Posts Tagged ‘Paramahansa Yogananda’
Death? Afterlife? Rebirth?
~ Easter Reflections on Resurrections
At my death do not lament our separation …
as the sun and moon but seem to set,
in reality this is a rebirth.
~ Rumi
“I tell you the truth,
no one can see the kingdom of God
unless he is born again.”
~ John – 3:3
“The soul is eternal, all-pervading, unmodifiable, immovable and primordial.”
“The soul never takes birth and never dies at any time,
nor does it come into being again when the body is created.
The soul is birthless, eternal, imperishable and timeless,
and is never destroyed when the body is destroyed.
Just as a man giving up old worn out garments accepts other new apparel, in the same way the embodied soul giving up old and worn out bodies verily accepts new bodies.”
~ Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Krishna to Arjuna
“I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as a plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was man.
Why should I fear?
When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as man,
To soar with angels blest;
But even from angelhood I must pass on …”
~ Rumi
death, as men call him, ends what they call men
–but beauty is more now than dying’s when…
~ e. e. cummings
“The dewdrop belongs to the sea.
Separated, it is vulnerable to the sun and wind and other elements of nature;
but when the droplet returns to its source, it becomes magnified in oneness with the sea.
So it is with your life. United to God you become immortal.”
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
Eternal Life is gained by utter abandonment of one’s own life.
When God appears to His ardent lover the lover is absorbed in Him,
and not so much as a hair of the lover remains.
True lovers are as shadows, and when the sun shines in glory
the shadows vanish away.
He is a true lover to God to whom God says,
“I am thine, and thou art mine! ”
~ Rumi
Tree of Life
The Last Supper
The biblical story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection raises crucial issues about life and death – about afterlife and rebirth – and about our true identity and reality.
As countless millions traditionally commemorate the rebirth and resurrection of Jesus Christ following his physical death by crucifixion, let us contemplate the deep significance of that story. Whether we regard it as historic or metaphoric, the story raises crucial issues about life and death – about afterlife and rebirth – and about our true identity and reality.
Physical death is inevitable, but Life is perpetual.
Death of the physical body is inevitable and unavoidable. After birth, “no matter how we strive, no body leaves alive.” Uncertainty exists only about time of death, and about whether there is conscious life after physical death.
For millennia seers, saints, philosophers and mystics have addressed perennial questions of life after physical death and of our true identity and reality. Since the beginning of the 20th century when Albert Einstein revolutionized Western science with his theories of special and general relativity, quantum physicists and other non-materialistic scientists have begun confirming ancient mystical insights.
Raymond A. Moody, Jr., PhD, MD coined the term ‘Near Death Experience’ [NDE] in his 1975 best-selling book “Life After Life”. Since then NDE’s have become widely considered, especially by millions who claim to have experienced them. And some leading-edge non-materialist scientists have cited testimonies about NDE’s and other extraordinary mystical experiences as evidence that consciousness survives physical death.
For example, Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, world renowned scientist, teacher, author and pioneering authority on death and dying, believed in survival of spirit after physical death, and used butterflies as symbols of the death process.
Soon after World War II, she visited the children’s barracks at the Maidanek concentration camp in Poland. There, amazingly, she observed hundreds of butterfly images drawn by the inmate children on the walls, even with pebbles and fingernails. Spellbound by the sight of butterflies drawn on the walls, she wondered why they were there and what they meant.
Twenty-five years later, after listening to hundreds of terminally ill patients, she finally realized that the imprisoned children must have known that they were going to die, and intuitively were using butterflies as images of the physical death process. Dr. Kubler-Ross thus explained in The Wheel of Life, A Memoir of Living and Dying:
“They knew that soon they would become butterflies. Once dead, they would be out of that hellish place. Not tortured anymore. Not separated from their families. Not sent to gas chambers. None of this gruesome life mattered anymore. Soon they would leave their bodies the way a butterfly leaves its cocoon. And I realized that was the message they wanted to leave for future generations. . . .It also provided the imagery that I would use for the rest of my career to explain the process of death and dying.”
Dr. Kubler-Ross’s writings have inspired many other non-materialist scientists, authors, and teachers who have followed her lead. Also, of great importance in helping us understand whether spirit survives physical death were the ground-breaking scientific studies by Dr. Ian Stevenson, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, who for forty years studied children world-wide who spontaneously remembered past lives. Dr. Stevenson objectively validated and documented about twelve hundred such cases.
Thanks to the ‘leading edge’ work of Dr. Kubler-Ross and Dr. Stevenson, and of distinguished non-material scientists inspired by them, there now exists overwhelming scientific evidence that consciousness and mind are independent of physical bodies; that our physical bodies and brains are not originators of consciousness and mind, but their receptors, tuners and transducers. And that until we evolve beyond space/time duality reality, apparent reincarnation or rebirth may happen after death of the brain and physical body.
What survives physical death?
If – like snowflakes – each of us manifests as an absolutely unique physical form, what is it about us that can survive death of that unique form, and be “born and reborn”?
“Reincarnation” is often understood to be the transmigration of a “soul” – viz. apparently uniquely circumscribed spirit – to another body after physical death.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Hinduism’s most cited ancient scripture, Divine Avatar Krishna instructs Prince Arjuna that:
“The soul is eternal, all-pervading, unmodifiable, immovable and primordial.”; “The soul never takes birth and never dies” but “when the body is destroyed” or when “giving up old and worn out bodies . . [it] accepts new bodies.”
~ Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2
Though in Buddhism there is no concept of separate soul or individual self that survives death, Buddhists believe in rebirth. Like most mystics, Buddhists say that in addition to our physical body, we are enveloped by subtle astral and mental bodies, which survive death of the physical body and become consciously associated with successive physical bodies.
Thus the Dalai Lama says that:
“We are born and reborn countless number of times, and it is possible that each being has been our parent at one time or another. Therefore, it is likely that all beings in this universe have familial connections.”
A detailed and compelling description of afterlife can be found in “Autobiography of a Yogi”, by Paramahansa Yogananda, Chapter 43 – The Resurrection of Sri Yukteswar . There Yogananda credibly recounts a long discussion with his physically deceased Guru, Sri Yukteswar, who – like Jesus – resurrected to explain to his disciple Yogananda many details of afterlife. [You can read that extraordinarily fascinating story at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Autobiography_of_a_Yogi/Chapter_43
Many psychics say that on physical death “we” survive and enter different realms. eg. http://www.victorzammit.com/Whenwedie/whatdoeshappen.htm
But ancient Vedic and Buddhist non-dualism philosophies (“Advaita”;”Advaya”) have for millennia taught that this impermanent and ever changing world is an unreal illusion called maya or samsara; and, that “all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream”… .
“The world, indeed, is like a dream
and the treasures of the world are an alluring mirage!”
~ Buddha
“A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion,
does not act as if it is real,
so he escapes the suffering.”
~ Buddha
Notwithstanding the Buddha’s non-dualist teachings, the Dalai Lama says he practices death and rebirth eight times daily. And, as Tibetan Bodhisattva of Compassion, he intends to return until all sentient beings are liberated from suffering.
If you had the option of a one-way exit pass to ‘heaven’, would you volunteer as a Bodhisattva to come back to this crazy world?
Vivekananda and Einstein.
The ancient Eastern non-dualism teachings were first brought to large Western audiences by Swami Vivekananda, principal disciple of nineteenth century Indian Holy Man Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa, at and after the 1893 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago.
In an eloquent New York City lecture called “The Real and the Apparent Man”, Vivekananda equated maya or samsara with “time, space, and causation” and presciently predicted scientific confirmation of the ancient Vedic non-dual philosophy of One Infinite Existence. He said:
“According to the Advaita philosophy, ..this Maya or ignorance–or name and form, or, as it has been called in Europe, time, space, and causality–is out of this one Infinite Existence showing us the manifoldness of the universe; in substance, this universe is one. So long as any one thinks that there are two ultimate realities, he is mistaken. When he has come to know that there is but one, he is right. This is what is being proved to us every day, on the physical plane, on the mental plane, and also on the spiritual plane.”
“What then becomes of all this threefold eschatology of the dualist, that when a man dies he goes to heaven, or goes to this or that sphere, and that the wicked persons become ghosts, and become animals, and so forth? None comes and none goes, says the non-dualist. How can you come and go? You are infinite; where is the place for you to go? “So it is with regard to the soul; the very question of birth and death in regard to it is utter nonsense. Who goes and who comes? Where are you not? Where is the heaven that you are not in already? Omnipresent is the Self of man. Where is it to go? Where is it not to go? It is everywhere. So all this childish dream and puerile illusion of birth and death, of heavens and higher heavens and lower worlds, all vanish immediately for the perfect. For the nearly perfect it vanishes after showing them the several scenes up to Brahmaloka. It continues for the ignorant.”
“Your own will is all that answers prayer, only it appears under the guise of different religious conceptions to each mind. We may call it Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, but it is only the Self, the ‘I’.”
~ Swami Vivekananda – Jnana Yoga
Revered 20th century Indian sage, Sri Ramana Maharshi – who was a renowned exponent of non-dualism – taught that for self-realized beings there is no reincarnation, but that reincarnation exists until self-realization – that self-realization reveals this entire world of space/time/duality as illusionary maya or samsara. Thus, responding to the question: “Is reincarnation true?”, he said:
“Reincarnation exists only so long as there is ignorance. There is really no reincarnation at all, either now or before. Nor will there be any hereafter. This is the truth.”
Einstein’s revolutionary non-mechanistic science and unconventional religious ideas were consistent with highest non-dualistic Eastern religious teachings, because they questioned the substantiality of matter, the ultimate reality of space, time and causality, and reincarnation. Like Vivekananda, Einstein said:
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
“Our separation of each other is an optical illusion of consciousness.”
“Space and time are not conditions in which we live, they are modes in which we think”
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.”
