow and lymph etc.  Ultimately the lymph is converted into hormones of various types.  The special hormone secreted from the spiritual aspirant's pineal gland flows into the pituitary plexus.  At that time if one's mind remains engaged in pure spiritual thoughts that hormone flows from the pineal gland down the left side to the pituitary gland, and then to other plexii, glands and sub-glands, nerve fibers, nerve cells, veins and arteries, etc.  This excessive flow of pineal hormone revitalizes all the lower plexii.  On the other hand, if one's mind remains preoccupied with crude thoughts then the pineal hormone gets burnt up at the pituitary plexus.  The lower cakras and glands, due to the lack of supply of pineal secretion, do not enjoy any spiritual bliss.  But when the pineal hormone flows through the pituitary plexus to the lowest plexii, the undeveloped cakras of the body become healthier and revitalized.  As a rule the upper cakras control the lower ones.  So the svadhista'na cakra (2nd plexus) controls the mu'la'dha'ra cakra (1st plexus), the manipura cakra (3rd plexus) controls the svadhista'na and mu'ladha'ra cakras, the ana'hata (4th plexus) controls the man'ipura, svadhista'na and muladha'ra cakras, and the a'jina' (6th plexus) controls all the lower cakras.

At the time of pineal secretion if a sa'dhaka goes into sama'dhi -- he or she experiences a kind of divine aura around the ana'hata cakra (heart plexus).  The sa'dhaka realizes that he or she is experiencing a divine dip in the holy aura, and feels indescribable bliss in the heart.  In that exalted state of realization every object of this universe seems to be extremely sweet, and one derives immense bliss which no worldly object could ever provide.  The sun's rays, the moon beams, the land, the water, in fact everything appears to be emanating continuous streams of blissful nectar.

Idam' ma'nusam'sarves'a'm' bhu'ta'na'm'

Madhvasya' ma'nu's'asya sarva'ni bhu'ta'ni madhuh

Aya'ma'tma' sarves'a'm bhu'ta'na'm' madhvasya a'tmanah

Sarvani bhu'ta'ni madhuh.

Even a sworn enemy appears to be very sweet at that time.  Everything is sweet.  In Vaesnava philosophy this stage of sama'dhi is called madhura bha'va.  In Ta'ntra it is called aninda'nanda rasa sama'dhi.

Characteristics of Anindya'nanda Rasa Sama'dhi

The different plexii of the body get revitalized due to abundant hormone secretion and become more active than before.  The sa'dhaka enjoys immense bliss.  Due to excessive feelings of joy the nerve cells and the nerve fibers become ineffective.  A very sweet relation of love between the sincere practitioner and core of the universe is established.  Throughout the blissful experience a sweet taste is felt.  This state is one of the thirty-two prominent states of bliss experienced by highly developed sa'dhakas.  The special characteristics of this sama'dhi is that it is attained by an adept's grace predicated upon one's sincere efforts.

Of course, to attain supreme spiritual salvation it is not necessary for a sa'dhaka to experience any sama'dhi at all.  For example, passengers traveling on a train may or will not be able to see the sights of nature or towns if the doors and window-shutters are closed.  Although the passengers are unaware of the towns they are passing through, they still reach their destinations.  In the spiritual world also, the sa'dhaka, while ideating on the Supreme Consciousness will certainly pass through the different stages of realisation without necessarily being aware of it.  When the all-merciful universe gifts an adept incarnate with transpersonal initiation capabilities they help deserving sa'dhakas to attain this type of samadhi.  Even when they are physically absent in this world they help deserving persons to attain this sama'dhi through other adepts.

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