The desire for God is God

A couple of days ago I mentioned a conversation with the Goddess, and Focus asked me to say more about it.

Before I describe the conversation, let me tell you the background. During the summer of 2015 I began to have many mystical experiences. They were very intense for a few months and then tapered off over a period of about two years. During this time I talked frequently with an entity who I call “the Goddess.”

I’ve avoided writing very much about these sorts of things because they sound crazy to most people and I don’t think they are essential for getting enlightened. Was I hallucinating? No, because by definition a hallucination is a false perception of a sensory object and I never imagined that she was physically present. She communicated with me through my mind. Was I imagining her? She used all the faculties of my mind to communicate with me, including my imagination, but this tells us nothing about whether she was real because people can imagine real things. Right now, for example, I can close my eyes and visualize the camera in the desk drawer next to my right arm. I’m imagining it, but if I open the drawer I’ll see the camera without my imagination because it’s really there. (I’m using the word “real” here in the ordinary way, not in the Advaitin sense.)

So the question should be whether she was merely my imagination. I don’t think so. I think in some way she is real. In some way the universe is such that something we intuit as a female goddess, the female Goddess, the goddess that Shaktas call Devi, really exists. One of the reasons why I believe this is that she taught me things that are as profound as anything I’ve ever come across.

Another reason why I believe it is because she didn’t just communicate with me. She also did things to me. There’s an example of this in the story you are about to read.

[Edit: A note from Freddie as he rereads this article in 2021. A third reason occurs to me now for believing that the Goddess and events described here are real. Right now, many years later, this article moves me so deeply that I am crying. If it were only my imagination, could it move me this way? I don’t think so.]

When I started this blog in 2015, the first two posts were about my visit to Meenakshi Amman Temple that had taken place 30 years earlier. During that visit I went into a sort of altered state of consciousness, a walking trance, for hours. I didn’t explain why the blog began that way. I’ll explain now. When I started the blog, I had just realized (or come to believe) that my experience in the temple was a sort of initiation. The Goddess put a seed in me that day. Over the next 30 years, the seed sprouted and made me become interested in enlightenment and led me to Ramana and eventually brought me to where I was in 2015 having deep mystical experiences and talking to the Goddess. For the first 30 years after she planted the seed, I never suspected that it was an initiation or that it had anything to do with the way my life unfolded afterward. When in 2015 I finally became aware of this 30-year-long process, when I finally became aware that the Goddess had been watching over me and directing my evolution for 30 years, when I saw that she had arranged for me to find Ramana, I was very deeply moved.

On September 2, 2015, I asked her, “Why did you give me that experience (the initiation) in 1985 when I entered your temple?”

That question was the start of the conversation that Focus asked me about. Right after it finished, I recorded the highlights in the following email:

Dear Charlie,

I must really be losing my mind, but I just sat in my chair and talked to the goddess for about an hour.

I asked her why she gave me that experience in 1985 in her temple. Why me? She answered, “Because you wanted it.” I said, “How could i have wanted it when I knew nothing about these things and had hardly ever thought about them?” She answered by showing me my mental state on that day. She’s right; without knowing what I wanted, I wanted it. Then she started talking about the desire for liberation and why she responds that way:

She said she’s like the flip side of certain desires… if you want those certain things, then she is automatically there at the same time. The desire for God is God. It’s not really a desire but a kind of heartbeat. it’s like a sound we hear, but we perceive it as a desire. It can’t be a desire because it’s God desiring God which makes no sense. The existence of the feeling depends on a misunderstanding. The misunderstanding tries to unravel itself because due to its inherent nature it has to try to unravel just like a bent spring will try to straighten out.

The email has the virtue of immediacy and accuracy but it’s so terse and was written so fast that it’s hard to understand. Let me try to flesh it out and clarify a few things.

When I asked her why she gave me that experience, she answered with an amused tone, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world and it was funny that I couldn’t see it, “Because you wanted it.” She often spoke with that amused tone. I once asked her whether she was really amused or I was misinterpreting. She said she was really amused.

[Edit: Another note from Freddie as I reread this article in 2021. I happen to know now, but didn’t know when I wrote it, that Francis Lucille (who I think is realized and extraordinarily intelligent) says that humor is a quality of the Self. I’ve never heard this anywhere else but now I see I wrote it here myself in the form of, “The Goddess was amused.]

