Falling Out of Enlightenment and the White Man's Enlightenment Problem and Adyashanti

Staying in Nirvikalpa Samadhi is effortless but even from this condition one must eventually return to ego-consciousness. Otherwise, this highest level of Samadhi leads to Nirvana, which means total Unity and the logical end of individual identity (and also death of the body).

https://www.aypsite.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1502&whichpage=3 

So I was trying to get a handle on "adyashanti" - reading u;">However, it is entirely possible to stay in Nirvikalpa Samadhi and yet be fully functional in this world. This condition is known as Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi or Sahaj Samadhi (sahaja means "spontaneous" in Sanskrit). Only the truly Enlightened (Satguru) can be and remain spontaneously free.

This is the Brahmin Vedic view of enlightenment from Ramana Maharshi that has been co-opted by the Western white male "enlightenment" Nondualism scene. Dr. Peter Kingsley says when he tries to get a grip on the nondualism scene he does not get into it at all...

 When sitting in my satgurus presence many experience the feelings of peace and joy and are certainly different when they leave.Even though he is a siddha and the body is only considered to be needed to remain in our presence, he still meditates daily and performs japa and other austerities.This is still considered necessary to maintain the purification needed for this state.Can you recognise these levels? IMO if one talks about what they can do for you and promotes themselves rather than what you can do for yourself, then they are probably not as enlightened as they think they are. Guruji has told me in the past not to tell others he is a great guru but to simply tell others of my experiences.
I am sure Adya talks in the same way if he is of such a level.

 In the book "Taoist Yoga: alchemy and immortality" this is explained very much in detail but we as Westerners like to be deluded. As Master Nan, Huai-chin emphasized, the spiritual and the mundane do not mix well together. There has to be purification. Yet Adyashanti got married to Mukti early on without the real serious training from what I can tell.

Yes he meditated in his hut as a teenager and into his twenties - was that in full lotus padmasana?

Unless Westerners seek out real Nonwestern spiritual healers than it is difficult for Westerners - dare I say impossible - to even know what they are missing (and that includes Westernized modern people all over the world). Unfortunately real spiritual healing masters are difficult to find - even if you hold them out in front of peoples' faces - due to the Ego of the West, then the white males are most likely not going to focus on the nonwestern spiritual masters.

Ramana Maharshi was part of the Brahmin caste tradition - so that he practiced Jnana Mind yoga but he refused even to see his mom for nine years! And as he got old then a host of volunteers took care of his body as he let his body go to waste. The Taoist tradition combines body healing with mind healing as part of a larger spiritual dynamic - one that is older than the Vedic Brahmin Caste tradition that invaded India around 3500 years ago....around the same time the Yamnaya culture conquered Europe....

Adya is a rare non-dualist who admits to energy being an issue (e.g. he says he's screwed up some people via something akin to shaktipat, and won't give energy now even if people "beg"). I find that interesting. Has he written or spoken on the issue of energy (I don't mean just shakti) anywhere that can be seen or downloaded? it's of acute interest to me, as every time I let go an iota more, I become much more awash in energy, and I'm always banging right up against the amount I can maximally handle. And not being interested in magic tricks and personal power, it's nothing but hindrance to me. But I do recognize that opening to What Is involves opening to flavors and intensities of energy we usually insulate ourselves against.

 That sounds pretty "convenient" to me as an excuse. I have no problem admitting I overused my energy and used it as psychic "yin qi" healing - not the REAL Shaktipat that is the Yuan Qi energy. Taoist Yoga is very detailed on what the differences are...But Westerners do not understand these subtleties - the differences between psychic and spiritual energy, for example.

So the "White Man" nondualism enlightenment scene is full of this wishy-washy language. You read the book "Taoist Yoga: alchemy and immortality" and the language is very precise. You rotate the eyes for example, with the eyes closed, so that the yin shen (right eye) and yang qi (right eye) intermingle with the yin qi (left eye) and yang shen (left eye)... So the Yuan Qi emanates out of the pineal gland and is created by that intermingling of yang with yin via shen and qi.

Clubfoot | Johns Hopkins Medicine

www.hopkinsmedicine.org › conditions-and-diseases

Clubfoot is caused by a shortened Achilles tendon, which causes the foot to turn in and under. Clubfoot is twice as common in boys

The bones of the foot and ankle are all present but are misaligned due to differences in the muscles and tendons acting on the foot.

