That's a good start, Avtar!

It sounds just like my Grandma Dot. "Goodness Gracious!"

So I'll say, "Blessed nakedness!"
Stripped clean and hung out to dry.

Some of us never grow up...
we just outgrow our diapers,
and become to big for our britches.

I think I've wore myself out.
Good-night.

This is beautiful

Dear Avtar,

Thank you for the beautiful message. We'll be looking forward to more on the ego.

Love/Peace,

Betsy

Thank you Dr Avtar. I am going to print to and read it every day. Nice!!

~~Love
bonnie

Who is "Him?" Do you realize you're stating the obvious? You once criticized my attempt to simplify detatchment. I don't know why that stayed with me like it has. You are stuck in rote and in an intellectual quagmire. Don't attack me because you want to make the dharma more difficult than it should be. This is the method human beings use to retain power. It just ain't about that. Leave me alone. From now on.

So, if Avtar goes to the North Pole and commoner51 goes to the South, does not the Earth's magnetic field continue to flow right through them?
Defence, attack, detachment, entanglement, all the same to me saith the Lord.

Excuse me, I'm the piggy in the middle, ducking and weaving......oh! am I supposed to catch the ball?

Dear Commoner51,

"I don't know why that stayed with me like it has". Isn't this a golden opportunity for you to find out?

RUMI- "Fierce Courtesy"

(translated by Coleman Barks)

.

The connection to the Friend
is secret and very fragile.

The image of the Friendship
is in how you love,

the grace and the delicacy,
the subtle talking together
in full prostration, outside of time.

When you are there,
remember the fierce courtesy
of the one with you.

Aurora, I think it stayed with me because the guru types often obscure the path, intentionally or not. Sometimes the teacher needs a little jab to come back out of the lofty states s/he think they reside in. I see myself as being no different. In fact, I'm no teacher at all. But I do have some understanding of the dharma. I know tit for tat is useless, but constructive criticism is invaluable. I welcome it. If you'll go back and read the post you'll see it was an outright attack. In fact I think he called me insane. That's all I'm going to say or think about this matter. Mike

Hi Mike, thank you for your answer.

I'm sorry to say I haven't read your previous dialogue with Avtar, but I don't find it important in this situation. What I know is that nothing "out there" is ever responsible for our reactions. We will only react with pain or anger to someone's "touch" if there is a wound in that spot. For me, it has become a habit to look for the wounds inside instead of studying the situation out there. Of course, it is up to you to do as you please. All the best!

Hindu Prayer in Senate Disrupted
Thursday, July 12, 2007

www.foxnews.com/wires/2007Jul12/0,4670,SenatePrayer,00.html

The prayer is from Geeta and Rig Veda

Video of the Prayer and Protest:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/07/12/vo.senate.prayer.arrests.cnn

Aurora, it is important in the sense that if I didn't bring it up the person who spoke it would continue to believe that malevolent attacks are OK. This guy is posting about ego, for chrisake. I also understand there was no response when I was attacked. These types of behaviour don't hurt me but they poison the whole place. The non-response to the attack on him and the attacks on me after my comment tell me all I need to know about posting here and even posting in general. The level of hatefullness drove me away for several years and I was hesitant to even try this type of interaction again. The attacker can't even come up with enough non-ego to apologize. It didn't last long but I enjoyed it . Peace

Thank you for sharing that beautiful piece Avtar, as I needed to hear something like that about now.

Love, Char

Dear Friends:

Thanks to all for kind and thoughtful comments.

As a matter of courtesy and keeping a healthy dialogue going, I would love to answer sincere questions related to the subject matter of the post. However, I do not feel that it would be productive to answer any personal, judgmental, and prejudiced remarks since they are subject to individual interpretations, misunderstandings, and disagreements. Nobody gains anything by engaging in such a subjective, disruptive, and non-converging dialogue.

