Essay Edition
The Seriousness of Spiritual Practice
This is serious work that we are doing here. It is important, but it is also very serious.
We are not learning a skill. We are not learning to be better architects or anything like that. We are learning something somewhat native to the world. We are learning something that goes to the heart of the universe and existence. This is about immortality. This is about the ultimate source of life, in a very real way.
Most religions are originally founded upon this sentiment, and they tend to veer away and become lacking in sincerity unless an individual really reaches into that religion's offering.
The way the world changes, we are a society, and one's capacity to be self-transcendent is more than wishful thinking. There has to be an ontological shift in our energetic consciousness, in the makeup of our sentience. When that happens, one can love their neighbor as themselves. One can act with the intelligence of love, with the wisdom of enlightenment.
Nobody but ourselves will bring the light into society. The light does not get here. It is here. But for it to be a part of society, part of the collective psychology of humanity, each one of us has to tend the garden of self. We have to spend time in the light.
I am in pain when I am not in light, because I am in a normal, mundane condition of humanity, which is dense, solid. But there is an etheric side to us that is beyond manifestation, that brings through real, palpable love. It is palpable in the sense that it is made of an energy. It is not an energy in space. It is the energy that creates space and can destroy space.
In nirvana, we destroy space. We open a portal into the timeless.
Because this is so serious, we should be playful about it, because otherwise we are missing its point. But it is serious in the sense that it should touch the heart profoundly. It is serious, but it is playful, and we can laugh and we can dance.
Meditate for fifteen minutes a day. If you think you do not have time for that, I would question how much time you have for your own soul, for eternity, for God, for something beyond your own individual story of life, to go beyond the form.
Enlightenment has truth in it, and it feels good for the truth to push all the nonsense out of the way, so we can have a little wake, a little bubble of divinity, of sacredness.
Enlightenment and Human Potential
I want to share a few examples of enlightened beings and what makes them enlightened. These are people who were serious and did this work, and opened a doorway for humanity to heaven on Earth. People who devoted their lives to this.
These are profound individuals, saints in the most real sense of the word. But they would all probably very openly claim that they are ordinary people.
These are seven twentieth-century Indian saints. This has nothing to do with India other than that India tends to be more focused on spirituality, and there is a nice cultural pocket there that opens the doorway to the universal consciousness, the universal potency. I could very well talk about Native American or Mexican saints who have exactly the same type of consciousness, or some Americans who are alive today.
These individuals achieved moksha. They were able to go into the deepest layers of light and purify themselves in such a way that they yoked their awareness with the Supersoul of the universe.
There is an entire robust language in Sanskrit that outlines qualities and aspects of this process. You may take a step along the journey, but all beings are on this journey in some way or another because it is endemic to our nature.
We are consciousness. What is consciousness? We are alive. What does it mean to be alive? What is this?
I want to consider people who do not seem completely unreachable. We are not going to talk about Jesus, although he is an example of it. We are not going to talk about Buddha or Lao Tzu. These people are just so high that they seem like they are of a different kind, and I am not sure that is the case. Maybe it is.
But the whole idea is that, as ordinary people, we can become enlightened. If we have not been enlightened before in previous incarnations, we could be enlightened in this incarnation. It is a possibility, and I think that is a really important realization to have.
Jesus has a lot of followers. I am not sure how many of them feel that they can be like Jesus. They do not really talk that way about it. But if you read his words, he is actually instructing them to be just like he is.
Seven Indian Saints
Jiddu Krishnamurti is one of my favorites. I have probably read more of him than anybody else.
“Relationship is the mirror in which the self is revealed.”
“Meditation is emptying the mind of the known.”
“In the flame of attention, all conflict ends.”
His big thing was to never allow yourself to experience conflict inwardly. Never worry about anything. Do not experience conflict. Just act completely and directly.
Krishnamurti was a really incredible man. He spent a lot of time in Ojai, California, and then he traveled the world. He was anticipated to be an enlightened being, and they built a whole spiritual community around him when he was a child. He told them it was nonsense, took all the money and gave it away, dissolved the entire organization, and claimed, “Truth is a pathless land,” because he did not want it to be a religion.
He died in the 1980s at the age of eighty-nine or ninety. He was an absolutely wonderful man.
The great Ramana Maharshi was pure jnana yoga enlightenment, although quite bhakti too, I would say. My teacher considers him the most beautiful enlightened being.
Ramana Maharshi became enlightened when he was sixteen. He had a really intense experience. He said he felt like he died, inwardly, not physically. He became enlightened, and he spent years in a cave in meditation.
He is considered one of the great sages who understands ultimate truth.
“Who am I?”
That is his instruction. You want to become enlightened? Ask, “Who am I?” Really ask, who are you really? To whom, to what, is this appearance occurring?
“Your own self-realization is the greatest service you can render the world.”