So the "modern" medicine treatment takes months of wearing braces and casts - the qigong treatment took minutes!! https://forum.culteducation.com/read.php?12,135827,152031

 Adyashanti at the beginning sold * Truth for 10 pounds.atat demanded 10 years ago for Retreat ... now demands 1440 pounds for 5 days Retreat * at Assilomar! He and his wife Mukti are their own accountants and alone they harvest * $$$ in Milei's Box in Satsang Hall from devotees $$$$ .... ITS ALL ABOUT MONEY..MONEY..MONEY !! $$$$

What has changed in Adya for 10 years now? ... and Adya for now. ..Nimik as Self * Supreme ... instead appeared on the level of the Mind (of the Person) ... Hunger for Money ... for More and More Money! $$$

https://gururating.org/adyashanti/ 

 So I read that his initial $10 charge was "not a donation" but a "fee" for entrance to his "satsang" talks. Now apparently the charge is greatly increased yet he insists on NOT giving Shaktipat?

 Again Westerners have no idea what they are missing when http://springforestqigong.com is doing real "Yuan Qi" or Shaktipat healings.

And if someone does achieve "liberation" as Adyashanti claims - in the NOnwestern tradition that refers to a permanent Shaktipat energy emanating from the person or guru - via the right side of the heart - once the right side vagus nerve sends a person into a beyond death experience....So it's not by their choice. The energy WILL emanate from them.

https://www.electricalspirituality.com/adyashanti-a-true-guru/

 critical reviews of Adyashanti

Adyashanti believes that awakening begins with the experience of no-self. I say it begins with the initial experience of the Holy Spirit, or Shakti. Any bloke can conceptually recognize that the self is not an entity, just an amalgm of discrete psycho-physical tendencies that combine to create an illusory self-sense; but real awakening does not begin until one is baptized in (or by) the Spirit, which is tantamount to receiving what Hindu yogis call "Shaktipat."

 If he were fully, finally, awakened, he'd know that Kundalini-Shakti severs the spiritual Heart-knot, and once the knot is cut, the yogi is never again bound, as thereafter a permanent, radiant Force-current between the Heart-center and the crown outshines arising thought-forms, rendering them impotent as agents of bondage. This is not just my opinion but also that of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, India's greatest twentieth-century guru. Moreover, the Buddha also equated the attainment of enlightenment, or Nirvana, with the Heart-release. Adyashanti, by contrast, reduces "Heart Level Enlightenment" to "awakening on the level of emotion."

Wow Precisely what I just wrote!! amazing.

 yet I gave an even more precise definition - again the book Taoist Yoga: alchemy and immortality gives the scientific details of this training. No more excuses for wishy-washy White Man Enlightenment talk stuff...

First, without the awakening of intense spiritual energy--Kundalini-Shakti--spiritual en-Light-enment is not possible. In fact, the Hindu Kashmir Shaivism tradition teaches that the more intense and violent the energy, the closer one is to en-Light-enment. Second--and I speak from intimate personal experience--what most intensifies the energy isn't trying to control, but rather totally letting go.

 So I've described in detail my "enlightenment experiences" and also my misuse and overuse of the enlightenment energy - I was deconverting my stored up Yuan Qi energy back into yin qi psychic healing energy. In fact that is still what I mainly do since I have spent the summer reducing meditation to a minimum. And I rely on food to do this - so it is still an impure process - and so I rely on organic ginger and tea tree oil and peppermint and garlic and onion still. haha. I still practice dirty tantra.

Whereas Ramana would engage devotees in provocative talks about subjects such as Amrita Nadi, Jnana vritti, Kundalini, Shaktipat, samadhis, and cutting the Heart-knot as a precursor to Self-realization, Adyashanti sticks to tired homiletic monologues, which will entertain the spiritually unsophisticated, but bore the spiritually astute.

 Yes again the "pure" path is to devote yourself to the guru but in our modern world - devoting yourself to a real spiritual master is expensive - to do so in person. To do so through practice then requires a lot of self-discipline since the people around you are going to fight against it. True spiritual liberation is literally creating a new Spacetime Vortex around you!!

Because he's aping Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, who uses that expression in the book "I Am That." Adyashanti, in typical Adyashanti fashion, can't say what we realize, only that it's beyond our imagination.

So Poonjaji stated quite clealry that Nisaragadatta LACKED any Shaktipat ability and yet strangely Westerners, from my experience, actually PREFER Nisaragadatta to H.W.L. Poonja (Poonjaji). Why is that? I guess since Nisaragadatta put more emphasis on his talks and writings while Poonjaji put more emphasis on actual silence as Shaktipat meditation! Poonjaji complained that his Western students would come to India and then just "shake up." The Aurobindo Ashram made the same complaint about its Western students.

