All your life in your present body you have been building-up the idea in your consciousness that you are your present body with its memories and habits.

You decreasingly experience yourself as a Spirit.

Things of the Spirit, of spirituality, have become mere beliefs and speculations because you no longer have direct access to realms of the Spirit.

You are a dark and constricted Spirit of identification with your body.

You then experience the world increasingly through the bodily senses.

The sensory world is vivid and strong, but the subtler Spirit worlds are vague and speculative.

The sensory world appears to be a sharp and clear hard reality. 

You then treat the sensory body as a central subject, a hard self going about in a hard world.

A set of bones has some eyes protruding out of their brain to see the reality of stones and hills, of cars and buildings.

Bones and muscles make up a so-called “self” that looks at rocks and plants.

Therefore, if you say “I am”, it does not cause you to see yourself as a Spirit in the world of the Spirit.

It seems to confirm that you are a material body in a material world.

So, as a mantra it cannot awaken or liberate your consciousness.

It would only help if you truly knew yourself as Spirit, experienced yourself as Spirit.

Even repeating “I am Spirit” will not necessarily help because you would try to think, “I-the-body-am-somehow-a-Spirit”:

So you can go around in circles in your brain like a dog chasing its own tail.

Merely trying to believe you are a Spirit is not going to get the job done of directly realizing and experiencing Spirit as yourself.

But, on the other hand, trying to just be quiet and effortless like Krishnamurti is more likely to reveal a state of sleep.

That is, after all, how one goes to sleep.

Reading Krishnamurti and blanking-out does not particularly reveal Spirit.

If it is important to you to question your bodily identity and reveal yourself to yourself directly and experientially as Spirit, you are going to have to become a great deal more serious about it than you have so far.

An intense self-boosting of urgency about Spirit is the essence of Zen.

In Zen, both Vedantic self-affirmation and relaxed clarity of consciousness as in the Krishnamurti approach become two sides of the same coin.

This becomes Shikantaza, or just sitting in simple, natural clarity as the basic expression of self-nature or Spirit.

But the whole practice tends to fall into drowsiness on the one hand or confused neurotic turmoil and cleverness of the agitated brain on the other hand.

Someone can hit you with a stick now and then to snap you out of these useless states, but if the one who hits you does not have the high energy of awakened Spirit, it will not put you into the heightened awareness of the Spirit.

When the Seer, Juan Matus, would strike his student, Carlos Castaneda, on the back now and then, it would put Carlos Castaneda in a state of heightened awareness for awhile because Juan Matus was imparting higher Spirit energy into the less developed energy system of Carlos Castaneda.

This is the same principle utilized by Siddhayogis of arousing Kundalini in their students through transmitting Power, Shakti, through Shaktipat, descent of Power, from the senior developed system into the less developed system.

But in both the case of Carlos Castaneda and the Siddhayoga students, a personal dependency on the energy boost from the senior person can become unhealthy so that it never becomes fully self-sustaining in the student plus it becomes a vampirical drain on the teacher by the dependent students. 

The Sufis made a deep study of these problems and hit on the idea of moving students around to more than one higher source, both in terms of higher teachers but also high energy situations, like candles being built up with layers from a variety of pots.

With these techniques of multi-transmission or spiritual out-sourcing, there has tended to be better results than dependency fixations in the exclusive Guru-cults of India and the useless wielding of sticks in Zen monasteries where the energy-sources are not high enough and the timing and location of the blow on the body is wrong.

But the Sufis have also tended to exert too much authority over their trainees.

Solving the energy-side of the equation suppressed the need for an intense self-awakening effort of real consciousness from within the student.

Multi-dependency and group identification is itself ultimately a veil over Spirit. 

The Sufi approach thus remains incomplete.

Hence, the complete way is not a tradition anywhere on Earth.

All traditions are imbalanced.

Therefore, getting to the Spirit is not going to be easy.

Even if you try to make use of all the traditions in the manner of Osho Rajneesh, you may discover that there is nothing but a useless dilution of all of them because of certain personal faults and inadequacies of realization in the Great Universal Formulator Himself as demonstrated in the case of Osho Rajneesh.

You are thus up against the great dilemma of Universalist Dilution versus Local Traditional Incompleteness. 

Since both of these are ultimately useless, what are you going to do? 

Are you serious about both your self-awakening and your higher energy connections? 

How will you resolve these two urgently ultimate problems?

©2004 Kevalin Absoluto