“There is no place in this new kind of physics for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.”
“That which is impenetrable to us really exists. Behind the secrets of nature remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.”
“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, …Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism.”
~ Albert Einstein
Ron’s Explanations and Reflections on Reincarnations and Resurrections.
Dear Friends,
At age ninety, I have long reflected upon crucially important perennial questions concerning life, death, afterlife, and rebirth. And thereby I’ve been blessed to realize that consciousness we call “life” continues eternally after inevitable physical death.
Until my mid-life spiritual awakening, I self-identified only as my mortal physical body, its thoughts and its story, and believed that inevitable death of the body ended life. I had no opinion, knowledge or belief concerning reincarnation or afterlife in ‘heaven’ or ‘hell’, or of an immortal “soul”.
Then in my early forties, I had irreversibly transformative experiences of spiritual self-identity and afterlife: I began to realize that I was not merely my mortal body, its thoughts and story, but eternal and universal awareness. And I started seeing visions of apparent past lives, and inner and outer appearances of deceased people, including my maternal grandfather and Mahatma Gandhi, who I now regard as my first perceived inner guide.
So, I began accepting Eastern ideas of reincarnation and transmigration of an eternal soul, while gradually losing fear of inevitable physical death. Then, on meeting my beloved Guruji, Shri Dhyanyogi Madhusudandas, I learned that from childhood he had been preoccupied with two perennial puzzles: “Who am I?” and “What is death?”; and, that at age thirteen, inspired by irresistible inner longing, Guruji had run away from home in search of experiential answers to those eternal questions.
Inspired by Guruji, I developed a deep curiosity and philosophical interest in the spiritual significance of death and dying, reincarnation and karma. Elsewhere, on SillySutras.com I have shared many experiences, essays, quotes and poems on these subjects. (See, e.g., https://sillysutras.com/category/afterlife/ ;https://sillysutras.com/category/life-and-death/; https://sillysutras.com/category/reincarnation/ )
Ultimately I’ve concluded that cosmically there is no death; that “birth and death are virtual, while Life is perpetual” and that “as we lose our fear of leaving life, we gain the art of living life.” (See e.g. https://sillysutras.com/know-death-to-know-life-know-death-to-know-that-there-is-no-death/ )
Consequently, I’ve become ever less fearful about my own inevitable and perhaps imminent bodily death, and often witness Earth-life like an illusionary play or movie, rather than Reality – which I now consider timeless LOVE as Infinite Potentiality beyond comprehension, imagination or description.
Moreover, I’ve become persuaded that from a Self–realized ‘Buddha’s eye view’ all our supposedly separate lifetimes, incarnations, emanations or appearances can be Seen timelessly and concurrently – formed like ink blots in a ‘big bang’ Rorschach test; but that (except for rare Avatars or Buddhas) we are karmically challenged to live each supposed space/time lifetime as lovingly and empathetically as possible, while ever mindful that we are not separate mortal entities but indivisible formless and eternal Infinite Potentiality as LOVE.
To encourage our deep insights on perennial questions of afterlife and reincarnation, like “Who am I?” and “What is death?”, I have shared the foregoing writings.
May Easter and every day help us attain destined inner fulfillment and happiness during our ephemeral lifetimes on precious planet Earth.
And so may it be!
2023 Epilogue.
Dear Friends,
During recent equinox holidays we have experienced an unprecedented era of social, psychological, political, and economic turbulence, violence, and polarity, with seemingly imminent nuclear war or other omnicidal catastrophe ending earth-life as we’ve known it.
More people than ever before are suffering fears of death, illness, impoverishment, or imminent calamity, and are unable to live normally. They feel deprived of God-given human rights and necessities, and prevented from engaging in customary economic and social activities. Some are homeless or ‘sheltering’ unable to reverently commemorate the equinox holidays with others.
Nonetheless, our species is still insanely plundering, polluting and pillaging our planet’s limited resources and and unsustainably destroying it’s precious ecosystem and climate.
But, paradoxically, this is also a time of epochal opportunity, not only a time of apparently imminent catastrophe caused or condoned by our species.
Thus, this an especially appropriate time for us to deeply reflect upon our fundamental life purposes, priorities and responsibilities as sentient Earth beings.
Because ignorance of humanity’s immortal Self-Identity causes continual fearful sufferings which impede evolution and progress, it is crucial that we transcend fears. So the foregoing writings are offered to help us overcome our fears, and thereby enter an unprecedented new era of peace and prosperity on earth.
Dedication
These writings are deeply dedicated to encouraging reflection about our Eternal Self-identity as timeless Divine LOVE.
May they help us experience ever expanding fulfillment and inner happiness during our ephemeral lifetimes on precious planet Earth, whatever we believe about death, afterlife or rebirth.
Invocation.
May we – in this ephemeral human lifetime
on our precious planet Earth –
realize our common dream for a new reality,
where everyone everywhere is happy.
May Everyone Everywhere Be Happy!
“Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu!”
And so shall it be!!
Ron Rattner
Divine Harmony
~ by Swami Paramahansa Yogananda
“Harmony is the secret principle of life.”
~ Swami Paramahansa Yogananda
“You are walking on the earth as in a dream.
Our world is a dream within a dream; you must realize
that to find God is the only goal, the only purpose, for which you are here.
For Him alone you exist. Him you must find.”
~ Swami Paramahansa Yogananda
Swami Paramahansa Yogananda January 5, 1893 – March 7, 1952
Ron’s Introduction to “Divine Harmony”
Dear Friends,
To honor Swami Paramahansa Yogananda on the anniversary of his 1952 mahasamadhi, it is my grateful privilege to share with you Swami Yogananda’s enlightened aphorisms titled “Divine Harmony” as excerpted verbatim from his “Journey To Self-Realization: Collected Talks And Essays On Realizing God In Daily Life, Volume III”.
Swami Yogananda’s profound wisdom words about “Divine Harmony” are shared to help heal the world, by awakening Humankind to our spiritual Oneness and Harmony with Nature and Universal Awareness, as LOVE.
May Paramahansa Yogananda’s Divine message inspire us to BE harmonious with ourselves, with each other, and with all of Nature of which we are part.
And so may it be!
Ron Rattner
“Divine Harmony” ~ by Paramahansa Yogananda
Excerpted from Journey To Self-Realization: Collected Talks And Essays On Realizing God In Daily Life, Volume III.
· Disharmony is misery and death; harmony is the joy of life.
· We Live in Two Worlds
· The outside world is the one in which your life engages in action and interaction. The world inside of you determines your happiness or unhappiness, and also your fitness or unfitness, expressed in the world outside. The hand of the One who made these worlds tuned them to harmonize with each other. Harmony is their inherent nature. If they seem discordant, that is the fault of those who misuse and abuse the potentials of these divine creations.
· People are convinced that their own personal perceptions are “fact” until contrary evidence eventually proves otherwise. Who can persuade biased individuals that the whole universe moves in an eternal cosmic rhythm, and that all irregularities are misconceptions due to limited or distorted vision? Those who can hear, hear; those who can see, see; those who have a perceptive heart perceive the divine harmony that runs through all creation.
· To penetrate into the soul of creation, yoga insight is required.
· There Is Harmony at the Core of Disharmony
· Things are not what they seem.
· Consider everything that happens as a note in the symphony of the Cosmic Conductor.
· Only those who partake of the harmony within their souls know the harmony that runs through nature. Whosoever lacks this inner harmony feels also a lack of it in the world. The mind in chaos finds chaos all around.
· How can one know what peace is like if he has never tasted it?
· But he who has inner peace can abide in this state even in the midst of outer discord.
· Harmony is born of love and wisdom. These, in turn, are offspring of a heart that is pure and outreaching. A pure heart is the result of pure thoughts.
· Mental purity comes from a selective process by which the mind sorts good thoughts from bad, rejecting the latter and dwelling always on the former.
· By repetition, and by reinforcement through application to action, discrimination becomes a virtuous habit. When the mental conflict of divergent thoughts ceases, owing to the elimination of wrong thinking, there arises in one’s life an outward as well as an inward harmony. Therefore, whenever your thoughts engage in a family quarrel among themselves, mediate their differences with wisdom and behold! Distressing conflicts will disturb you no more.
· The mind is nature’s incinerator wherein you can burn to ashes all mental dross that is not worthy to be saved: your waste thoughts and desires, your misconceptions and grievances, and your discords in human relationships. There is not a single relationship, however estranged, you cannot reconcile, provided you do so first in your own mind. There is not a single problem in life you cannot resolve, provided you first solve it in your inner world, its place of origin. Be not intimidated by consequences, even though they be drastic. Before you act, if you first harmonize the situation with the discriminative wisdom in your mind, the outcome will take care of itself. A harmonized mind produces harmony in this world of seeming discord.
· Inner harmony is a prolific source of power; it breeds strength. Things that you think you are unable to bear, you can not only bear but change and improve. To you is given the power that can move the world and alter the face of fate despite inharmonious outer circumstances.
· Harmony conserves mental energy; disharmony dissipates it.
· Harmony manifests itself as a natural goodness. A man who cannot get along with others is one who does not get along with himself, he is always at war inwardly, ill at ease with his own nature.
· Those who cannot find peace in their own hearts will not find it elsewhere either.
· Harmony is the Secret Principle of Life
· Good judgment is a natural expression of wisdom; but it is directly dependent on harmony within, which is poise of mind. When the mind lacks harmony, it has no peace; and without peace it lacks both judgment and wisdom. Life is full of bumps and knocks. In the hours of trials, which demand your keenest judgment, if you preserve your mental equilibrium you will attain victory.
· This is equally true in any type of organization – any structure that has interacting parts, from nature as a whole to human relationships to corporate businesses and spiritual societies. Harmony is the soul of organization; disharmony is death.
· Harmony is the fruit of common understanding.
