The drinking of Soma / Amrita

Hello Unseeking,

I was simply looking on google image for a picture that could represent how I feel the energy running within and found this one. I did not go to the website to which it is associated to find the origin of its author. And now that I go back on Google image, I'm not able to find it anymore.

Ok I found from where it comes from:

https://www.arslucida.mk/en/kundalini-energy/

[Unseeking Seeker]

@ Legrand ... thanks! :)

Originally Posted by NoOne

Thanks Antoine,

That's very nice of you, but like everyone, I have a dark side. It's just that I have come to terms with it and accept it as part of my being, without prejudice or hate. It is important for people to learn to love and accept everything about themselves, including their faults, shortcomings and the darkness that dwells within. I love my darkness, it is part of me and allows me to become a whole person, keeping a delicate balance. We cannot have light without the dark and vice versa.

An interesting point of view from psychology:

Nothing in psychology allows us to maintain that the conscious content is superior to the unconscious. There is even a chance that the opposite is true. From nursery tales and kindergarten to the Faculty, to the blackmail of professional success, each group of a given time, structure and place pours into our brains the partial information, always partial, useful to its survival, not to ours. The newspapers, the radio, the cinema continue this psychological action which ends until the grave. It results from it that the conscious is a dustbin of illusions, errors, lies, bad novels which will rot with the actuality. The conscious is the social. The conscious represents the accidental limitations imposed by the historical situation where this or that man is situated. Only the unconscious without time is real, free of the prejudices of the family, the school and the city. Only the unconscious is the seat of the total man with all his virtualities for the sun and the shade, since the beast of prey until the God in becoming, since the vegetable until the spirit. He is neither good nor bad, neither rational nor irrational. It is all of these at once. In the unconscious resides the universal man. In the light of this definition, making the unconscious conscious means that the universal man wins over the social man. Consciousness in itself is worthless. In psychoanalysis as in yoga, only the awareness matters. This also clarifies Wo Es war, soll Ich werden. It is a question of the universal man living his deep humanity after having freed himself from the distorting lenses of the social. He no longer projects. He no longer blinds himself. He finally sees the real. He is not more foreign to himself. He no longer thinks feelings. He feels them. Thus his experiential knowledge joins the knowledge of the yogi. Any man who listens to the existential question and tries to answer it totally with his body and soul, not only with words and thoughts, is a godly man, even if he thinks he is an atheist. Any system that gives, teaches, transmits the answer is a mystical system, even if it does not have an official Church. Any man who evades the existential question by talking about the social is an atheist. Whether he thinks about God often, whether he goes to mass or not, whether he talks about religious ideas is irrelevant. As Erich Fromm has shown, if the total man is deaf to the existential question, if he has no answer, he lives and dies in the manner of the objects that he himself makes. He thinks about God instead of trying to experience becoming God.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

By Maryse Choisy (1903-1979)

[pixiedust]

Originally Posted by NoOne

it is part of me and allows me to become a whole person, keeping a delicate balance. We cannot have light without the dark and vice versa.

I really like your presence and posts, NoOne, but I don't think that what you say here is accurate.

The path of divinity is not not-acknowledging or not-seeing the darkness, but in seeing it, (eventually) freeing it ALL into the light. This is the Way.

[Miss Hepburn]

Hmm, well, if anyone would like to love their faults and shortcomings
I think that is not the way to go, for me.
To love yourself and someone else even tho you and they have faults is a whole other thing.

What I tolerate I will not change.
I have no intention of loving or accepting my faults and short comings (dark side)...overcoming them, yes.
My 2 cents on the matter anyway.

[NoOne]

@Legrand
Boy, French writers are wordy, aren't they? But yeah, I agree with his conclusions.

@pixiedust
Nice username btw, I already like you just based on that :)

I guess we can disagree on that issue, it may only be semantics. The way I see it, dualities are what manifest reality, which included light and dark, even good and evil. Both are needed to maintain balance and harmony. Maybe not a popular view, but seems to be a basic fact of the universe, e.g. for something to exist, you need both dualities, one cannot exist without the other.

Now, I do believe that the work of self-realisation involves overcoming this duality and integrating or rather synthesizing both to achieve a non-dual state of being. This involves all opposites, whether it is male-female, left-right, up-down, light-dark, etc...