“Silence is also conversation.”
Rabindranath Tagore had a very obvious dharma. His dharma was poetry. He became enlightened, and you can just see it. He is so powerful.
“Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it.”
“Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love.”
“We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.”
Paramahansa Yogananda also spent a lot of time in California.
“Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you.”
“The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success.”
“Change yourself, and you have done your part in changing the world.”
Anandamayi Ma was crazy devoted. She was just dripping in ecstasy and devotion.
“The purpose of human life is the realization of God.”
“Every being is searching for that infinite joy.”
“Only the name of God can purify the mind.”
Osho is a controversial figure. You may have heard lots of negative things about him, but I assure you, this man is a divine being. I would encourage you to look deeper into the actual words that he speaks and not what others say about him.
“Be. Do not try to become.”
“Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.”
“Courage is a love affair with the unknown.”
Just be with that one for a moment: “Courage is a love affair with the unknown.” Who are these people?
Osho became enlightened when he was twenty-three. Apparently, he was raised around many enlightened beings, so he was able to do that.
Sri Aurobindo was really, really intelligent. You try to read his books, and it is insane. They are very difficult to read.
“The first principle of true teaching is that nothing can be taught.”
“The mind has to be silent to know God.”
“The sign of the divine worker is equality.”
“All life is yoga.”
The Heart Center Practice
Bring attention to the heart center. It is paramount to feel the heart, to get the heart energy radiant. Sometimes we do not give the heart enough attention.
It is the most wonderful thing, having the heart be full and radiant, pure and clear.
When Krishnamurti talks about being without conflict, in conflict the heart recoils and becomes smaller. When there is no conflict, the heart can expand. You become everything in the field of existence.
Now that we have felt the heart, let us learn to open the heart and expand it. This is actually an epistemological process, which means it pertains to knowing. We know by becoming the other. We become the other by expanding the heart field.
Practice physically reaching out. Your sense of attention and awareness can reach beyond the body from the heart center. You can do it from any chakra, but we are doing it from the heart.
Feel that your heart is enormous, perhaps just the size of the room. Another colloquialism for this is an open heart, a big heart. It does feel open.
It is almost as if you are holding a heart as a giant sphere in front of you, using your hands to hold it open, and your heart, of course.
Expanding the heart.
You may want to add an element of heat to the heart. Energy, heat. Intend warmth and expansion simultaneously. Try to maintain a posture that keeps your sushumna straight.
Make sure to use the light. The astral energetic intention is important, but when we use the potency of the light, we are doing a deeper level of astral work. In fact, the astral is intended to be a doorway into the deeper planes of the causal light.
Let that light work to purify the astral form. Allow its luminosity and brilliance to energetically, physically transmute subtle biology.
Meditative Light and Samadhi
When you can experience light, you are actually progressing along a path to ultimate enlightenment. There are different levels, indicative of the qualities of light you experience. You are experiencing a partial form of enlightenment by experiencing that light.
It is what my teacher would call manasamadhi. There are five levels of samadhi in my teacher's personal system. Sometimes they make it just two, but you can divide it into any that you like. The level of colors is one of the samadhis.
You are experiencing self-transcendence and a return to the substratum of manifestation when you go into this light. What makes it so pleasant is that you are entering into the eternal layers of self.
There is all this power and love and ecstasy available to us inside of everything, and it is made of light.
Sometimes the only words we have are “spaced out,” but when somebody is bored and listening to something they are not interested in, that is called spacing out. I do not think that is what we are doing. We go to a different plane. The sense of self is dissolved in the energy of existence. There is nobody there.
One of the reasons we sit in half-lotus position is that physical yoga was apparently intended to help people sit in a posture, meditating without falling over for many hours. When people first start meditating, their legs are too tight, and then their back hurts. You want to get past all that to the point where you can sit for hours, and it is easy because your body is accustomed to it. That is a lot of what yoga is about.
Work, Thought, and Natural Enlightenment
You can meditate throughout the day. Take five minutes in the middle of the day. Recenter and keep yourself from going too far into the momentum of the thinker.
The more we create peace of mind through streamlining, a very nice, organized calendar, and a nice task list, the more we can let go. Have a really excellent calendar, really beautiful, structured systems that you sit down and design once and then let go of. You revise and refine them once a season, that type of thing.
Create a condition where you can stay in a flow state, where your work becomes more of a spontaneous flow state than constantly having to be thinking.
This is one of the big challenges for an entrepreneurial mystic: learning to run your life without it draining your energy.
Ultimately, and this is very much Krishnamurti's philosophy, we want to be without conflict. Sometimes when we are posed with decision and choice, that is a state of conflict. Can we be in spontaneity?
It is not easy because you have to reform your mind. Then you take on a bigger project and you have to adapt to that, and then a bigger project. It is this constant thing.