· Efforts to establish harmony among human beings or nations solely on the basis of economic equality of equivalence of military preparedness are sure to fail.
· What is necessary is an understanding of the common higher necessities for the preservation and true happiness of the bodies, minds, and souls of all beings.
· Love and forbearance are essential to the growth of harmony. Love nurtures all things that grow; it harmonizes and unites. Hatred agitates and separates; and indifference destroys what could have been made good and beneficial. Love is harmony and harmony is love.
· “People have time to worry and to suffer, but feel they have no time to meditate and work toward being truly happy.” Throw off difference and cultivate love, forbearance, and wisdom. Build your joys on the sure foundation of inner harmony. Cherish no thought that does not harmonize with the love and lawful ideals of God. Thus will your whole life be flooded with the light and bliss of the Divine Harmony.
Invocation
May Swami Paramahansa Yogananda’s Divine message inspire us to BE
harmonious with ourselves, with each other, and with all of Nature of which we are part.
May we thereby cooperatively coexist, peacefully, harmoniously and happily, with each other and with all other life on our precious planet,
for the welfare of the World and all life.
Until ultimately we realize our common Divine Self-identity
As the Eternal light of timeless LOVE.
And so may it be!
Ron Rattner
Doing Time
~ Ron’s Memoirs and Sutra-Poem
“Be empty of worrying,
Think of Who Created Thought!
Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?”
~ Rumi
“True freedom and the end of suffering is living in such a way as if you had completely chosen whatever you feel or experience at this moment. This inner alignment with Now is the end of suffering.”
~ Eckhart Tolle
“There is only one time when it is essential to awaken.
That time is now.”
~ Buddha
“That which is timeless is found now.”
~ Buddha
Shri Dhyanyogi Madhusudandas
Ron’s Introduction to “Doing Time”
Dear Friends,
Today’s posting, on my ninetieth birthday, is a sutra-poem with memoirs, paradoxically titled “Doing Time”. Instead of being about the colloquial English idiom meaning serving a prison sentence, today’s posting is about the psychological imprisonment of almost all 8 billion humans, except for rare Buddhas and Bodhisattvas who intentionally incarnate to help others.
Spiritually most humans are unknowingly imprisoned in time by illusionary ego/mind ideas of self-identity and “reality”. We are mass acculturated and psychologically ‘programmed’ to mistakenly believe ourselves to be separate physical entities in space and time apart from each other, Nature, and Eternal Divinity.
Today’s quotations, sutra-poem, and memoirs remind us that in Truth we are the unseen spiritual Source of the world we see – ONE Eternal Spirit; ONE Life; ONE Light; ONE LOVE!
After my midlife spiritual awakening I experienced many years of intense longing for the Divine, beyond the inevitable suffering of this world. It began with the amazing experience on a Yosemite mountain-top of beholding inner luminescence of “ten thousand suns”. But only after another unforgettable experience with my beloved Guruji, did I begin considering myself imprisoned and condemned to suffer in a human body.
While massaging Guruji in my San Francisco apartment, I exclaimed at the flexibility and softness of his then hundred year old body. Whereupon Guruji unforgettably responded:
“Rasik, a yogi’s body is like a baby’s body.
Your body is like a prison.
I am like a jailer with the prison key. I come and go as I please.”
Thereafter, during many years of seclusion, prayer and meditation, I considered myself metaphorically ‘imprisoned’ in a space/time human body. It was then that I was given the following sutra-poem, which I called “Doing Time”.
In comments following the written and recited verses, I will summarize my evolution from longing to escape incarnate worldly suffering to aspiring to be in this world but not of this world, so as to help others transcend suffering.
A more detailed description and explanation of that transition is recounted in my prior memoirs chapter Human Body – A Precious ‘Prison’.
Here is the “Doing Time” poem. Please, enjoy it.
Doing Time
Time is how
“I” Measure “Now”,
And space
Is for places
Where I’m –
Entangled here in time.
But I long to be – FREE
Where there is no “ME”-
Nowhere,
Out of time,
Beyond I’m,
Beyond hereness/thereness-
As just Awareness –
NOW!
Ron’s audio comments and recitation of Doing Time
Ron’s Explanation of “Doing Time”
After birth in a human body and until physical death, we are compelled to be in this world of inevitable pain and suffering. But we are not obliged to be here mentally. With focused awareness and self-control of our thoughts, emotions and attitudes, we can remain mentally peaceful, grateful and joyful.
Thereby we can ‘be in this world’ physically, but ‘not of this world’ mentally, attitudinally or spiritually.
While “tuning in” to our ever present worldly problems, we can “tune out” from much worldly suffering by non-judgmentally and forgivingly focusing on our Eternal and infinite inner Essence, which is LOVE and Light.
Background
Eastern spiritual paths identify human incarnation as an extraordinarily precious opportunity to evolve – beyond that of any other life-form; Buddhist and Hindu teachings say that for enlightenment it is better to be born human than even in a heavenly realm.
Before my mid-life spiritual awakening, I self-identified only with my body/mind and its story. Though I cherished my health, I was totally unaware of esoteric evolutionary perspectives about preciousness of human incarnation. But, since realizing that I was and am much more than my body and its story, I have deeply reflected on the significance and purpose of a human lifetime.
After previously unimagined spiritual awakening experiences, I began wondering about the nature and importance of the human body. I realized that my initial intense rebirth experience had temporarily released a previously unimaginable flow of vital energies (chi or prana), which gradually had abated as I returned to ‘normal’ consciousness.
So, I became highly motivated to again access that hidden reservoir of vital energy.
This motivation greatly intensified and was deeply inspired after I met Guruji and observed his amazing physical prowess, even as a centenarian, and experienced his extraordinarily intense and powerful cosmic life-force energy (“shakti”).
I received confirmation of Guruji’s exceptional energy upon an unforgettable synchronistic experience with him. While massaging Guruji in my San Francisco apartment, I exclaimed at the flexibility and softness of his then hundred year old body. Whereupon Guruji unforgettably responded:
“Rasik, a yogi’s body is like a baby’s body. Your body is like a prison.
I am like a jailer with the prison key. I come and go as I please.”
I became and remained intensely curious about Guruji’s revelation that my body was like a prison. I wondered how and why ‘I’ was ‘imprisoned’, and how ‘I’ could get out of ‘jail’ – free like Guruji.
Was I imprisoned by body stiffness from subconsciously stored traumas?
It was apparent that my body was not supple like Guruji’s body. Though half his age, I couldn’t even sit with crossed legs, much less stand on my head or perform the other advanced yogic postures (asanas) that Guruji showed us.
As I remembered the extraordinary vitality which temporarily followed my spiritual rebirth “peek” experience, I intuited that it was a glimpse of a potentially achievable bodily state well beyond anything I had theretofore imagined. But how could I restore that state? And even if possible, would the restoration of such a state allow me to get out of prison at will, like Guruji? That remained a mystery.
Gradually and synchronistically, I’ve been given insights about the bodily ‘prison’ mystery, but haven’t yet ‘solved’ it.
I discovered an important clue, in Paramahansa Yogananda’s “Autobiography of a Yogi”, Chapter 43, wherein Yogananda’s master Yukteswar resurrected to reveal the genesis of human physical, astral, and causal bodies, saying:
“The mere presence of a body signifies that its existence is made possible by unfulfilled desires.” “The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all man’s slavery…” “Physical desires are rooted in egotism and sense pleasures.” “So long as the soul of man is encased in one, two, or three body-containers, sealed tightly with the corks of ignorance and desires, he cannot merge with the sea of Spirit.”
~ Sri Yukteswar
Upon reading Sri Yuktewar’s esoteric explanations of human ‘bondage’, I intuitively accepted them as true. And I remembered that Guruji had revealed in San Francisco lectures on “Death, Dying and Beyond” that during a 1971 ‘near death experience’ he had been sent back by Lord Rama from a heavenly realm to his physical body because of his unfulfilled desires to help people.
I realized that all phenomena and forms – including human forms – that appear in this space/time reality interdependently originate in subtle energy planes pursuant to mysterious laws of causality. And I remembered that even though Guruji had evolved beyond limits of ordinary human consciousness, he had remained in a human body, but with amazing ability to transcend ordinary physical limitations, only because of his unselfish desires to help others.
Whereas it was obvious that I was ‘imprisoned’ by bonds of ego desire and ignorance mentioned by Sri Yukteswar.
So, thereafter, I became highly motivated to transcend all such egotistic bonds, and to get out of ‘prison’ – free like Guruji. Expressing these aspirations, I soon composed the above “Doing Time” verses.
Evolutionary Insights
During the forty year period since then, I have been blessed with an ongoing evolutionary process. Now, instead of longing to escape incarnate worldly suffering, I am unspeakably grateful for the immense privilege of encouraging others to transcend suffering by publishing memoirs insights about “Reality” and Self-identity, as requested by Guruji, which are consistent with those expressed for millennia by non-dualist Mystics.
And by so helping others it has helped me find previously unimagined happiness and peace of mind, which I aspire for everyone everywhere.
Conclusion and Dedication
Most humans are unknowingly imprisoned in time by illusionary ego/mind ideas of self-identity and “reality”.
However we are exceptionally privileged to live in an era with unprecedented opportunities for spiritual awakening and evolutionary elevation to a wonderful new ascended Earth-age, forever beyond “doing time” ‘imprisonment’ with fear and suffering, and concern about future earth-life.
These “Doing Time” writings are deeply dedicated to helping everyone everywhere soon awaken to such a wonderful new Earth-age.
And so may it be!
Ron Rattner
“Harmonic Resonation” ~ “Harmonic Coalescence”
~ Sutra Sayings
“May we live in harmless harmony,
and keep in cosmic synchrony,
as we play in Nature’s symphony.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
Ron’s Introduction to “Harmonic Resonation” and “Harmonic Coalescence”
Dear Friends,
“Harmonic Resonation” and “Harmonic Coalescence” are poetic sutra-sayings composed long ago about the crucial importance of living harmoniously with each other and Nature.