When she answered, “Because you wanted it,” I had no idea what she was talking about. How could I have wanted an initiation into enlightenment in 1985? I knew nothing about such things. I had never thought about such things. So I said, “Huh? I didn’t want it.”

To show me that she was right, instead of replying with words, she restored my mind to the state it was in when I walked into the temple thirty years earlier. She didn’t warn me, “Hold on to your seat belt, I’m about to wind your brain back to 1985.” She simply did it. One moment I was 62-year-old Freddie in 2015; an instant later I was 32 years old again — mentally, at least. Suddenly the thoughts and emotions swirling through my head were the ones that were there when I walked into her temple in 1985. I had forgotten them but now that she restored them, I recognized them. This is one of the most astonishing things that has ever happened to me. Thirty years is a long time in a person’s life, and normally we can’t see how much our minds change because there is no way to retrieve the old state and compare it to the new. But she allowed me to do exactly that.

I saw instantly that she was right. On that day in 1985, my father had just died. My head was filled with moody inchoate deep thoughts. If I put those thoughts into words they would be questions like, “What is life for? Why do we die? What’s the point? What should I do in the few dozen years that remain before I follow my father into death?”

But such states don’t consist of words. The thoughts were deeper than words. Events like the death of my father are terrible storms that churn the oceans of our minds to a froth. Even the ocean floor gets disturbed; even the tectonic plates under the floor get jostled apart, and the raw burning magma, the pure energy of our real lives, leaks out in an incandescent haze. On that day in 1985 when I walked into her temple, I was in that state. Although I had no words for that state, I was filled with a desire for ultimate truth and meaning and reality. That’s all I could think about. If that isn’t a desire for enlightenment, nothing is a desire for enlightenment.

You don’t have to think, “I want enlightenment” in order to want enlightenment. The real desire is beyond words; the real desire is for the substance of enlightenment, its actual flesh, for truth and meaning and divinity and holiness and liberation from the suffocating confines of the ego. Not for the words in the previous sentence, but for the things they represent.

She told me “the desire for God is God” with great emphasis. Sometimes she “spoke” by putting ideas or knowledge directly in my head without words, but if I recall correctly, she pronounced those words like a mahavakya. When she said “God” she meant that word in a very broad sense. She meant anything holy or divine, anything related to ultimate truth or goodness or love.

She showed me with a visual metaphor that any desire for such things has special properties. Such a desire is not like other desires. It’s based on a misunderstanding that tries to correct itself, and because the correction of the error is the gratification of the desire, the desire is self-fulfilling. She used a metaphor from physics: we crumple a piece of paper in our hand, then let go, and it uncrumples a little due to the paper’s elasticity. The idea is the same as a ball rolling downhill or a coiled spring unwinding. Just as a spring unwinds due to a physical law — in other words, due to the nature of the universe — so too the desire for God gets gratified due to the nature of the universe.

I’m saying “desire” because we perceive it that way but she said it’s not really a desire. Desires belong to the ego; in fact the ego consists in large part of desires. But the ego can desire God only by making a mistake, by imagining that it’s apart from God. When the ego intuits God, it reacts by desiring God; therefore in a way this desire is the ego’s representation of God; but God isn’t a desire; the representation is faulty; and since God is everything, the ego is God and can’t ever not be God. It occurs to me now that the ego can be defined as the fantasy that it’s something other than God. People without spiritual understanding sometimes think it’s a terrible sacrilege to say that the ego is God; but actually it’s a worse sacrilege to say it’s not, because that implies that God isn’t everything, that God is limited, that God is not infinite.

I can’t remember if she explained what she meant when she said that the desire for God is really a sound like a heartbeat. Maybe she meant that it’s always there, like God is always there, like our heartbeat is always there, and that it’s not something our minds contrive but something they misperceive. Also, when we perceive through a certain channel of intuition, the heart beat is the center. Sometimes, I don’t know why, I become very sensitive to the heartbeat. I feel the heart beating — feel it moving in the chest as it contracts and relaxes — and I feel the pulse wave radiate outward through my arteries after every beat all the way to my fingers and toes. At those times the heart is the center. In a similar way, God is the center.