As an aspiration, imagine being somebody who can run a Fortune 500 company with thousands or tens of thousands of employees, never leaving enlightenment.
What does sahaja mean in sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi? It means the natural state. I would actually say it kind of means the normal state. There is this idea that normality is before that, and then that societal norm, which we might call the common state, is abnormal.
Sahaja is a state where one is in enlightenment, and no matter what they do, they do not leave it. You are in the deepest state of nirvana and meditation, and you could be totally engaged in anything in the world.
Perhaps research what enlightenment is. That is what makes it enlightened. Sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi is the name of that, and we are learning to become like that.
It does not mean we necessarily renounce the world, go to a cave, and do not engage with the world. But we do renounce something that allows us to stay in the world and act, perhaps with voracious intensity, while maintaining a connection with the eternality of enlightenment and the divine.
This is a kind of mastery that most people are not even considering as a possibility. Let it be your dharma. Let it be your karmic practice, your mindfulness practice, trying to be that person, because people will feel it in your project when you are in that.
This is a big part of my life, trying to stay in that. Sometimes I get so far off that I am in pain at the end of the day. My energy is saying, “I did not use my karma correctly.” I sit for an hour and clear it, and then I am grateful. If I do not do that, I do not sleep well.
What does a day look like when you use your karma correctly versus incorrectly? I keep returning to Krishnamurti. There should be no sense of resistance in any moment, no dissipation of energy.
I would envision a glowing, divine leader in a business, or in whatever it is that you do, who never leaves it. That synchronicity occurs in life, where you just figure things out. With everybody who comes to you, always be positive, be gentle, be spontaneous, all of those things together.
You can still do all that you need to do, but there is a mindfulness factor. You have to make that your natural karma.
Full Transcript
The Seriousness of Spiritual Practice
Adam Wes Namaste, everybody. Welcome.
This is serious work that we're doing here. It's important. It's important, but it's also very serious.
We're not learning a skill. We're not learning to be better architects or anything like that. We're learning something somewhat native to the world. We're learning something that goes to the heart of the universe and existence. This is about immortality. This is about the ultimate source of life, in a very real way.
Most religions are originally founded upon this sentiment, and they tend to veer away and become lacking in sincerity unless an individual really reaches into that religion's offering.
So it's very serious, what we're doing. And it's very important, too, because the way the world changes, we are a society, and one's capacity to be self-transcendent is more than wishful thinking. They have to undergo an ontological shift in their energetic consciousness, in the makeup of their sentience.
When that happens, one can love their neighbor as themselves. One can act with the intelligence of love, with the wisdom of enlightenment. So it's very important. This practice is very important.
Nobody but ourselves will bring the light into society. The light doesn't get here. It's here. But for it to be a part of society, part of the collective psychology of humanity, each one of us has to tend the garden of self. And we have to do it. We have to spend time in the light.
I spent hours in the light in the last 24 hours, just so you know. I'm not bragging. It's not about that. I'm just trying to make you understand that I am in pain when I'm not in light, because I'm in a normal, mundane condition of humanity, which is dense, solid.
But there's an etheric side to us that is beyond manifestation, that brings through real, palpable love. It's palpable in the sense that it's made of an energy, but it's an energy in which all time and space is within. It's not an energy in space. It's the energy that creates space and can destroy space.
In nirvana, we destroy space. It's interesting, because you're like, "But you're still sitting there in space." Not really. We open a portal into the timeless.
So this is very serious work. And obviously, because it's so serious, we should be playful about it, because otherwise we're missing its point, right? But it's serious in the sense that it should touch the heart profoundly.
It's not a superficial online class that's teaching you how to be a better marketer or whatever, right? We're doing serious work here. This is very serious, but it's playful, and we can laugh and we can dance.
Oh, I knew I was forgetting somebody. Just a second. You'll see what the sermon is today, because when I said, "You can laugh and you can dance," it reminded me of him.
Thank you for being here, and thank you for practicing. The assignment still holds: 15 minutes a day of meditation. If you think you don't have time for that, I would question how much time you have for your own soul, for eternity, for God, for something beyond your own individual story of life, to go beyond the form.
It's 15 minutes. That's like brushing your teeth four times, right? That's enlightenment.
Okay. Enlightenment has truth in it, right? And it feels good for the truth to push all the nonsense out of the way. So thank you for being with me and letting me push it out of the way, including out of myself, so we can have a little wake, a little bubble of divinity, of sacredness.
Enlightenment and Human Potential
Today's sermon is enlightened beings.
I want to share with you a few examples of enlightened beings and what makes them enlightened. We already had a sermon on enlightenment a few weeks back. You can review that. But I'd like to go over five or six, or maybe seven. You know what? Extremists. People who were serious and did this work, and opened a doorway for humanity to heaven on Earth. People who devoted their lives to this.
