The Spiritual Imagination

Looking to the East is something a lot of people from our generation has assumed, and identifying with Mother India is one endless avenue of study I keep asserting--probably more seriously because of its cultural presence than anything ascetically promulgating otherwise. I wonder about Deepak Chopra's discussion of Krishnamurti--we can be certain there is a surmise of his influence in Chopra's vast literary endeavors. I am currently reading "The Jews of Kerala" by Fernandes--that is in Cochin...a really ancient Jewish community, whose success and end is due to the open-ness on one hand in the Hindu presence, & unfortunately caste-dispersions otherwise. In a timely way, when I was coming back from Ontario a couple of yrs ago now, there at our hotel in Toledo we watched an interview on L. King w/ Chopra. I felt less homeward bound than actually a nurturing domicile in the bigger conscious map when listening to auspicious words always the good result when seeing some one mind crossing water, or in this case, the silent walls of a ubiquitous urban hotel. I like the fact I feel I owe leaden consciousness to imminent thinkers exacting ever new power spots, I otherwise may have missed in the frenetic rush of a life incomplete...
Does "meditation" elude you in the impact that only in brief glimpses (of that elusiveness) you would be sustained by--otherwise? Because, now I am back in a better place--yet the looming feeling that I can't maintain centeredness makes me sometimes opt for LESS of a reprieve. Say, the reprieve I imagine as in an auspicious read regarding, yes even, meditation...which is the mundane day begging at the scholarly self to lift up the veil dulling my spirit. So, just talking about as in intra-mantra slavery--a conversation with one's self, doesn't translate in moments when attentiveness would otherwise be attractive, and motivating. The plateau I am received upon is sometimes something my intellect propounds, yet meditation through my processing all the torpidity of a day, has this same illustrative wave crashing at the doors of wakefulness... And if I am already half-FULL of exacting just what interests demand of me, I can't see meditation as a goal unfortunately.
**Woe death, spare me on to another year!! And Death is used as a the reason why spirits should be conjured (ignorantly I might add). We have spirit as the motivator behind the equinox of the Minds, and then we have spirits as some ancestry event we think we get indicated by--which I don't agree with, other than Knowledge of self being the goal=no miracles. The definition for "spirit" is so broad, I tried to hone down just what we affect that makes continuity with community imminent.
Rumi says, "These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows that hold no capital." ***This is what I love--it goes to the head of those who persist that the promise in this life, is in fulfillment that something extra-sensory holds something fateful. "Shadows that hold NO Capital." That is an important statement: we are the currency of a temporal norm, & tho' we may have elevated thoughts, & presume all that glitter is gold - spirits?, in our folly, tho' we know, in reality, there is a material-void. Emptiness is an ascetic goal, because that is the condition in which we live--actually. Once we briefly match that, it is incumbent upon us to relinquish the control the gold had on us. That being "SHADOWS that hold no capital." IS not a provisional statement. IT means just that.
> The part about emptiness pertains to the Chopra
> Tribe. But in asking a relevant question as to this spirit imbiber's line of discussion, Does Memory Leave you
> in the past? via existant spirits--definitely
> pertains to his thread in Raw Wisdom Tribe. The
> memory part as to a communities' memory seems, in
> his mind, to validate belief in spirits: I'd say
> in terms of what Stevie Wonder
> sings, If You Believe In Things You Don't
> Understand, You Suffer. I got that RUMI quote
> from his poem (ghazzal) called Noone.
I think it is in everyone's capable hands to move around leaden consciousness to give substance to an otherwise Empty world. Knowledge is in the negation of what is--once we do that, we define things by that which it is not. This is epistemology: knowing WHY we know something. In asceticism, and what I get from Deepak, is that we need to address our striving/ our source of suffering. So, ego telling us that we deserve security because we can control the outward fact, is NOT looking at the inherent emptiness that the world defies us to understand & corral in our presumptive minds. Corral if we must, but it is an endless cycle around the mulberry bush unto weariness--then our Wakeful Attention begins to dull... which is harder to observe, and the vulnerable human condition with all our distractions will inevitably deter us from seeing our folly. Emptiness means we would have to answer for less, thereby seeing our insignificance in relationship with Higher Ground... THE goal!

Let me draw a comparison with Chaim Potok, his value as an ascetic in Americana, & Deepak--another Man of Reality enthused transient Identity annihilator. Deepak depicts depth that is reasonably an Aside, we'd abide, had we observed we're only here for a little while. Potok, whose name means Gate--a name he assumed probably for iconographic reasons, expresses continuity of Ultimate Reality, say G-d as the Center of Awareness/ maybe Mind, then our conventions that represent G-d: In judaism, The High G-d is an early anthropomorphic understanding, In Christianity, the convention maybe Holy Ghost & Son...and all these over-lap, and only some make accessible the Ideal we may find self-realization therein. The point of Reference is relationship with mutually arising community, and his/her intercession on our behalf toward compassion. Deepak is a nod east, and uses Western language as worthy allegory for iconoclast sensibility... I imagine, reading elsewhere--yet he may have said himself, that had the intermediary space intra-atomically been eliminated, our mass in 5 or 6 foot frames would be smaller than a grain of sand...this may suggest, I'd think, that that is where the soul resides, in our cosmic now--enveloped as we are with the space of self.