[Edit: Another note from Freddie as I reread this in 2021. I think I know now what she meant. It was instantly apparent to me just now as I reread the first sentence of the previous paragraph. But I’m not sure how to put it into words. It is something like this: the heartbeat animates our physical body, keeping it alive by its continuous repeated action. Similarly, the desire for God is something like a constant throb that creates and maintains our existences on a more subtle level. When we suffer we automatically desire an end of suffering. Those two things are two aspects of one whole. The feeling of separation — in other words, the existence of our ego, the root of “me” — is the source of suffering and therefore it’s the same thing as the desire for the separation to go away. The end of separation is God. Ramana says that ego, world, and God rise and fall together, and that all are unreal.]

Before I end this post, I’d like to quote something I wrote in an email about a year before my conversations with the Goddess began. (Thank you, Focus, for reminding me of this.)

The most successful sadhana I ever did was simply craving and desiring experience of the divine. I wanted it. I wanted it for hours on end, every day. And so it came to me. I didn’t even realize it was sadhana. It was just my state at the time. It was just what was happening in my mind. I only realized later, in retrospect, after God came to me, that there had been cause and effect.

That quote could go in a post by itself under the title, Grace.

17 thoughts to “The desire for God is God”

  1. So profound, clear and revealing of not only a great mind but also of a great heart. Please keep going and tell us more.

  2. Maybe this is really the missing link. I have tried to become very silent, successfully, but my instinct says that it’s just not enough. I think also with all my previous sadhana (chakra work, primarily Kriya yoga) I focused too much on technique, forgetting about the Higher Being itself. Maybe it’s time to become very humble and invite God to help out! In the end, it’s also what Ramana unconsciously did, a very emotional desire to know the higher truth.

    1. Every man’s desire is according to his evolution; that which he is ready for, is the desirable thing for him.

      Bowl of Saki, May 23, by Hazrat Inayat Khan

    2. Sometimes it’s helpful to involve several aspects or elements of ourselves. The physical body, energy, Kundalini, the right sorts of ideas (gasp! I really mean that), surrender, the desire for holiness and truth — all these dimensions or aspects of ourselves can interact synergistically and amplify each other.

      The Goddess once told me, “Use everything we gave you.” Including the mind.

      Not necessarily all at once.

      I think what you (Jelke) wrote is a good idea but you may have accomplished more than you realize already. Sometimes progress happens underground beyond our view and only becomes evident years after the fact.

    1. Sorry for the delayed reply. I really don’t know. Things are a bit confusing. I postponed answering because I hoped I would think of something to say. As soon as I know, I’ll post something.

  3. Hi Freddie,

    Thank you for sharing your experience with us. I enjoyed it very much. Your story of kundalini and the Goddess is great… Incredible experience indead! Makes me feel like I used to when I went to see this healer go in trance of Amman in Sri Lanka!

    The Goddess helped me too… when I was 14 years old, my parents had not paid their rent for over a year and were fighting all the time. I used to wish I could disappear: so one night I called on the Universe (or God?) to help my family and I get out of this mess. I started to remember my dreams at night… finally after a year or so something happened! My mother’s step grandfather’s company was being sold! We changed schools bought a nice house and my parents got back together again. It felt so peaceful… But I could feel something was different. I tasted this sweetness in my mouth and I wanted to meditate all the time. I felt drunk feeling the sun light. I knew that someone was listening to me, guiding me, protecting me.

    As I got older, things became even more mystical. I started reading about kriya yoga and the upanishads. There was only one main thing in my life: God… I realised that the outside world was full of disappointments and i decided to try going inwards instead. I had a series of dreams which led me to go to Sri Lanka and meet a poor Tamil Shaman living on the Beach. He showed me many things. He was a siddhar… When I came back to Europe, I had a lucid dream of the Goddess. I woke up and saw the Goddess smiling at me, she was surrounded by Light and somewhere I could sense it was not of this world. I was perfectly awake. But then I felt tired and woke up in the morning. Then 9 months later, my kundalini arose one night and I left my body to fly to some Indian temple. It was very traumatic. My body had electric discharges after the event. And it took a few weeks before I had another experience where I felt deep bhavam in a paradise Spring type of garden. More experiences happened later but the first was the most vivid and challenging. After a few years, I met another healer who went in Trance of Amman on Fridays. The first time we met, I lost my body consciousness and felt deep bliss with tears of release and deep joy. Both of these people died 6 months apart in 2016-2017 both sicknesses. One was 53 the other 70 years old. This has left me empty and unable to cope with my life. So many questions unanswered… So many doubts… so much confusion. When I meet or talk to an awakened person I feel my kundalini starts to stir and jolts and my heart throbbs but in Sri lanka most were unable to help me get proper answers.