These are profound individuals, saints in the most real sense of the word. But I've also picked seven people who would all probably very openly claim that they're ordinary people.
These are seven 20th-century Indian saints, in this case. This has nothing to do with India other than that India tends to be more focused on spirituality, and there's a nice cultural pocket there that opens the doorway to the universal consciousness, the universal potency.
But I could very well talk about Native American or Mexican saints who have exactly the same type of consciousness I'm talking about, or some Americans who are alive today. But I want to do these 20th-century Indian saints today because it's a nice theme. I've got seven of them for us.
These individuals achieved moksha. It means that they were able to go into the deepest layers of light and purify themselves in such a way that they yoked their awareness with the Supersoul of the universe.
There's an entire robust language in Sanskrit, which we also talked about, that outlines qualities and aspects of this process. And so you may take a step along the journey. But all beings are on this journey in some way or another because it's endemic to our nature.
We are consciousness. What is consciousness? We are alive. What does it mean to be alive? What is this?
Let's go through them.
Here are a few images from the Awakened Beings Wall of Enlightenment. I wanted to pick people today who are not those individuals who seem completely unreachable.
We're not going to talk about Jesus, although he's an example of it. We're not going to talk about Buddha or Lao Tzu. These people are just so high that they seem like they're of a different kind, and I'm not sure that's the case. Maybe it is. Sometimes people say that's the case.
But the whole idea is that, as ordinary people, we can become enlightened. If we haven't been enlightened before in previous incarnations, we could be enlightened in this incarnation. So it's a possibility, and I think that's a really important realization to have.
Jesus has a lot of followers, right? I'm not sure how many of them feel that they can be like Jesus. They don't really talk that way about it. But if you read his words, he's actually kind of instructing them to be just like he is. If you read his words, you'll notice that he says that, as far as I recall, assuming I'm recalling and understanding correctly.
A few of the seven are on here. I also want to quickly reference the new, awesome page that I made for us: sfi.school/live.
All you do is put this in the browser address bar, and here it is. You can enter here, or you can copy the ID. And if you need to download Zoom, which none of you do, you can click it here.
Just notice the three requests. Please arrive early. Join a few minutes before the session and get settled in. I was getting my phone to text people to help people arrive, so we started late because I was kind of waiting for people to arrive. Let's be impeccable.
Camera on, unless you previously made a request to have it off. Also, make sure that your camera is settled and positioned so that it's not moving around and causing everybody to get seasick. Don't get on the camera and walk around with it, like some individuals tend to do. It's a little bit disappointing.
Also, keep your microphone muted. You can unmute the microphone, but initially it should be muted so there's not a lot of noise coming in.
Okay, let's get started. Here are some of these enlightened beings. What I want to do is just mention them, and you can read up on them.
Seven Indian Saints
Let's start with Krishnamurti. Jiddu Krishnamurti is this person here. He's one of my favorites. I've probably read more of him than anybody else.
Let me read you a couple of his quotes:
"Relationship is the mirror in which the self is revealed."
"Meditation is emptying the mind of the known."
"In the flame of attention, all conflict ends."
I'll just do three for each one.
"In the flame of attention, all conflict ends." His big thing was to never allow yourself to experience conflict inwardly. Never worry about anything.
People would say, "What if your children are starving?"
He said, "Okay, sure, do something about it, but why worry about it?"
He said, "Don't experience conflict. Just act completely and directly."
Krishnamurti was a really incredible man. It's amazing how India is so connected to California. Krishnamurti spent a lot of time in Ojai, California, which is basically right down the street from where I am. Then he traveled the world.
He was anticipated to be an enlightened being, and they actually built a whole spiritual community around him when he was a child. He told them it was nonsense, took all the money and gave it away, dissolved the entire organization, and claimed, "Truth is a pathless land," because he didn't want it to be a religion.
Isn't that profound?
He died in the '80s at the age of 89 or 90. He's just an absolutely wonderful man, and you can read 50 of his books because he literally has that many books out there. I highly recommend them.
The great Ramana Maharshi. My teacher says he's the most beautiful person, the most beautiful enlightened being. That's quite a lot coming from my teacher. He says Ramana Maharshi, for him, is the most beautiful enlightened being.
He was just pure jnana yoga enlightenment. Actually, quite bhakti too, I would say.
I'm not sure when Krishnamurti became enlightened. It was kind of later in life, as far as I know, when he became fully enlightened in sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi. For him, I think it was in his 50s or 60s. I'm not fully sure.
Ramana Maharshi, this wonderful man right here, is whom my teacher considers the most beautiful enlightened being. He became enlightened when he was 16, which is really interesting. He had a really intense experience. He said he felt like he died when he was 16, just inwardly, not physically at all.