As hereafter published and orally recited they still express ever enduring ideas and ideals of fundamental spiritual significance.
May these sutra-sayings encourage and inspire us to help heal the world, by living as LOVE, with our harmonious thoughts, emotions and behaviors.
And so may it be!
Ron Rattner
Harmonic Resonation ~ Sutra Sayings
Quicken and BE,
in harmony.
The higher our entrainment,
the greater our attainment.
Don’t disrupt and polarize,
but syncretize and harmonize.
Live harmlessly
in harmony.
Stay in cosmic synchrony,
as you play in Nature’s symphony.
How can there be harm in me
when I am perfect harmony?
As harmony we stay
out of harm’s way.
Let us consciously live conflict-free
as constant cosmic Harmony.
Lovingly let us ever Be
thought-free perfect Harmony.
Ron’s audio recitation of “Harmonic Resonation” – Sutra Sayings
Harmonic Coalescence
May we harmonize,
together in unity:
Unity in diversity,
not uniformity;
Unity in equality,
not hierarchy;
Unity in integrity,
not conformity.
Unity as universal
LOVE!
Ron’s audio recitation of “Harmonic Coalescence” – Sutra Sayings
And so may it be!
Ron Rattner
“Harmony”
~ Quotation Collection
“Love is the energizing elixir of the Universe,
the cause and effect of all Harmony.”
~ Rumi
“When there is harmony
between the mind, heart and resolution
then nothing is impossible.”
~ Rig Veda
“Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another . . And over all these virtues put on LOVE, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”
~ Colossians 3: 12-17
“Let us live in harmless harmony,
and stay in cosmic synchrony,
as we play in Nature’s symphony.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
Ron’s introduction to “Harmony” ~ Quotation Collection
Dear Friends,
Over thirty years ago I began deeply reflecting about the crucial importance of living harmoniously with each other and Nature. Since then I’ve accumulated the following treasury of inspiring quotations about “Harmony”, which express ever enduring ideas and ideals of fundamental spiritual significance.
May these quotations encourage and inspire our harmonious thoughts, emotions and behaviors to help heal the world, beyond illusory perceived separation from Nature and each other.
And so may it be!
Ron Rattner
Quotations and Sayings about “Harmony”
“Harmony is the secret principle of life.”
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
“When there is harmony between the mind, heart and resolution
then nothing is impossible.”
~ Rig Veda
”Neither human wisdom nor divine inspiration
can confer upon man any greater blessing than
[to live a life of happiness and harmony here on earth].”
~ Plato
“Clothe yourselves with compassion,
kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.
Bear with each other and forgive one another . .
And over all these virtues put on LOVE,
which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”
~ Colossians 3: 12-17
“Love is the energizing elixir of the Universe,
the cause and effect of all Harmony.”
~ Rumi
“(A)ll problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony.”
~ Sri Aurobindo
“The heart and mind can find peace and harmony
by contemplating the transcendental nature
of the true Self as supreme effulgent life.”
~ Patanjali
“Where the heart is full of kindness which seeks no injury to another,
either in act or thought or wish, this full love creates an atmosphere of harmony,
whose benign power touches with healing all who come within its influence.
Peace in the heart radiates peace to other hearts,
even more surely than contention breeds contention.”
~ Patanjali, Yoga Sutra
“Affirm divine calmness and peace,
and send out only thoughts of love and goodwill
if you want to live in peace and harmony.
Never get angry, for anger poisons your system.”
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
“A harmonized mind produces harmony
in this world of seeming discord.”
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
“Go forth in every direction –
for the happiness, the harmony, the welfare of the many.
Offer your heart, the seeds of understanding,
like a lamp overturned and re-lit, illuminating the darkness.”
~ Buddha
“The life ahead can only be glorious
if you learn to live in total harmony with the Lord.”
~ Shirdi Sai Baba
“Happiness is when what you think,
what you say,
and what you do are in harmony.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi
“Virtue is harmony.”
~ Pythagoras
“God reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists.”
~ Albert Einstein
“Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed.
Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi
“The sage is one with the world,
and lives in harmony with it.”
~ Lao Tzu
”One who lives in accordance with nature
does not go against the way of things,
but moves in harmony with the present moment.”
~ Lao Tzu
“He who lives in harmony with himself
lives in harmony with the universe.”
~ Marcus Aurelius
“The essence of saintliness is total acceptance of the present moment, harmony with things as they happen.”
~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
“If only the whole world could feel the power of harmony.”
~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
”The superior person is in Harmony,
but does not follow the crowd.
The lesser person follows the crowd,
but is not in Harmony.”
~ Confucius
“Love opens all doors,
no matter how tightly closed they may be,
no matter how rusty from lack of use.
Your work is to bring unity and harmony,
to open all those doors which have been closed for a long time.
Have patience and tolerance. Open your heart all the time.”
~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
“The life of this world is nothing but the harmony of opposites”
~ Rumi
“Where there is discord,
let us sow Harmony.”
~ Peace Prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi
”Without law or compulsion,
men would dwell in harmony.”
~ Lao Tzu
As soon as laws are necessary for men,
they are no longer fit for freedom.
~ Pythagoras
”Happy the man whose lot it is to know
The secrets of the earth.
He hastens not
To work his fellows hurt by unjust deeds,
But with rapt admiration contemplates
Immortal Nature’s ageless harmony,
And how and when the order came to be.”
~ Euripides
”To have a positive religion is not necessary.
To be in harmony with yourself and the universe is what counts,
and this is possible without positive and specific formulation in words.”
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The unlike is joined together,
and from differences results the most beautiful harmony.”
~ Heraclitus
”Mutual respect and mutual listening
are the foundations of harmony within the family.”
~ Buddha
“Harmony can not thrive in a climate of
mistrust, cheating, bullying; mean-spirited competition.”
~ Dalai Lama
”Wherever I go meeting the public… spreading a message of human values … [and] harmony, is the most important thing.”
~ Dalai Lama
”If you want peace and harmony in the world,
you must have peace and harmony in your hearts and minds.”
~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
“Happiness is not a matter of intensity
but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.”
~ Thomas Merton
”Harmony sinks deep into the recesses of the soul
and takes its strongest hold there,
bringing grace also to the body and mind as well.
Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe,
wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness,
and life to everything. It is the essence of order.”
~ Plato
”Music then is simply the result of the effects of Love on rhythm and harmony.”
~ Plato
”Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God
and the permissible delights of the soul.”
”Harmony is next to Godliness”
~ Johann Sebastian Bach
“If only the whole world could feel the power of harmony.”
~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“Every element has a sound, an original sound from the order of God; all those sounds unite like the harmony from harps and zithers.”
~ Hildegard of Bingen
“A life in harmony with nature,
the love of truth and virtue,
will purge the eyes to understanding her text.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
“With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony,
and the deep power of joy,
we see into the life of things.”
~ William Wordsworth
“Life’s errors cry for the merciful beauty
that can modulate their isolation
into a harmony with the whole.”
~ Rabindranath Tagore
“The highest education is that
which does not merely give us information
but makes our life in harmony with all existence.”
~ Rabindranath Tagore
“Training the intellect does not result in intelligence.
Intelligence comes into being when one acts in perfect harmony,
both intellectually and emotionally.”
~ J. Krishnamurti
“As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures
there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people.
Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.”
~ Isaac Bashevis Singer
”I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind…”
~ Albert Einstein
”The harmony of natural law reveals an Intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”
~ Albert Einstein
“In art, and in the higher ranges of science,
there is a feeling of harmony which underlies all endeavor.
There is no true greatness in art or science
without that sense of harmony.”
~ Albert Einstein
“My feeling is religious insofar as I am imbued
with the consciousness of the insufficiency of the human mind
to understand more deeply the harmony of the Universe
which we try to formulate as “laws of nature”
~ Albert Einstein
”Today wherever you go, carry the intention of peace, love, and harmony in your heart.”
“Just as light brightens darkness, discovering inner fulfillment can eliminate any disorder or discomfort. This is truly the key to creating balance and harmony in everything you do.”
~ Deepak Chopra
”There is great freedom in simplicity of living,
and after I began to feel this,
I found harmony in my life between inner and outer well-being.
There is a great deal to be said about such harmony,
not only for an individual life but also for the life of a society.
It’s because as a world we have gotten ourselves so far out of harmony,
so way off on the material side, that when we discover something like nuclear energy we are still capable of putting it into a bomb and using it to kill people!
This is because our inner well-being lags so far behind our outer well-being.”
~ Peace Pilgrim
”Everyone has the perfect gift to give the world- and if each of us is freed up to give our unique gift, the world will be in total harmony.”
~ R. Buckminster Fuller
“Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity.”
~ Plato (The Republic)
“Out of clutter find simplicity.
From discord make harmony.
In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
~ Albert Einstein
“The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace.
A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being
that places harmony in one’s life.”
~ Peace Pilgrim
“Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life’s relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.”
~ Soren Kierkegaard
“Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend;
you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left”
~ Aldo Leopold
“Live harmlessly in Harmony.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“How can there be harm in me,
when I’m in harmless Harmony?”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“Let us live in harmless harmony,
and stay in cosmic synchrony,
as we play in Nature’s symphony.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“Don’t disrupt and polarize,
but syncretize and harmonize.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
And so may it be!
Ron Rattner
Spiritual Paths
Q. “What is the path?”
A. “Everyday life is the path.”
~ Zen Master Nansen
Q. “Sir, shall I ever leave the spiritual path?”
A. “How could you?
Everyone in the world is on the spiritual path.”
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
“Just as a candle cannot burn without fire,
men cannot live without a spiritual life.”
~ Gautama Buddha
“The spiritual path –
is simply the journey of living our lives.