    In France, people are not very welcoming to the idea that The Goddess is real and that she can communicate with us. People here have a hard time believing that even the sun still shines! My Soul is silently watching, wondering when I will find them again.

    Something I don’t understand and if you could clarify for me: Amman told me that she had sown her light seed in my heart but since the passing of the healer (who went in trance of Amman), Amman rarely comes in dreams, only when I do some bhajans or really pray deeply. It’s so difficult here in France. Recently I met with a swami of kriya yoga online. He gave meditations online through zoom. I felt he had a strong power and my kundalini started stir again. I saw my Shaman friend in a lucid dream. But the swami became very condescending towards me to ‘test me’ as he put it… I just stopped his connection.

    I am having doubts about my past experiences because I have this fear of the rising kundalini as well as this feeling of losing the chance to gain spiritual experience. Things happen sometimes but I ‘m not really knowledgeable enough to manage everything myself. I’ ve read many books… upanishads, bhagavatam, gita, yoga books, taoist alchemy etc… Books cannot give us the first hand experience of having guidance…

    Being 39 years old I still feel that all just happened so fast now I want to find specific answers to my doubts… Does Amma give us a road map to our spiritual destiny after the seed is sown in the Soul’s heart?

    1. Dear James,

      As I read your letter, waves of cold blue energy went through my body. This happens to me when something Godly is evident, like a signal telling me, “Hey, this is real, this is divine.” Your experiences with the Goddess seem very similar to mine. I can’t remember anybody ever telling me experiences that seem so similar.

      Before I say anything else, in case this letter becomes very long, let me say at the beginning, regarding Kundalini and the Goddess, I suggest that you may want to consult Jan Esmann. He lives in Copenhagen and frequently gives retreats in various European cities. You can meet him and talk to him at one of his online satsangs on Tuesdays at 19h30 CET.

      Amman told me that she had sown her light seed in my heart…

      I think this “light seed” is what happened to me in 1985 in Meenakshi Amman temple. I always say “she planted a seed in me that day that eventually sprouted and changed the course of my life.” Among other things, it led to light in and around my head, so it makes sense to call it a “light seed.” But I didn’t know at the time she had done it. I only knew decades later. I never heard the words “light seed” until I read your letter a few minutes ago. I think you’re the first person who has told me he or she had the same experience as I did. But you knew it happened. I didn’t know.

      There’s a reason why I’m making this point that She did something to me without my knowing. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

      The Goddess helped me too… when I was 14 years old, my parents had not paid their rent for over a year and were fighting all the time. I used to wish I could disappear: so one night I called on the Universe (or God?) to help my family and I get out of this mess. I started to remember my dreams at night… finally after a year or so something happened! My mother’s step grandfather’s company was being sold! We changed schools bought a nice house and my parents got back together again. It felt so peaceful… But I could feel something was different. I tasted this sweetness in my mouth and I wanted to meditate all the time. I felt drunk feeling the sun light. I knew that someone was listening to me, guiding me, protecting me.

      25 years ago she was listening to you, guiding you, protecting you. Why would she stop? She hasn’t stopped. Maybe the experiences (sweetness, drunkeness, etc.) have stopped, or become less evident. But she can guide you — this includes choreographing your life — without your knowing. This is why I pointed out that she gave both you and me seeds, but only you knew. Nevertheless the seeds affected both of us.

      Something I don’t understand and if you could clarify for me: Amman told me that she had sown her light seed in my heart but since the passing of the healer (who went in trance of Amman), Amman rarely comes in dreams, only when I do some bhajans or really pray deeply. It’s so difficult here in France.

      In my case, she was very evident to me as a “person” for a few years. She talked to me, came into my body/mind and gave me direct experiences, etc. Then one day she said “We (i.e. Shakti and Shiva) have taught you everything you need to know” and stopped talking to me. She didn’t mean I was fully enlightened. Far from it. She only meant that the limited amount of understanding that they needed to give me through that form of communication, had been given. That stage or episode of my education was now over.