He became enlightened, and he spent years in a cave in meditation. Kira and I have this joke that I'll just start meditating constantly, and she'll have to come over and feed me.
What would happen is that he would sit in meditation, and they would come around with a bag of liquefied food. He would just open his mouth, stay in meditation, drink the food, and keep going. Kira and I have this joke that I'll just start meditating constantly and she'll have to come over and feed me, because there's this urge to do that.
Ants ate his leg. He just sat there while they ate his leg because he was outdoors and completely ignoring his body entirely. Not his whole leg, but part of his leg. I don't know, maybe it grew back. A piece of his leg.
He's this amazing man in India. He's considered one of the great sages who understands ultimate truth. I'll read you a couple of his quotes.
He says, "Who am I?"
That's his instruction. You want to become enlightened? Ask, "Who am I?" Really ask, who are you really? To whom, to what, is this appearance occurring?
"Your own self-realization is the greatest service you can render the world."
He said that. When I look at Ariella and Mom, I almost feel, because you guys are so in service, that I want to remind you to meditate. Your own self-realization is the greatest service you can render the world.
He says, "Silence is also conversation."
The next one is Rabindranath Tagore. I like Tagore a lot because he had a very obvious dharma. His dharma was poetry. He became enlightened, and you can just see it. Look at this man. He's just so powerful.
"Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it."
This is much more poetic. It's very different.
"Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love."
"We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility."
I need to read more Rabindranath Tagore. He had a school too, and Krishnamurti had a school.
Next is Paramahansa Yogananda, right here. He's also somebody who spent a lot of time in California. Amazing, right? California and these Indian sages. It's really special.
Paramahansa Yogananda:
"Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you."
"The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success."
"Change yourself, and you have done your part in changing the world."
Very much like what Ramana Maharshi said.
Just to let you know, I'm not 100 percent sure if he became fully enlightened in the same way as the others. He was, I think, at that other level of liberation. He was going into nirvana, but I'm not sure he had done it. You can actually hear in his quotes that they're a little different, right?
I'm not 100 percent sure. I don't want Yogananda to smite me. He would never do that. I think he might have, but I've heard that he didn't. I can also tell that the way he talks is a little different. He's talking kind of from self, looking at God and connecting with God, as opposed to being nothing as God, which is a little more like Ramana Maharshi.
I love him. He's one of my favorite people. I highly recommend him.
The next one is Anandamayi Ma. She's this lovely woman right there. It's interesting. I love her. She was crazy devoted. She was just dripping in ecstasy and devotion.
She said:
"The purpose of human life is the realization of God."
"Every being is searching for that infinite joy."
"Only the name of God can purify the mind."
Beautiful.
Next one. A controversial figure. You may have heard lots of negative things about him, but I assure you, this man is a divine being. I would encourage you to look deeper into the actual words that he speaks and not what others say about him, because you know what the news does to us? It brainwashes us from our own perception.
Osho. He's one cool dude. Take a look at that photograph.
"Be. Don't try to become."
"Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence."
"Courage is a love affair with the unknown."
I love this one. Just be with this one for a second: "Courage is a love affair with the unknown."
I mean, who are these people?
He became enlightened when he was 23. Quite young, very young. Apparently, he was raised around many enlightened beings, so he was able to do that.
The last one of the seven is Sri Aurobindo, with whom my sister has quite a connection, actually, because her teacher apparently is a student of his astrally, in spirit, but directly, actually.
"The first principle of true teaching is that nothing can be taught."
Interesting. He was really, really intelligent. This guy is like, you try to read his book, and it's insane. It's very difficult to read.
"The mind has to be silent to know God."
"The sign of the divine worker is equality."
I'm going to do a different one for the third one:
"All life is yoga."
All right, let's meditate.
Representation and Heart Center Practice
Colleen I looked at this picture, and I didn't think there were any women, which is not unusual, to put men everywhere. So I decided to quickly Google it, and there are some interesting, famous, spiritually enlightened women.
Adam Wes Yeah, there are. Did you see Mother Meera?
Colleen I see Dipa Ma, Ayya Khema, Mae Chee Kaew, Mother Meera, and Amma.
Adam Wes Some of them are alive today. Part of the reason they're not on there is that they're alive. Everybody on there, I believe, is not alive. I purposely did that, although one is quite recent.
You know, it's interesting. My teacher's teacher has a talk on this. Apparently, in this state of humanity, it has been more difficult for women to achieve full enlightenment. He actually gives a very detailed description of why it's the case, and he definitely doesn't like that. But he describes why it's the case with full sahaja samadhi enlightenment. There are women, but it's just a smaller ratio.
Who is that other woman? Joan of Arc was supposed to be enlightened, I think. Do you know Joan of Arc? Have you heard of her?
I'd like to add more. Maybe one of these days I'll share that recording with you about why. It would be nice if there were more enlightened women. The balance is not balanced. There's a problem that's not balanced.