Everyone is on a spiritual path;
most people just don’t know it.”
~ Marianne Williamson
“The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear
and the acceptance of love.”
~ Marianne Williamson
“Truth is a pathless land,
and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever,
by any religion, by any sect.”
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
“In a conflict between the heart and the brain,
follow your heart.”
“You have to grow from the inside out.
None can teach you, none can make you spiritual.
There is no other teacher but your own soul.”
~ Swami Vivekananda
Spiritual Paths
Introduction to “Spiritual Paths”
Dear Friends,
The above perennial wisdom quotations, and the following Spiritual Paths sutra-essay, suggest a simple and universal way for us to resolve current complex worldly problems and dire threats.
They remind us to faithfully follow the inner wisdom of our Heart, by always living with love.
And so may it be!
Ron Rattner
Spiritual Paths
There are as many spiritual paths as people.
Each person is unique,
with unique evolutionary challenges
arising from unique karmic causes.
To find and follow your spiritual path –
Look within.
And find and follow your Heart.
Ron’s audio recitation of “Spiritual Paths”
Ron’s Comments on “Spiritual Paths”
We are living in exceptionally unhappy times. Most humans worldwide are troubled and polarized, and sometimes violent. They are accepting top-down domination benefiting only a few obscenely rich people and transnational corporations, rather than over 99% of Humankind.
Humans are thereby authorizing or allowing their leaders to psychopathically end life on Earth as we’ve known it by omnicidal nuclear, radiological or biological warfare, or by deliberate climate collapse. Alternatively, we can each avert any such catastrophe and enjoy happy lives without fear or suffering.
So, what can we do to accomplish this?
Dr. Seuss reminds us that
“Sometimes the questions are complicated
and the answers are simple.”
And Albert Einstein advises:
“Out of complexity, find simplicity!”
“When the solution is simple, God is answering.”
~ Albert Einstein
Also Einstein observes that we cannot solve our problems from the same level of consciousness which created them; that
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant.
We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
We will not solve the problems of the world from the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
~ Albert Einstein
Similarly, renowned sage Swami Vivekananda wisely advises that:
“In a conflict between the heart and the brain,
follow your heart.” “You have to grow from the inside out.
None can teach you, none can make you spiritual.
There is no other teacher but your own soul.”
~ Swami Vivekananda
Discussion
Each human is unique, with a unique perspective and unique karmic history. And each of us creates our own reality with our personal thoughts.
But though our mental perspectives are unique, we always share deep common consciousness. And when we access our common consciousness we can resolve seemingly insoluble individual and societal problems from intuitive levels of awareness above and beyond the mental levels which created them.
Thus this Spiritual Paths posting offers us a universal, but simple, spiritual method for resolving our seemingly complex problems: The method of living and growing from inside-out, by always following the wisdom of our heart, and living our every-day lives mindfully guided by our inner intuitions.
Invocation
With abiding faith in Self, Nature, and Divinity,
may we always follow the heartfelt wisdom of our inner intuitions –
with LOVE.
May we thereby resolve seemingly insoluble problems,
and bless the world – as LOVE.
And so may it be!
Ron Rattner
Becoming a Faith-Based Optimist
~ Ron’s Memoirs
“When I despair, I remember that all through history
the way of truth and love has always won.
There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible;
but in the end they always fall—think of it. Always.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi
“Faith is intuitive conviction, a knowing from the soul,
that cannot be shaken even by contradictions.”
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
“I’m only a cockeyed optimist . . .
stuck like a dope
With a thing called hope,
And I can’t get it out of my heart!”
~ Oscar Hammerstein II, South Pacific, lyrics
“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement.
Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”
“Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light.”
~ Helen Keller
“The highest thinkers of the ages,
the seers of the tribes and the nations,
have been optimists.”
~ Helen Keller
“An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… the truly wise person is colorblind.”
~ Albert Schweitzer
“Steady faith is stronger than destiny.
Destiny is the result of causes, mostly accidental,
and is therefore loosely woven.
Confidence and good hope will overcome it easily.”
~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
“Even faith in God is only a stage on the way.
Ultimately you abandon all, for you come to something so simple that there are no words to express it.”
~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Optimism optimizes opportunity.
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
Hanuman
Becoming a Faith-Based Optimist ~ Ron’s Memoirs
Introduction to “Becoming a Faith-Based Optimist”
Dear Friends,
In prior postings I’ve told how “I’ve Found A Faith-Based Life”, and defined faith as distinguished from belief. And I’ve explained that inner faith in the Divine, is the same as faith in one’s Self, and that such inner faith can bring us previously unimagined happiness.
Today I’ll tell how I found faith in Divine Self in a midlife transition from self-reliant secular litigation lawyer to devotional “born-again Hindu”; and how that faith became an optimistically unshakable conviction that everything happens for the best, until we transcend the ego illusion of existing separately in space/time.
And because these memoirs are published on commencement of important Equinox religious holy days, I’m including a 2022 Equinox Epilogue.
Memoirs of “Becoming a Faith-Based Optimist”
Soon after receiving 1978 shaktipat initiation from my beloved Guruji, I began daily Sanskrit recitations of a Ram mantra and the Hanuman Chalisa – a rhymed poetic ode to the mythological Vedic ‘monkey-god’ Hanuman (pictured above). The Hanuman Chalisa (composed by poet-saint and philosopher Tulsidas) metaphorically venerates Hanuman, who faithfully served Hindu avatar Rama, as the epitome of faith in God.
Shri Ramakrishna Paramahansa (with whom I feel deep devotional affinity) often cited an epic Ramayana story about Hanuman heroically leaping over the sea between South India and Shri Lanka (Ceylon) to serve Rama, as illustrating the epitome of divine faith. In the Gospel of Ramakrishna, he taught:
“You must have heard about the tremendous power of faith. It is said . . that Rama, who was God Himself – the embodiment of Absolute Brahman – had to build a bridge to cross the sea to Ceylon. But Hanuman, trusting in Rama’s name, cleared the sea in one jump and reached the other side. He had no need of a bridge.” . . . . “Once a person has faith he has achieved everything. There is nothing greater than faith.”
While repeatedly reciting Ram mantras and the Hanuman Chalisa, I felt their devotional energy while unconcerned about their precise Sanskrit meaning. And I became instinctively harmonious with Ram, as Divinity. Even today (at almost age ninety), I still often instinctively call out to Rama in devotionally honoring the Divine. And Hanuman energy became and remains for me symbolic of both enduring Faith and immutable optimism.
After I became an instinctive Rama devotee, I realized that my initial secular self-confidence and optimism had gradually grown to heartfelt Faith in God; that I’d evolved from being a pragmatic secular optimist into living a devotional faith-based life, with both conviction and optimism.
Also, I realized that with Faith it’s always best follow one’s conscience in all behaviors, and to surrender outcomes of such conscientious behaviors to Divine Source (or Tao) – to let go and go with the flow; because karmically whatever happens could not be otherwise. So, to clear our karma, we must non-judgmentally and forgivingly accept and bless everything and everyone NOW, as ephemeral and illusory appearances in ever impermanent space and time of our sole Divine Source – ineffable, immutable, and Eternal LOVE.
My insights revealed that our earthly sufferings arise from fearful and illusory ego-mind thoughts because we forget our true Divinity and immortality.
But that as omnipotent immortal spirit we have nothing to fear from anything that seems to happen in always illusory ego-mind space, time, and duality. Moreover, that our transcendence of ego-mind is inevitable, and always advanced by our loving behaviors.
2022 Equinox Epilogue
These memoirs are published concurrent with commencement of the Jewish High Holy Days, and the Hindu Navaratri shraddha period. In prior times I participated in both Jewish and Hindu religious ritual observances of these important holidays.
But in recent years, I’ve stopped attending all scheduled religious ritual services. As an innately faith-based optimist, I now continuously honor God every day and everywhere with Divine intentions, behaviors, and prayers, and with the SillySutras spiritual poetry and philosophy website.
Yet, I’ve instinctively realized that beyond ego-mind’s persistent “optical illusion” of a space, time, and duality worldly “reality”, all that is, was, or will be is NOW. Thus, that being a worldly faith-based optimist (with hope for the future) is like aspiring to an “impossible dream” of a never-attainable mental mirage – a time-based dreamlike fantasy “reality” that can never exist.
Optimists instinctively hope for the best. But “hope” is always “then” while Life is only NOW, ever NOW, never then.
However, since inception of the current historically unprecedented post-pandemic “new normal” era, I’ve become optimistically convinced, and foresee, that a “critical mass” of energetically elevated humans will soon co-create (as a cooperative global family) an infinitely more compassionate world, without fearful ego-mind deprivations and sufferings.
And these faith-based equinox memoirs are deeply dedicated to inspiring and hastening our imminent fulfillment of that optimistic prediction.
Conclusions
I’ve become and irreversibly remain a faith-based optimist, despite apparent cataclysmic threats against survival of human life as we’ve known it. And I equate my instinctive optimism with inner Faith in our sole Divine Source – ineffable, immutable, and Eternal LOVE.
Therefore I’m especially grateful to be able to now share these memoirs with you to help us realize and enjoy supreme fulfillment and happiness from ever optimistic faith in Divine LOVE, until we ascend and transcend all ego-mind perception-deception illusion.
Invocation
“May we ever ascend –
as LOVE and Light,Beyond-all suffering,
from ego-mind fright.”
And so may it be!
Ron Rattner
“Cockeyed optimist” video
To further encourage our heartfelt faith-based optimism, I’ve embedded below a YouTube video performance of the Rodgers and Hammerstein ‘cockeyed optimist’ song from “South Pacific”.
Please optimistically enjoy it as we energetically ascend as Love and Light,
beyond all suffering from ego-mind fright.
Honoring God’s “Holy Fools”
~ Ron’s Memoirs
“For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.”