You will notice that gods, who I think we can all agree, are self-realised beings, all have a dark, even destructive side to them. Shiva for instance is much loved and venerated, mostly for his role in fertility and rebirth (same as Enki in Sumer), but when the time comes, he will destroy the universe with everyone and everything in it.

That capacity for destruction has a purpose to it, it isn't for a selfish purpose, the needs of this attribute are universal in nature.

[pixiedust]

NoOne, I like you too. Yes, I would be interested in exploring this further with you. Be back.

[pixiedust]

Originally Posted by NoOne

@Legrand
Boy, French writers are wordy, aren't they? But yeah, I agree with his conclusions.

@pixiedust
Nice username btw, I already like you just based on that :)

I guess we can disagree on that issue, it may only be semantics. The way I see it, dualities are what manifest reality, which included light and dark, even good and evil. Both are needed to maintain balance and harmony. Maybe not a popular view, but seems to be a basic fact of the universe, e.g. for something to exist, you need both dualities, one cannot exist without the other.

Now, I do believe that the work of self-realisation involves overcoming this duality and integrating or rather synthesizing both to achieve a non-dual state of being. This involves all opposites, whether it is male-female, left-right, up-down, light-dark, etc...

You will notice that gods, who I think we can all agree, are self-realised beings, all have a dark, even destructive side to them. Shiva for instance is much loved and venerated, mostly for his role in fertility and rebirth (same as Enki in Sumer), but when the time comes, he will destroy the universe with everyone and everything in it.

That capacity for destruction has a purpose to it, it isn't for a selfish purpose, the needs of this attribute are universal in nature.

NoOne

Here I offer you some verses to discuss:

(1)

“The peace of God is with them whose mind and soul are in harmony, who are free from desire and wrath, who know their own soul.”

(2)

“He who has let go of hatred
who treats all beings with kindness
and compassion, who is always serene,
unmoved by pain or pleasure,

free of the "I" and "mine,"
self-controlled, firm and patient,
his whole mind focused on me ---
that is the man I love best.”

(3)

“The man who sees me in everything
and everything within me
will not be lost to me, nor
will I ever be lost to him.

He who is rooted in oneness
realizes that I am
in every being; wherever
he goes, he remains in me.

When he sees all being as equal
in suffering or in joy
because they are like himself,
that man has grown perfect in yoga.”

The Bhagavad Gita

[NoOne]

Hi Pixiedust,

I generally like the Bhagavad Gita, but I can't say I necessarily agree with those passages. I don't advocate worship of anyone, not even gods.

Also, the passage mentions "The peace of God", not sure if that is a mistranslation or not, the English word God in that sense is a monotheistic concept, which does not translate well to a polytheistic religion like Hinduism. If it is an ISKCON (Hare Krishna) translation, then obviously they would be much more skewed towards the monotheistic side of the spectrum.

For the record, I do not accept that there is a "God" in the sense monotheists do. There is a Brahman, yes, but that is not a person. There are gods, some of them are cosmic, there may even be a hierarchy among them with one, or a few at the top, in terms of cosmic importance, but no omnipotent, all-seeing heavenly dictator.

If you were to ask my own opinion on the Vishnus of Vaikuntha, to me they appear to be aliens, whether on another planet, reality, a higher dimension or whatnot. We know from the Bhagavata Purana, that Vaikuntha, Vishnu's home planet / realm is populated entirely by blue-skinned, four-armed humanoids with physical bodies, though they do shine, as all gods do, possibly a hallmark of their higher-dimensional nature.

I would say that worship of these beings would be little more than a cargo cult, the cosmic, interplanetary or interdimensional equivalent of worshipping prince Phillip.

This doesn't detract from the beauty and profound spiritual truth of the Bhagavad Gita, but the monotheistic leanings of these passages are not to my taste at all. I think all monotheistic faiths are a result of the priesthood of that particular deity taking things a bit too far, trying to exclude, erase or demonise all other forms of religious and spiritual expression, at the expense of their own. This also means that they elevate their own deity to such a high station, as to be unattainable by ordinary mortals. This increases the power of the priesthood and ordinary worshippers will have to go through a hierarchy to get to their chosen deity, which, for the record, is not nesessary at all. You can contact and commune with any deity of your choosing, if you know how, which immediately negates the need for any sort of priesthood or religious hierarchy.