But that's not to say that you can't become enlightened as a woman. It's just that the probability is a little bit less, out of balance. That's all.
All right. Time.
Last time we didn't meditate, and I felt so sad. It actually really threw me off because we were supposed to meditate. My heart was like, "When's the meditation happening?" I went to the beach and had a really intense one, but it didn't feel as right as it would have if we'd started. So let's just dive in.
Thanks, David. I love having you here, David. Everybody wish David healing because his knee got hurt. Wishing you good healing, David.
David P Thank you.
Adam Wes Of course.
Let's bring attention to the heart center.
It's paramount to feel the heart, to get the heart energy radiant. Sometimes we don't give the heart enough attention.
It's the most wonderful thing, having the heart be full and radiant, pure and clear.
When Krishnamurti talks about being without conflict, in conflict the heart recoils and becomes smaller. When there's no conflict, the heart can expand. You become everything in the field of existence.
Today we'll do an expansion meditation.
Now that we've felt the heart, let's learn to open the heart and expand it.
This is actually an epistemological process, which means it pertains to knowing. We know by becoming the other. We become the other by expanding the heart field.
Practice physically reaching out. Your sense of attention and awareness can reach beyond the body from the heart center.
You can do it from any chakra, but we're doing it from the heart today.
Feel that your heart is enormous, perhaps just the size of the room. Or, if you're going to go much bigger, we can do it right away. I'm doing the room right now.
Another colloquialism for this is an open heart, a big heart. It does feel open.
You may notice the posture, or the mudra, that I'm using right now. It's almost as if I'm holding a heart as a giant sphere in front of me, and I'm using my hands to hold it open in that way, and my heart, of course.
Expanding the heart.
You may want to add an element of heat to the heart. Energy, heat. Intend warmth and expansion simultaneously.
Try to maintain a posture that keeps your sushumna straight.
Make sure to use the light. The astral energetic intention is important, but when we use the potency of the light, we're doing a deeper level of astral work.
In fact, the astral is intended to be a doorway into the deeper planes of the causal light.
Let that light work to purify the astral form. Allow its luminosity and brilliance to energetically, physically transmute subtle biology.
Namaste.
Meditative Light and Samadhi
I'd love to hear from you, Mom.
Colleen First, I think my temples got squeezed. I saw red and orange, and then I saw a man and woman running, a calendar with all of the days highlighted, and a whole lot of weirdness.
Adam Wes A calendar with all the days highlighted. I like that one. Very symbolic. Every day matters. Every day is today. Beautiful.
Colleen Thank you.
Adam Wes You're welcome. It's so wonderful to meditate with you. That was just, no words.
How was the quality of the light?
Colleen Very pleasant. I always end up with the purple and pink after the other colors come and go.
Adam Wes You can't call it purple and pink. You have another word for it.
Colleen Purpley-pink.
Adam Wes Thank you. When you experience this light, do you experience it as pulsating waves?
Colleen What do you mean? Like it comes in waves?
Adam Wes Yeah.
Colleen Yeah, it does different things, but it really was purple and pink today. They were separate.
Adam Wes Oh, really? Okay, so it wasn't perfectly purpley-pink. It was purple and pink. Nice.
Colleen Thank you, Adam.
Adam Wes You're welcome. Good job.
When you can experience light, you're actually progressing along a path to ultimate enlightenment. There are different levels, indicative of the qualities of light you experience. So you're experiencing a partial form of enlightenment by experiencing that light, just so you know.
It's what my teacher would call manasamadhi. There are five levels of samadhi in my teacher's personal system. Sometimes they make it just two, but you can divide it into any that you like. The level of colors is one of the samadhis.
You're experiencing self-transcendence and a return to the substratum of manifestation when you go into this light. What makes it so pleasant is that you're entering into the eternal layers of self.
It is truly pleasant. It's so pleasant. There's all this power and love and ecstasy available to us inside of everything, and it's made of light.
Wonderful. I'm honored to meditate with you. Love you. Good job.
All right, how about you, Kira?
No? Kira's high. No words. Good. Anybody can do what Kira just did. I love that. Just stay in it.
How about you, Ariella?
Ariella I started off with white light.
Adam Wes Anna Samadhi. Good job.
Ariella Then I have no idea. The only words I have are "spaced out," and I don't remember anything.
Adam Wes I'd love for you to come up with something more poetic than "spaced out," something that is more dignified.
You know when somebody is bored in class and the teacher's talking about something they're not interested in? That's called spacing out. I don't think what you're doing is spacing out, right? If you want to use that word, that's up to you, but I think you go to a different plane.
Colleen I think you go to a different plane.
Ariella Yes. I don't know where I am.
Adam Wes The sense of self is dissolved in the energy of existence, something like that. There's nobody there, and then your head falls over because nobody's there to hold it up. That could be a good sign.