~ 1 Corinthians 3:19
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”
~ Deuteronomy 6:4-5
“Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and everyone that loves is born of God, and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
~ 1 John 4:7-8
“Full of love for all things in the world;
practicing virtue in order to benefit others,
this man alone is happy.”
~ Buddha
“Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.”
~ Rumi
“Love is the highest, the grandest, the most inspiring,
the most sublime principle in creation.”
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
“Love Is The Law Of Life:
All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction.
Love is therefore the only law of life.
He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying.
Therefore, love for love’s sake,
because it is law of life, just as you breathe to live.”
~ Swami Vivekananda
“Only if one knows the truth of Love,
which is the real nature of Self,
will the strong entangled [ego] knot of life be untied.
Only if one attains the height of Love will liberation be attained.
Such is the heart of all religions.
The experience of Self is only Love,
which is seeing only Love, hearing only Love, feeling only Love,
tasting only Love and smelling only Love, which is bliss.”
~ Sri Ramana Maharshi
Honoring God’s “Holy Fools” ~ Ron’s Memoirs
Introduction
Dear Friends,
Prior memoirs have recounted my midlife transformation from “Secular Hebrew” social justice litigation lawyer to “Born-again Hindu” devotional-emotional lover of God, and then to “Uncertain Undo” seeking ‘relief from belief’, because ‘on the path of Undo, we’ll never be through, ’til we’re and undone ONE!’.
[See e.g. Crying For God and other ‘Kundalini Kriyas’]
This memoirs chapter tells how, as a newly awakened ‘lover of God’ (Bhakta), I’ve discovered and honored “Holy Fools” – rare ascetic and eccentric lovers of God, who don’t live in ordinary worldly ways.
I’ve learned that throughout human history there have been very famous “Holy Fools”. Only after first ‘discovering’ such famous “Holy Fools”, did I later learn that in all human societies there are countless more unknown God intoxicated “Holy Fools”; and that they timelessly bless this world as LOVE.
In some Eastern societies they are called “masts”, a word which originates from the Sufi term mast-Allah, meaning “intoxicated with God”.
In Hindu societies they are called Avadhutas, who are overwhelmed with inner love for God. For millennia India has honored Avadhutas, as self-realized bhakti mystics living beyond worldly ego-mind consciousness and concerns, and without adhering to accepted social standards. (See e.g. Advadhuta Gita)
To help you understand why I have honored spiritual “heretics” and “holy fools” as lovers of God, here is a summary of my devotional history:
Ron’s Devotional history
Until my profound midlife spiritual awakening, I hadn’t shed tears as an adult. But then I cried for twenty four hours. Thereafter, I began wondering why I was crying so much. But soon I realized with amazement that I was crying with intense longing for God. (See Beholding The Eternal Light Of Consciousness.) And I became and remained an extremely devotional, and frequent crier for God – often ecstatically longing and calling for the Divine.
After meeting my beloved Guruji, Shri Dhyanyogi Madhusudandas, and receiving his shaktipat initiation into the path of kundalini yoga as “Rasik: one engrossed in devotion”, I gradually learned that my continual longing and profuse crying for God was an immense transformative blessing – recognized not only in the bhakti Hindu devotional tradition, but also in:
1) Sufism epitomized by enlightened Muslim mystical poets Rumi and Hafiz who realized that all appearances in our seemingly complex earthly “reality” are manifestations of ONE eternal LOVE; and
2) in the Orthodox/Catholic “gift of tears” tradition of St. Isaac of Ninevah, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina.
Thus, when not crying I often had what I called ‘alternative LSD experiences’ of spontaneous (and sometimes ecstatic) Laughing, Singing, and Dancing. And even as an octogenarian “Uncertain Undo” I still often privately experience spontaneous outbursts of laughing, crying, and calling to God.
Guruji’s explanation was that:
“There are two kinds of kriyas, one is for purification and the other for the manifestation of joy. ..
Whenever one experiences great joy or bliss, this also manifests physically as crying or laughing.”
~ Shri Dhyanyogi Madhusudandas
Learning about devotional spirituality
Not until my 1976 spiritual awakening, did I begin learning about spirituality.
On moving from Chicago to San Francisco in 1960, I was ignorant about spiritual subjects, or religions other than Judaism.
I knew nothing about Christian saints, or core Christian teachings. I didn’t even realize that my new “San Francisco” home city was named for history’s most popular Christian saint. Moreover, apart from Christianity, I was ignorant of Eastern spiritual and religious teachings.
Growing up in Chicago, I had become familiar with Judaism’s core teachings:
“ Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is One”; and
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”
~ Deuteronomy 6:4-5
However, I had no idea of their supremely profound sacred significance.
But my midlife spiritual awakening experiences triggered an unprecedented interest in spiritual subjects. Initially – sparked by inner experiences and amazing synchronicities – I experienced great curiosity about Saint Francis of Assisi, and about Christian teachings which inspired him.
Later I began reading hagiographic stories about other Eastern and Western saints and sages. Gradually, I learned that – apart from Jesus and a few other world-famous paragons of Divine LOVE – the Divine devotional path has been followed by countless unknowns, especially in certain societies which for centuries have honored and emphasized devotional Love.
And gradually I became inspired by genuine “lovers of God” as exemplars of an important spiritual tradition, with which I had instinctively joined.
Lovers of God as “Heretics”
On discovering Rumi’s poetry, I learned that Muslim culture has long encompassed all aspects of love, culminating with Sufism’s mystical Self-realization as Divine LOVE as life’s ultimate goal. And, similarly, that Sufi philosophy has so honored eccentric lovers of God that it has specifically identified many of them as “masts” – persons so overwhelmed with love for God, that they appear externally disoriented.
Also, during my 1982 pilgrimage to India I learned that for millennia India has honored avadhutas, self-realized bhakti mystics living beyond usual egoic consciousness and worldly concerns, without adhering to accepted social standards. (See e.g. Advadhuta Gita, and Avadhuta – Wikipedia)
I indelibly remember seeing a peacefully smiling elderly man sitting stark naked on a rock in freezing temperatures midst ice and snow near the Himalayan headwaters of the holy Ganges river.
Like Sufi “masts” and Indian avadhutas, worldwide there have been countless unknowns societally honored as God intoxicated ‘holy fools’ with extraordinarily unconventional behaviors inconsistent with social norms.
Famous “Heretic” Prophets
Supremely eminent Greek philosopher Socrates, who taught the Delphic oracle’s fundamental transformative spiritual maxim “Know Thyself”, was considered an heretic and was sentenced to death after being unjustly tried and convicted for allegedly corrupting the youth of Athens. He was an archetypal wise ‘fool’ whose distinctive teaching method consisted in exposing foolishness of the world. For example, just before Socrates died of a coerced suicide, by drinking hemlock, he declared that fear of death was fear of the unknown.
In Western Christianity Paul the Apostle proclaimed that
“The wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.”
(1 Corinthians 3:19)
So, Christianity has at times rejected as foolishness “the wisdom of this world”. And it has endorsed the ‘Imitation of Jesus Christ’ – who preached “Love your neighbors” and even “your enemies”. And ‘heretically’ repudiated socially condoned hypocrisy, brutality, greed, and selfish desire for worldly power and gains; forgivingly endured crucifixion, mockery and humiliation from ignorant crowds; and even audaciously proclaimed the ultimately ‘forbidden mystical Truth’ – that “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).
In learning about Jesus’ “heretic” teachings – especially his Sermon on the Mount – I instinctively recognized him as an outspoken social justice reformer, and Truth telling political and religious nonconformist. And I intuitively honored him as a paragon of virtue, like prophets of other great religions, but not as God’s “only Son”.
I always conceived of “God” as ONE universally immanent nameless, formless, nonjudgmental Supreme Power. So I rejected any idea of a personal or judgmental God, and considered the Bible a collection of metaphoric legends – not as ‘the word of God’ who spoke only through special messengers.
And just as I always rejected Torah teachings about Jews as “chosen people”, I could never accept Christian dogma that Jesus was God’s “only Son” because he declared “I and the Father are one”.
Nor – like Gandhi – could I morally accept non-egalitarian Hindu scriptures justifying socially stratified caste systems, with some people deemed “untouchables”.
But I accepted that especially in historically dark and threatening eras of rampant world materialism, decadence, and violence, there have often appeared renowned sages or incarnate avatars to prophetically guide Humankind to societal and spiritual renaissance. And as religious nonconformists and social dissidents these famous reformers – like Jesus and Socrates – often were considered as “heretics”, and severely punished by contemporary worldly authorities.
‘Discovering’ Saint Francis of Assisi and Sri Ramakrishna as heretic “holy fools”.
Most famous Christian emulator of Jesus was Saint Francis of Assisi who in midlife – as an unconventional apostle of Love – renounced and relinquished all his worldly possessions and privileges as son of a wealthy merchant, to live reclusively in the Umbrian countryside; and later to establish an exemplary order of Franciscan Friars who gave away all possessions and survived only on alms while preaching in the streets to common people. Francis so completely identified with Jesus that, near the end of his earthly life, he became the first saint in history to miraculously receive crucifixion stigmata.
St. Francis of Assisi
Perhaps the best known Indian saint of the nineteenth century was Indian Holy Man Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa – an extraordinarily charismatic and eccentric ascetic, sometimes compared to St. Francis of Assisi.
(See Sri Ramakrishna and St. Francis of Assisi, by Sister Devamata, 1935)
Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa
February 18, 1836 – August 16, 1886
After my midlife spiritual awakening, I felt increasing egalitarian affinity and harmony with people living unconventionally ‘from inside out’, rather than with outer-directed worldly and conventional people.
And in learning about many famous saints and mystics, I felt most affinity with Saint Francis of Assisi and Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa.
