Posted on by Skip

What’s YOUR BFD?

Please don’t judge this post based on the picture alone – though feel free to comment on what constitutes a BFD to you!

Living in harmony, union or yoga with the world is simple – just not easy.

It only requires a LIFELONG succession of conscious or “mindful” choices.

Patanjali’s Raja Yoga [The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, a 200-line prehistoric poem about uncovering our true nature] promises as difficult as it is, this is a unique case in which you’ll get out of something more than you put into it – eventually.

The benefits of practicing Raja Yoga’s disciplines are cumulative as well as holistic: body, mind, spirit (the latter two are literally invisible aspects of each of us).

HOW do we achieve this literally indescribable state of union or “being at one with” our universe?

WITH:

  • constant, prolonged practice (NEVER forgetting to see the distinction between your thoughts and your awareness OF them), and

  • non-attachment (ALWAYS letting go of things, eventually even of identification with your body and mind: your ego)

CONSCIOUSNESS

  • alone never changes
  • alone doesn’t “do” anything
  • alone simply “is”
  • alone is not subject to the vagaries of time and space (i.e., awareness or consciousness alone is not subject to karma: the infinite cause-and-affect nature of our energetically bi-polar tangible universe)
  • (i.e., it’s essentially divine!! and it’s in YOU!!)

Yet it’s existence is readily verifiable: without it we aren’t aware of our own thoughts!

Inevitably, with prolonged constant practice, you’ll realize that YOU aren’t your body and thoughts; rather, those things are YOUR’S in the same way that your hair and nails, the parts you regularly cut away, aren’t YOU, they are/were parts of YOU.

YOU – at your essence – are the awareness OF those temporal, tangible “things”, including your own functioning parts! ALL of which we each eventually HAVE to let go of (“all we have to do is die” – it’s the price of admission promised for entry to the game of life).

The “True” or essential YOU survives your body/mind. Yeah, it’s not a fairytale.

That aspect of YOU that witnesses your EVERY thought, word and deed – that part survives!

 

Don’t ask me where it goes, that’s what churches and temples are for.

Read any book on the human dying process; when death occurs naturally, we each come to this realization in the end. Raja Yogis say “DON’T WAIT!!”

Admittedly, at first this may require a small leap of faith: that you assume based on natural laws of probability if not faith in a higher power, that the awareness OF your thoughts (the aspect of YOU which has literally never changed – for 60 years in my case) remains unchanging after your body and mind cease to function. The laws of probability and poker players would call that a sure bet.

Your consciousness is eternal.  🤯

 

We are consciousness in form. Not visa versa. I hope you see it eventually. I hope the day you see it, that you’re sitting down, and have a long life ahead of you.

God bless, Skip