One of the reasons we sit in half-lotus position is that physical yoga was apparently intended to help people sit in a posture, meditating without falling over for many hours.
A lot of times, when people first start meditating and I meditate with them in person, it's this big ordeal about getting a cushion or something because their legs are too tight, and then their back hurts. You want to get past all that to the point where you can just sit like this for hours, and it's easy because your body is accustomed to it. That's a lot of what yoga is about.
Colleen It's not possible for some people of our age, with our knees.
Adam Wes I'm very old. Well, you can also sit like this if that feels better. This is Japanese style.
Colleen Can't do that.
Adam Wes This is Indian style. This is American style. That's a joke I got from my teacher, or actually from one of his students.
You can do American style. I think Ariella is doing a form of American style.
Ariella Oh, so you see my head going down? See, I'm not even aware of that.
Adam Wes Yeah, your head goes down. So when I say, "Keep good posture," usually I'm talking to you, because you're the main one who does that.
We're not trying to fall asleep, right? Okay, now I'm messing with the energy because I'm being too loud and not gentle enough.
Good job, Ariella. Wonderful job, and congratulations on going somewhere else, going away.
David, would you like to share?
Work Thought and Natural Enlightenment
David P Yeah. What's happening to me is that I have started a professional project again.
Do you remember that last year I was on sabbatical? I took sabbatical time when I joined the math course, right?
I started about one month ago, with three projects in parallel. So I can see the thinker taking my attention.
It is clear now for me that this was normal in my life, just living in the thinker. It is normal for the rest of people, usually.
But now, because I was able to separate my identity from it, and thanks to maintaining meditation every day, I was able to connect with a different level of consciousness. I can see how the thinker can really blur your vision of life.
The thinker is like this wheel that has momentum, right? It gets a lot of momentum during the day when I am working, because my job is not with my hands. My job is very mental. So I have this huge momentum at the end of the day.
Meditation is the only solution to this. That's my takeaway. I have to meditate more and more, just to keep the gravity and the center of myself where it really is and not be drifted away.
Adam Wes Beautiful. There are two things to consider. You can meditate throughout the day. Take five minutes in the middle of the day, even. Maybe recenter and keep yourself from going too far into that momentum you're talking about.
Another thing, and it's not easy, is that I deal with a similar issue, by the way, because there are too many things. But the more we create peace of mind through streamlining, a very nice, organized calendar, and a nice task list, the more we can let go.
Try to design work in such a way that it flows, like with our pinky finger. We use our pinky finger, and we can move it, and we don't get so ensnared and enmeshed in the moment.
Have a really excellent calendar, really beautiful, structured systems that you sit down and design once and then let go of. You revise and refine them once a season, that type of thing.
Also, create a condition where you can stay in a flow state, where your work becomes more of a spontaneous flow state than constantly having to be thinking.
This is one of the big challenges for an entrepreneurial mystic. That would be a nice class, "Entrepreneurial Mystics," learning to run your life without it draining your energy.
Ultimately, and this is very much Krishnamurti's philosophy, we want to be without conflict. Sometimes when we're posed with decision and choice, that's a state of conflict. That's why I was talking about spontaneity. Can we be in that?
It's not easy because you have to reform your mind. Then you take on a bigger project and you have to adapt to that, and then a bigger project. It's this constant thing.
But as an aspiration, imagine being somebody who can run a Fortune 500 company with thousands or tens of thousands of employees, never leaving enlightenment.
I love that you brought this up, because what does sahaja mean in sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi? It means the natural state. I would actually say it kind of means the normal state. So it's interesting that you said "normal," because there's this idea that normality is before that, and then that societal norm, which we might call the common state, is abnormal.
Sahaja is a state where one is in enlightenment, and no matter what they do, they don't leave it. You're in the deepest state of nirvana and meditation, and you could be totally engaged in anything in the world.
Perhaps research what enlightenment is. That's what makes it enlightened. Remember, I was talking about the levels. Sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi is the name of that, and we're learning to become like that.
It doesn't mean we necessarily renounce the world, go to a cave, and don't engage with the world. But we do renounce something that allows us to stay in the world and act, perhaps with voracious intensity, while maintaining a connection with the eternality of enlightenment and the divine.
This is a kind of mastery that most people aren't even considering as a possibility. So I love that you're doing that. Let it be your dharma. Let it be your karmic practice, your mindfulness practice, trying to be that person, because people will feel it in your project when you're in that.
This is a big part of my life, trying to stay in that. Sometimes I get so far off that I'm in pain at the end of the day. My energy is like, "Oh, I did not use my karma correctly." I sit for an hour and clear it, and then I'm like, "Oh, thank God." If I don't do that, I don't sleep well.