Both of them were extraordinarily charismatic ascetics, having relinquished and renounced all worldly pleasures and privileges, to live in utter simplicity. Both were remarkably unconventional and seemingly “God intoxicated” exemplars of Divine Love and devotional faith – blessed with the ‘gift of tears’ and of spontaneously praying, singing, conversing and calling to the Divine, which as egalitarians they beheld everywhere and in every being. Both saints eschewed punditry and were simple, unschooled and unscholarly, yet with vast innate wisdom imparted conversationally and recorded by others.
Both historically helped to reform world religions by charismatically living their teachings. And both were so eccentrically unconventional that they were even considered insane by some worldly people, including a few friends and relatives.
Perhaps I found exceptional rapport with both St. Francis and Ramakrishna because my own private devotional tendencies and unconventional behaviors seemed similar to theirs, and especially because of inner and synchronistic experiences, including amazing and unforgettable déjà vu of their still palpable divine energies (shakti) during pilgrimages to India and Assisi.
Later, I learned that that renowned mystical poet-masters Hafiz and Rumi, were Supreme exemplars of the Sufi-Persian path of love. But that even in their societies which honored Love, they were considered by Moslem authorities to be “heretics” or “holy fools” because – like Jesus – they realized and truthfully proclaimed their mystical self-identity as Divine LOVE – a fundamentally forbidden heresy to ruling mullahs. Thus, though Hafiz was not executed, his remains could not be entombed in a Moslem cemetery in his beloved birthplace and cultured home city, Shiraz, Iran.
LOVE as the unseen Source of the worlds we see
Following the midlife spiritual rebirth and awakening, I’ve gradually discovered that LOVE is all that is, was, or will be; that LOVE is our true SELF-identity, and the unseen timeless Source of all worlds we see.
So I’ve realized that all God’s “holy fools” bless this world as living LOVE. And that their eccentricities and ‘heresies’ can help reveal that societal sanity requires radical reform of orthodox worldly rules and beliefs.
Dedication and Invocation – Love for all, Hatred for none!
This memoirs chapter is deeply dedicated to inspiring a critical mass of humanity increasingly to honor each other and all life as ONE LOVE – beyond the endless ego-mind illusion of a space/time duality universe
And let us ever remember that we are the unseen Source of all worlds we see!
So let us love GOD with all our heart and soul and with all our might.
And with firm faith, may our guiding motto ever be
‘Love for all, Hatred for none!’
And so may it be!
Ron Rattner
Extraordinary Energy Experiences
~ Ron’s Memoirs
“The entire physical creation,
so awe inspiring to human mentality…
provides only tantalizing hints
to the underlying wonders of being.”
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
“We never cease to stand like curious children
before the great Mystery into which we were born.”
~ Albert Einstein
“The miracle is not to walk on water,
but to walk with love on earth,
as if your feet are kissing the ground.
We must learn to say ‘Yes’ to the miracles of life.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Directly experiencing the multi-dimensionality of manifest reality
helps free the mind and open the heart,
inspiring and encouraging ever new insights,
while raising ever new mysteries.
~ Ron Rattner – Sutra Sayings
As we lose our fear of leaving life,
we gain the art of living life.
~ Ron Rattner – Sutra Sayings
Ron as Franciscan Friar,
Halloween 1981
Extraordinary Energy Experiences
Introduction
Einstein revolutionized our understanding of physical reality by showing that everything everywhere is endless energy, viz. E=mc2. But rare are those who mindfully self identify with this pivotal revelation.
Since realizing my true essence and identity as eternal spirit, beyond form – beyond birth and death, I have been experientially blessed with unforgettable reminders of the ephemerally impermanent and energetic nature of our apparent physical reality, and of its eternal context in cosmic consciousness beyond time and space.
From these experiences I’ve gradually lost fear of death and have been opened to innumerable new revelatory insights about this magical and mysterious world of forms and phenomena. These experiences have helped me live an ever happier life, as predicted by my beloved Guruji, and have inspired ever new insights and questions concerning our infinite evolutionary potentialities.
Subtle energy sensitivities
Amongst my most noteworthy new experiences have been unprecedented subtle energy perceptions.
Immediately after my spiritual rebirth experience I briefly experienced myself as mere lines of energy – like those associated with Chinese acupuncture.
Then my experience of bodily consciousness returned, but never again as before. Previously perceived bodily boundaries expanded well beyond my skin, and in rare instances even melted or merged into mystery. And I became aware that my bodily self-perceptions constantly varied with varying states of vitality and subtle awareness.
Here are some examples of this new clairsentience.
Starting soon after the rebirth experience, at times I felt the energies of people, creatures and objects visually perceived to be far away. And beyond my visual perception I became consciously sensitive to the energies of people and places both in and remote from my physical proximity – their ‘vibes’.
For example, I remember sitting with my then young son Josh in the grandstand at a San Francisco Giants baseball game, almost palpably feeling the energy of each pitched baseball as it left the pitcher’s hand and sped toward the batter. The entire playing field seemed within the ambit of my perceived energy field.
Once when meditating alone in my apartment and concerned about a grove of Northwest Pacific coast old growth trees then being clear-cut for lumber, I empathetically experienced with endless tears the suffering of those ancient beings.
After meditating in my high-rise view apartment, I remember at rare times looking out and feeling the energies of birds flying in the distance. And while walking on a path or beach by the Bay I sometimes palpably felt the energy emanations of people i saw moving at a distance from me.
One sunny Sunday, as I walked along San Francisco Bay to and from the Golden Gate Bridge, I beheld every person I encountered – dozens, without exception – as a divine being emanating and glowing with Divine luminescence. (See Beholding Beings Of Light )
Energy ‘mergers’
The foregoing unusual energy experiences seemed to involve supposed subject-object perceptions, viz. Ron aware of various supposedly separate distant forms. But other new energy experiences apparently transcended such supposed subject-object separation.
For example when I was talking in person or by phone with certain people with whom I felt special rapport – like my ‘high energy’ friend Betty Bethards, a spiritual teacher and psychic – I often experienced elevated energy, as if our subtle energy fields had synergistically expanded. And after I met Guruji I was consistently transformed and energetically uplifted when in his physical proximity, irresistibly resonating with his amazingly powerful “shakti” cosmic life-force.
Perhaps my most extraordinary new energy events were subtle energy ‘mergers’ that happened during out of body [OOB] experiences. The first ‘merger’ happened quite synchronistically, soon after my divorce. Just before awakening one work-day morning, I beheld an extremely vivid and large movie-like inner image of a blue-eyed blond woman who I’d never before seen. Quite puzzled I wondered who she was and why she had appeared in my inner vision. Those questions were soon answered.
A few days later, alone and lonely on a Saturday evening, I searched the SF Chronicle’s weekend event calendar for something to do. There I learned that a Tibetan bell concert was about to happen in an auditorium not far from my apartment. Though I then knew nothing about Tibetans, and never before heard Tibetan bells, this concert seemed interesting. So I made a last-minute decision to attend.
There were no reserved seats, and by the time I arrived the only remaining seats were on a small back balcony far from the stage. So I sat there waiting for the concert to begin. After a few moments, I noticed the person already seated immediately to my left. She was undoubtedly the woman who had appeared in my vision a few days earlier. She was a yoga teacher with whom I soon had a brief but very important romantic relationship.
Once during that relationship I had the unprecedented experience of leaving my body during physical coition with union of our subtle bodies above the intertwined physical bodies, which I viewed from above. Apart from that brief OOB experience, it seemed thereafter that our subtle bodies remained conjoined even when we were physically apart. One week I had a mysterious leg pain not traceable to physical trauma. That weekend I learned from my friend that she had injured a leg, and that apparently we were simultaneously experiencing the same leg pain.
After we were together physically, I initially experienced amazingly enhanced vital energies. But later because of very stressful life circumstances she became quite devitalized and enervated. Thereupon, she unknowingly began syphoning my vital energies whenever we were together. When we parted, instead of having amazingly enhanced energies, I became so debilitated that I couldn’t jog or even walk to work as usual. Finally, without vital energy it became impossible for me to continue to be with her. Our relationship ended. It was virtually my last romance before becoming abstinent for the remainder of my adult life – so far.
A few years later I had another memorable OOB merger experience, but this time without any physical intimacy. Here’s what happened.
In October 1981 I was invited to attend a Jungian archetypal Halloween costume party in Sausalito, California. Attendees were asked to dress as a personality or image important to them in this lifetime. Never before had I attended an adult costume party. Nor had I ever before thought about any “archetype” important to me.
But on learning that I could borrow a Franciscan friar’s habit from my friend Michael Toms, I decided to attend as Saint Francis of Assisi, with whom I had discovered a deep inner rapport. Dressed as St. Francis, I went to the party alone.
It was held in a large old warehouse space where there was live music and an extensive dance floor area. The warehouse was hot, noisy and crowded – not an ambience apparently conducive to spiritual experience or elevated awareness. But that’s what happened to me.
I was standing alone on the dance floor when a woman stranger costumed as an angel invited me to dance with her. I gladly accepted. Then she told me that as a spiritual practice she was “toning”, and asked if I would like to “tone” with her as we danced, explaining that while dancing together we could make harmonious tonal sounds. I hadn’t before heard about toning, and was curious.
So, at her suggestion, we danced and twirled and toned together like Sufis. Soon, while we were thus twirling and toning, I had another memorable OOB experience.
Fleetingly I ‘left my physical body’ and from above the two twirling dancers perceived our subtle bodies merged. This was a revelatory experience for me, because I learned from it the possibility of “tantric” merger without physical union.
After dancing and toning for a short time, we shared contact information. I learned that her name was Mary Saint-Marie, and that she was a visionary artist from Mount Shasta, California. But I did not reveal my merger experience to her. We parted without dancing again. Thereafter, we briefly exchanged correspondence when Mary was considering enrolling in graduate studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) where I then was Board Chairman. But we never met again for almost thirty years.