Let us stay focused on the subject matter to benefit most from the courteous and constructive dialogue. All sincere and constructive opinions are welcome.

Love & Regards

Avtar

Dear Mike,

I understand and respect your perspective. If you decide to draw back, I thank you for the short acquaintance and wish you the very best in your search for peace! But if you should choose to use this fantastic opportunity to study the ego by turning your attention inside, you would have my (and I'm sure others') whole hearted support. There are many people gathered here who are on a sincere path of understanding and seeing through the only ego that can be worked on - one's own.

Dear Avtar,

Thank you so much for your interesting posts and for the wish for love and a constructive dialogue on your blogs.

I have a question and as far as I know, it is sincere. You write the following :
"However, I do not feel that it would be productive to answer any personal, judgmental, and prejudiced remarks since they are subject to individual interpretations, misunderstandings, and disagreements. "

My question is: Is your decision of seeing a comment as personal, judgmental and prejudiced something other than an interpretation - your personal interpretation?

Or if I frame it differently - who is the one who divides remarks into "personal, judgmental, and prejudiced" and "corteous, sincere and constructive", choosing one over the other?

This could turn into a very interesting, practical discussion on ego. Spirit is a genius as always, offering such a possibility for practice to clarify all the wonderful theoretical knowledge.

Dear Aurora,
Regarding your earlier post to Mike, I couldn't agree more about 'wounds.' Dear Mike is hurting and should not be thrown back on himself. There's a trite saying, 'there's no smoke without fire.'
We are all inextricably One, in my view. So Mike is a part of this 'whole.' If Mike is indicating 'fire' it behoves all of us to investigate because, as a facet, he should not be 'smoking.' In fact, all of us are, to some degree.
It is not Avtar's brief, I know, but in order to live this theory of his, the separations of 'ego' must be addressed, as you suggest in your last post.

Dear Edmund,

you say it so well. We are One and we all "smoke" to some degree, as long as the fire, the pain of separation still burns. So, how do we live the theory, or how do we LIVE the truth?

As I see it, we do as you did now, we look at each other with compassion, we walk together focused not on the ego of others, but on dissolving our personal illusion of separation, encouraging and supporting each other on the path of self-discovery. Thank you Edmund :)

Hi Mike, I hope with your extensive knowledge of Gurus, their methods and your spiritual practices combined with your practical knowledge of the society and it's psyche...it should not surprise you that one does indeed speak about Ego without having to be free of it.

About personal attacks, subjectivity and the subject at hand... constructive criticism, and the community here not responding to your criticism, note that many who might agree with you may abstain from expressing their views just because they haven't read your views or may have felt that the point was indeed made.

One does need to be accountable to everything one has ever said in the context of a intellectual dialogue especially when the subject is spirituality. Otherwise, one would be contradicting oneself and wouldn't even know about that. Perhaps you made this point clear by way of your criticism.

Keep participating with your wealth of experiences and knowledge. You might even come to like this community with all its contradictions.

Dear Aurora:

#15: "My question is: Is your decision of seeing a comment as personal, judgmental and prejudiced something other than an interpretation - your personal interpretation?.......Or if I frame it differently - who is the one who divides remarks into "personal, judgmental, and prejudiced" and "corteous, sincere and constructive", choosing one over the other?"

This is an excellent question. My investigations into science and spirituality were driven by this basic question - How to find the needle of the universal truth from the haystack of interpretations of relative realities or prejudiced judgments. When I saw conflicting, inconsistent, and non-converging interpretations of reality by scientists as well as the so-called self-acclaimed gurus and mystics, I started looking for One Wholesome understanding of reality via merging science and spirituality. I used the following three stringent criteria:

1. Must agree with the scientific data and theories.
2. Must be consistent with the universe or cosmic observations.
3. Must be consistent with the essence of the spiritual experiences of masters.