It's this interesting thing of trying to maintain it, and maintain it at greater scopes. You might do it with one company, and then you have another company or a different thing, and then it's harder to do.
All day, every day lately, I've been responding to inquiries from my ad on Facebook and Instagram. This is really messing with me energetically because I'm constantly responding to different minds, and it's hard for me to do that. So I'm learning, "Okay, maybe I should do this differently. Am I doing it right?"
Anyway, thank you, David, for sharing.
What does a day look like when you use your karma correctly versus incorrectly?
I keep returning to Krishnamurti. There should be no sense of resistance in any moment, no dissipation of energy.
I would envision a glowing, divine leader in a business, or in whatever it is that you do, who never leaves it.
There was a show called Entourage 20 years ago. Do you remember Entourage? Vince was kind of like this. He was an actor, but he was always like, "Oh yeah, I trust it'll work out." He was a famous actor in the show. His character was a famous actor, and he was always just flowing with things.
That synchronicity that occurs in life, where you just figure things out, that's what it would look like. With everybody who comes to you, always be positive, be gentle, be spontaneous, all of those things together. You can still do all that you need to do, but there's a mindfulness factor, right? You have to make that your natural karma.
Community Growth and Shared Aspirations
We went 20 minutes over. Well, we kind of only went 15 minutes over because we started five minutes late. Try to be on time.
Praveen, I hope you were here and enjoyed all that.
Praveen S Yes, sir.
Adam Wes Good. Look up some enlightened beings. I'm open to recommendations for female enlightened beings that I could add to the Wall of Enlightenment.
Ariella, your smile is priceless.
We'll add some more beautiful females to the Wall of Enlightenment. I like Joan of Arc. She's interesting. You should look her up. She was a very interesting individual. I think she died as a teenager. It's really interesting. But she changed a whole society with her energy and her being.
There are a few alive today. Mother Meera is one. I met Mother Meera, actually. She did a darshan on my head.
Mom met Amma. She got a hug from Amma. That's cool. Nice.
This is wonderful, and I'm also open to suggestions on how to grow this group. It is a serious group, and all of you actually have a very special intensity about you. It's part of why you're here.
But I really would like to grow it, and I'm not sure what to do. I'm not sure how. So if you have any suggestions, it would really be helpful.
It would be so cool if there were 21 people here tonight. Can you imagine? It would be really fun. We could get to know each other just like we know each other in our smaller group.
Or 50 or 100 people. It would be really great. Then we could have retreats in Mexico and do all kinds of wonderful things together. We could go and meditate together and throw a rave in the desert centered on light.
Oh, I want to do that! Can you imagine how great that would be? Let's go to the desert with a bunch of light mystics centered in their hearts and throw a rave. I really, really want to do that.
What else is my dream? A beautiful sabbatical in a mansion in Malibu, where we can spend four days together and have beautiful, mindful, curated, catered dinners, a live string quartet playing, and go into light together.
We could travel to Japan for a retreat around a Buddhist temple or something, or go camping in the summer in Joshua Tree. There are so many wonderful things we could do together as a light community.
I don't know how to grow it. Maybe I haven't advertised enough. If anybody has any insights into what I'm not doing, let me know.
You look at somebody like Sadhguru. Sadhguru has done this. He's got millions of people, and I think many of them are very, very sincere. Of course, he's fully enlightened. I'm not fully enlightened. I'm well along the way, but I'm not fully enlightened.
Hopefully, in this lifetime I'll become fully enlightened. That's an aspiration of mine, a very, very serious aspiration. But Sadhguru is fully enlightened, and that can help.
Even then, I don't know if it helps that much. My teacher is supposed to be fully enlightened. I think he is. He has only handfuls of students, but he really is intense for people.
I think I'm in a position where it definitely can be a large group, and I don't think that's the reason it isn't. I think it has to do with finding the people the right way.
Invite your wonderful spiritual friends. I think it should grow organically like that.
Praveen, I know you have at least one friend interested in enlightenment. Kira, I know you have at least one friend really interested in light.
Kira It's you.
Adam Wes It can't be me. Well, okay, yeah. I am your one friend.
David has one friend. It's Andrea, and she's already here. But you guys both should double. One becomes two, two becomes four, four becomes eight. That's exponential growth, mathematically speaking.
All right, so good to see everybody. Happy May 5th. Happy Cinco de Mayo.
It is between the summer solstice and the spring equinox, which to me is actually very much a new season. We enter a new season. Spring Two, perhaps, or Summer One, perhaps.
If you think of summer as having the longest day in the middle of summer, then today would be the first day of summer. But summer starts on the longest day and then goes to the middle day, which is kind of like the beginning of spring, which is also winter in terms of day length.
All right, enough of that.
Namaste. Enjoy your studies this week and your 15-minute-a-day meditations in light.
See you next time. Namaste.
Thank you.