In the meanwhile, I wondered why I had such an extraordinary experience with an ‘angelic’ stranger in a crowded, hot and noisy place. Ultimately, I determined it happened because my dancing partner was an extraordinarily elevated being who (then unknown to me) had recently experienced a prolonged period of out of body cosmic Oneness.
As I write, Mary Saint-Marie is still a visionary artist and spiritual guide who shares her rare transcendent perspectives and experiences via inspiring art and spiritual writings, and in work shops and consultations.
Several years following my subtle merger experience with Mary Saint-Marie, I had another unforgettable revelatory union experience even more extraordinary than the previous ones.
Mahavatar Babaji
“Total merger [with another soul] is a much higher and deeper love bond than anything you can know on the earth plane. [It] is like stepping inside of one another’s auras; [and] is far superior to the physical mechanics of the sexual experience.”
~ Betty Bethards, “There is No Death”, pp 89-90. [edited]
One night I was awakened from a deep sleep to behold within the face image of an Indian yogi, who looked familiar but who I could not then identify. Thereupon, the yogi merged our subtle fields, and we became ONE. Words cannot describe the orgasmic thrill of that merger.
It was for me thrilling beyond any other experience of this lifetime.
For many years after that extraordinary glimpse of evolutionary potentiality I wondered about the identity of the benevolent yogi who had bestowed the unforgettable experience, and why it happened. Finally, through synchronicity, I intuited his identity.
One evening, while on-line at my computer, I was wondering about the mysterious yogi when a familiar portrait appeared in a file I was searching. It was Mahavatar Babaji the legendary timeless saint and root guru of Paramahansa Yogananda’s kriya yoga lineage, who was pictured and described in “Autobiography of a Yogi”. Instantly I intuitively recognized him as the compassionate yogi with whom Ron had been merged.* [See footnote.]
Conclusion
I don’t know why I was karmically granted these wonderful “peek experiences”. Like other extraordinary experiences, they’ve helped to free my mind from illusory limitations and to open my heart to ever new Divine insights.
Perhaps they were portents that – after eons of endless evolution – Humankind will ultimately realize ever elevated life experiences through our precious planet’s inevitable dimension Ascension,
In an autogyral
Endless spiral
Flowing up and beyond
The beyond.
Or maybe we’ll experience supramental powers upon earth, as envisioned by Sri Aurobindo.
In all events, these fleeting extraordinary energy experiences have helped inspire my ever growing gratitude and unconditional faith in our Infinite Potentiality – in the Mystery of Divinity.
*Footnote:
In February 1982 at the Kumbha Mela in Allahabad, India, I beheld an ethereal being who was soon identified to me as “Mahavatar Babaji”. I believe the Oneness experience with him happened several years after our encounter in India.
Dedication and Invocation.
The above energy stories are published with the deep aspiration that they will help free our ego-minds from all illusory fearful limitations, and open our hearts to ever new Divine insight and inspiration.
And with ever-growing gratitude and unconditional faith in our Infinite Potentiality as Universal Love:
May they inspire our Sacred heart Realization
of our infinite evolutionary potentiality
to bless the universe as Divine Love,
beyond all illusory fears
of death, disease or deprivation,
and without current insanely-inflicted
space-time perils, sufferings and sadness.
May they thus portend our continuing co-creation
of harmoniously elevated societies
which inspire and benefit all of Nature
and all Life everywhere as LOVE –
until our destined ultimate transcendence
of this permanently impermanent dream-like world
of space/time and duality!
And so may it be!
Ron Rattner
Solstice Salutations and Quotations
~ For a Happy World
“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life,
the whole aim and end of human existence”
~ Aristotle
“The purpose of our lives is to be happy.”
~ Dalai Lama
“A disciplined mind leads to happiness,
and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering.”
~ Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness
“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle,
and the life of the candle will not be shortened.
Happiness never decreases by being shared.”
~ Buddha
“The world is so unhappy because it is ignorant of the true Self.
Man’s real nature is happiness. Happiness is inborn in the true Self. Man’s search for happiness is an unconscious search for his true Self. The true Self is imperishable; therefore, when a man finds it, he finds a happiness which does not come to an end.”
~ Ramana Maharshi
Solstice Salutations and Quotations For a Happy World
Dear Friends,
Happy Summer Solstice!
With a new summer solstice sunlight zenith, let us envision the dawning of an Aquarian age of divine light, peace, compassion, and joy everywhere on our precious planet and beyond.
May we thereby rededicate ourselves to the Eternal Light of LOVE within and beyond everyone and everything on Earth; to THAT universal spirit of eternal light, love, harmony and happiness, which is the unseen Source of the worlds we see.
And as we optimistically envision a new season of previously unimagined planetary peace and joy, may we be infused with unprecedented illumination and inspiration for harmoniously healing our beautiful blue planet and all its life-forms.
To help inspire us, hereafter posted is a collection of wisdom words about finding timeless happiness. Please enjoy and accordingly consider these inspiring quotations.
Perennial Wisdom Words About Finding Happiness:
“Seek first the kingdom of heaven,
which is within.”
~ Matthew 6:33; Luke 17:20-21
“Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it.
What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside.”
~ Ramana Maharshi
“Happiness comes when your work and words
are of benefit to yourself and others.”
~ Buddha
“The happiness of one’s own heart alone cannot satisfy the soul;
one must try to include, as necessary to one’s own happiness,
the happiness of others.”
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
“One great question underlies our experience, whether we think about it or not: what is the purpose of life? From the moment of birth every human being wants happiness and does not want suffering. Neither social conditioning nor education nor ideology affects this. From the very core of our being, we simply desire contentment. Therefore, it is important to discover what will bring about the greatest degree of happiness.”
~ H.H. Dalai Lama
“I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness.
That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not,
whether one believes in this religion or that religion,
we all are seeking something better in life.
So, I think, the very motion of our life is towards happiness…”
~ Dalai Lama
“True happiness cannot be found in things that change and pass away.
Pleasure and pain alternate inexorably.
Happiness comes from the Self and can be found in the Self only.
Find your real Self and all else will come with it.”
~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
“There is only one life and one world, and this one life and one world is appearing to us . . . . like a dream. . .You do not live in your dreams. The dreams come one after another; scene after scene unfolds before you.
So it is in this world of ninety per cent misery and ten per cent happiness. Perhaps after a while it will appear as ninety per cent happiness, and we shall call it heaven. But a time comes to the sage when the whole thing vanishes, and this world appears as God Himself, and his own soul as God. It is not therefore that there are many worlds; it is not that there are many lives. All . . is the manifestation of that ONE.”
~ Swami Vivekananda
“He who has not looked on Sorrow will never see Joy.”
“We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.”
~ Kahlil Gibran
“Find ecstasy in life;
the mere sense of living is joy enough.”
~ Emily Dickinson
“I do not think of all the misery, but of the glory that remains.
Go outside into the fields, nature and the sun,
go out and seek happiness in yourself and in God.
Think of the beauty that again and again
discharges itself within and without you and be happy.”
~ Anne Frank
“The root of joy is gratefulness…
We hold the key to lasting happiness in our own hands.
For it is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.”
~ Brother David Steindl-Rast
“We are formed and molded by our thoughts.
Those whose minds are shaped by selfless thoughts
give joy when they speak or act.
Joy follows them like a shadow that never leaves them.”
~ Buddha
“People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
~ Abraham Lincoln
“When you are suffering, when you are unhappy, stay totally with what is now.
Unhappiness or problems cannot survive in the Now.”
~ Eckhart Tolle
“Happiness does not depend on how the furniture is arranged –
it depends on how I arrange my mind.”
“When you change the way you look at things,
the things you look at change.”
“Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy,
but this is not accurate.
You make yourself unhappy.”
~ Wayne Dyer
“The surest way to be happy
is to seek happiness for others.”
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Joy comes not through possession or ownership
but through a wise and loving heart.”
“If one speaks or acts with a pure mind,
happiness follows like a shadow.”
~ Buddha
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.
If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
~ Dalai Lama
“Happiness resides not in possessions, and not in gold,
happiness dwells in the soul.”
~ Democritus
“The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more,
but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.”
~ Socrates
“Happiness belongs to the self sufficient.”
~ Aristotle
“The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live
that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.”
~ Epictetus
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not;
remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”
~ Epicurus
“Cultivate compassion; harvest happiness.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“Joy is not in things; it is in us.”
~ Richard Wagner
“I am happy even before I have a reason.”
~ Hafiz
“The superior man is always happy.”
~ Confucius
“Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.”
~ Chuang-Tzu
“By letting it go it all gets done.
The world is won by those who let it go.
But when you try and try,
the world is beyond the winning.”
~ Lao Tzu
“What is the worth of a happiness for which you must strive and work?
Real happiness is spontaneous and effortless.”
~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.”
~ William Blake
“Always be joyful. That is the only truly saintly state.”
~ Teresa of Avila
“Joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service,
and have a definite object in life
outside themselves and their personal happiness”
~ Leo Tolstoy
“I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy.”
~ Rabindranath Tagore
“Somehow not only for Christmas
But all the long year through,
The joy that you give to others
Is the joy that comes back to you.
And the more you spend in blessing
The poor and lonely and sad,
The more of your heart’s possessing
Returns to make you glad.
~ John Greenleaf Whittier
“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination”
~ Mark Twain
“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow,
it only saps today of its joy.”
~ Leo Buscaglia
“Some cause happiness wherever they go;
others whenever they go.”
~ Oscar Wild
Closing Invocations:
May we consciously and cooperatively participate together in co-creating an ever better world – Happy, Harmonious and Peaceful – as we intend and envision it to be.
May we so become infused and used as instruments of Light and Love for everyone and everything everywhere – on Solstice Holidays and Always!
May everyone everywhere be happy!
And so may it be!
Ron Rattner