So clearly there has to be a SACRIFICE for proper enlightenment training but Master Nan, Huai-chin complains about how Japanese Zen is too much based on mental conceptual poetry, etc. and not enough full lotus meditation.

So Ramana Maharshi assumed of his students that they would be chaste and also vegetarian. He said being vegetarian - by making the body weak then the mind would be strong. So the practice starts out as left-brain concentration to empty out the conceptual mind - with the "who am I?" and just repeating I-I-I-I not as a mantra but as logical inference. But then as the light develops in the brain then you visualize that light on the right side of the heart as the secret pinhole to the nondual awareness. In Mahayana Buddhism this is called the 8th level of consciousness as the formless reality beyond form - and that creates the Universe. Ramana Maharshi emphasizes this is the same as kundalini energy that rises up from the spine and then ends on the right side of the heart - and the same as prana and shaktipat - he calls it the "Ether" or invisible energy of the spirit light. So it "powers" the spirit light but it itself is NOT the light. It makes the light get brighter and more intense and so in Nirvikalpa samadhi then the sense of the body and mind are gone while the light is much brighter. So it's just like deep dreamless sleep only the body and brain are filled with Prana or Qi - such that the top of the skull is soft and pulsating with qi - the bones are flexible as a baby - and astral travel begins.

 Master Nan, Huaijin emphasizes that this is when REAL meditation begins as the source of the I-thought or "Who Am I?" as does Vivekananda in his series on yoga - he says that is when REAL Jnana Yoga begins - as does the secret teachings of Vipassana. REAL Vipassana is only at the Nirvikalpa stage which requires a week of fasting while meditating the whole time.

So I search Adyashanti and full lotus padmasana and I don't get any mention of it.

 What about fasting?

Two weekends ago, I went to an intensive with Adyashanti and thought I'd share here.

Adya radiates a very "clean" sort of energy; loving, calm, powerful and yet very sweet, almost translucent.

He did some talking but the lion's share of the intensive was in a Q&A format. And every pre-conceived notion I might have had of him disappeared after the first question - about Kundalini (yeah)! This person asked about raging K symptoms and if that is part of the journey. He began his response with, "There is no denying that there is an energetic component to awakening." He went on to offer advice on how to deal with it. Kundalini/energy seemed to be one of the two dominant themes for the weekend (the other being relationships). Someone asked about "negative energies" and Adya went on to say if one is drawn to shamanic rituals, etc, they could try it. He also talked about using acupuncture for overloads, grounding techniques, foods for grounding, etc.

 Adyashanti talks about his kundalini energy - vid interview on youtube

 Adya is completely right in saying that unity has nothing to do with energy or with bliss or with ecstasy. But it is also just as true to say that unity is the merging of ecstasy and bliss and the end of the process of kundalini. It is one of those divine paradoxes.

So this is the Western confusion that I'm talking about! HOW CONVENIENT for White Male Enlightenment Gurus to claim they are "beyond" energy. Hilarious. It makes for great "self help" gurus though....

 Adya does talk about his experience with kundalini awakening in his books and elsewhere. One notable case of this is in his book "The End of Your World," Chapter 8, entitled "The Energetic Component of Awakening". In short, it resembles nothing like what you have described above, or previously: "Yes, that is the interesting thing about Adyashanti, he meditates for years, goes through an intensive kundalini awakening, comes out the other end enlightened and then talks, for the most part, as if it didn't happen and has no relevance. Then occasionally someone asks him about it and he says 'Oh yes, that...'" You can read a few pages of it here

 The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment: Easyread Super Large 18pt Edition

 So he says his heart race so fast beyond 200 bpm that he thought he was going to die. Then he no longer felt his body and he got "downloaded" of information.... and then he came back to normal...

 So NO strong spacetime vortex? NO seeing of ghosts? No telekinesis? NO telepathy? NO long distance healing? NO precognition?

The Seeking Stopped...

So he achieved Nirvikalpa Samadhi - I can relate to that.... I stopped meditating for two months after my enlightenment experience. My body channels closed up and I lost the connection to the Yuan Qi and I fell out of enlightenment - because I did not KNOW the details of the training. I had not studied the book Taoist Yoga: alchemy and immortality enough...