If all three are satisfied, then it should represent a universal reality. Most mainstream data and theories only partially satisfy 1 and 2. Most mystic experiences partially satisfy 3 only. Holistic Relativity is an attempt to satisfy all three above. The personal opinions and judgments may not satisfy either or any of them until they are compared against them.

Bottom line, no personal interpretation is free from prejudice of the ego. All personal interpretations, including mine, must be validated against the above criteria before claiming free from prejudice.

Love & Regards

Avtar

Dear Avtar,

thank you for your answer. This sounds all so fascinating and new to me, I'm doing my best to understand. So please allow me a few more questions, because it is not fully clear to me what you mean.

I would like to understand this paragraph in particular:
"Bottom line, no personal interpretation is free from prejudice of the ego. All personal interpretations, including mine, must be validated against the above criteria before claiming free from prejudice."

I completely agree with the first sentence- personal interpretation cannot be free of prejudice. But in the second sentence you say that personal interpretation CAN be free of prejudice, if it is validated against the three criteria.

To me, the key word is "personal". As long as the "personal" exists, anything it finds is unreal. In my experience, the ego is a master illusionist, excelling at proving the validity of its perspective, so I would be very careful when looking out there for a truth that can only be found in here. Everything out there is a projection. To find the wholesome perspective, we need to look from the person-less, center-less place inside. This, to me, is the meaning of the verses

"If you look at what you do not have in life
You do not have anything.
If you look at what you do have in life,
You have everything."

These verses do not speak about what one is looking at, but about the place from where one is looking.

That's why I would say that a universal perspective cannot be held by the person. It can be understood theoretically, but just like the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon, the theory is not reality.

Do you have any comments on this?

Aurora,
I've got to back you on this. The unified field is experienced subjectively as mind and objectively as the material universe. What is out there is definitely a projection as is what is in there.
Todd

Dear Aurora and Todd:

#20 and #21: "That's why I would say that a universal perspective cannot be held by the person. It can be understood theoretically, but just like the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon, the theory is not reality.
Do you have any comments on this?"

Yes. Please hold on to your questions and conclusions regarding the universal reality and its perception. Hopefully, a lot would become clear following my posts.

In the meantime, without realizing you are simply supporting or reiterating in your own words a subset of what I am saying in #19. A theory alone is a subset of the universal reality, and so is the subjective experience alone, because most subjective experiences are nothing but hallucinations. How do you separate genuine experiences from hallucinations? That is why I use the three criteria to test theories as well as subjective experiences, as I repeat:

1. Must agree with the scientific data and theories.
2. Must be consistent with the universe or cosmic observations.
3. Must be consistent with the essence of the spiritual experiences of masters.

If all three are satisfied, then it should represent a universal reality. Most mainstream data and theories only partially satisfy 1 and 2. Most mystic experiences partially satisfy 3 only. Holistic Relativity is an attempt to satisfy all three above. The personal experiences, opinions and judgments may not satisfy either or any of them until they are compared against them.

Ultimate reality is absolute wholesome One that exists at its own irrespective of the observer who may color it by its own way of looking.

Love & Regards

Avtar

Dear Avtar...those three points are really interesting.

I understand 1 and 2.

Point 3 is open for interpretations.

"Must be consistent with the essence of the spiritual experiences of masters."

If we are not sure about our own personal experiences( which could be hallucinations) how can we sure of the experiences of past masters?

By masters I suppose you mean the non-dual( Advaita) masters and not the Dwaita philosphers or the masters who sang praises of a supernatural entity.

How can we tell what Buddha experienced?

His teachings are interpreted in many ways.

I suppose the third point may as well read as "Must be consistent with Non duality as taught by Shankara, Ramana Maharishi, Nisargadatta etc.

It guess it will take a lifetime to intellectually analyze their teachings. For that to happen one has to practice it too... and we become our own master.

I don't know...I am lost here.

Regards

Siddharth

Sankara said that the rope appears to be a snake, or Brahman appears to be the world. However it all falls down when there is no snake in the first place....