      But this didn’t bother me. I never thought she had stopped guiding me. She can’t leave me because although I experienced her as a sort of super-powerful person, in reality she is the Universe or the power that makes the Universe manifest or however you want to say it. The Universe can’t go away. Where would it go?

      Also, the first thing she ever said to me was, “You should meet my husband.” So I took her apparent “departure” (which wasn’t really a departure) to mean, “The time has come for you to get serious and meet my husband”, i.e., get Self-realized.

      (She talked to me like somebody who follows Kashmir Shaivism, i.e, Trika, Tantra. I knew almost nothing about that tradition at the time.)

      One day, a few years after she “left me” (she didn’t really), under extraordinary circumstances, she intervened noticeably in my body/mind and gave me a particular energy experience. At that time she said one sentence of eight words to me. So although I no longer see her, she’s still “here” and may come back directly again in the future. But I haven’s seen her directly intervening in my life since then.

      I just wrote, “I no longer see her.” That’s not right. I see Shakti all the time. Shakti, filling space, constituting space, constantly in motion, dynamic. Isn’t that her? I don’t know. Tantra says it’s her. When it enters my body, it is intense love and bhakti.

      In the paragraph quoted above, you wrote, “…only when I do some bhajans or really pray deeply.” So you know you have the option of seeing her if you really want to, if you do some bhajans or really pray deeply. If bhajans and praying are hard for you, you can probably make them easier by doing it in a satsang (like Jan Esmann’s) or by taking shaktipat (again, I think Jan is probably good for this).

      I am having doubts about my past experiences because I have this fear of the rising kundalini as well as this feeling of losing the chance to gain spiritual experience. Things happen sometimes but I ‘m not really knowledgeable enough to manage everything myself.

      I think Jan can help with the Kundalini and fear of Kundalini. I don’t think you have lost or can lose the chance to gain spiritual experience.

      You have a teacher, her name is Amma. 🙂 She can teach by arranging events in the universe. She doesn’t have to talk or appear. Right now, these letters that you and I have written, are her doing. Everything is her doing. She is what makes the universe manifest.

      Maybe it’s time — this is only a suggestion, I don’t know — for you to focus on making these experiences happen by yourself, without a human teacher. Maybe that’s what Amman is arranging for you right now. You know a way to do it — bhajans, intense prayer. Maybe (I don’t know) you will learn to do this effortlessly by immersing yourself consciously in Shakti — but probably this requires you to transcend your fears of Kundalini.

      I believe you that it’s hard to find people to discuss this with in France. It’s hard where I live too, in the US. Judging from the number of letters I receive from India, it’s even hard in India! Are you saying this because of a search for the next teacher? We are lucky today because we have the Internet, so we can talk to people easily anywhere on the planet. The most important thing is that She is as easy to find in France as anywhere else.

      I think (this is purely intuition, I claim no special expertise) that you will have to become more fully aware of Shakti to move forward. This probably means more energy phenomena even though it’s scary.

      Does Amma give us a road map to our spiritual destiny after the seed is sown in the Soul’s heart?

      As I said earlier in this letter, in my case, she guided my life — made events happen — without my knowing that she was doing it. So I would say, she doesn’t always show us the map. Or maybe she shows us but we can’t see it.

      Regardless of whether she shows us the map, she’s driving the car and we’re sitting in it. 🙂

      Very best wishes,

      Freddie

    2. P.S. James, my earlier reply was very long but despite its length, as often happens when we write, I didn’t figure out the real starting point of the letter until the end, when I answered your comment about the road map and joked about the car.

      So here’s a second reply that begins with the road map and car.

      I think the main way Amman has helped me over the last 36 years is by arranging my life. She puts me in situations where I have to do something. Or she puts desires in me that cause me to do things. She doesn’t only work like Santa Claus, giving me gifts. She also works through me, causing me to give myself gifts. It’s hard to know she is doing this except afterward in retrospect. This is what I meant by riding in a car that she is driving, without seeing the road map.

      I think she has done the same thing for you. I think she will continue to do this as long as necessary, or as long as you desire something holy and desire her help (that’s the meaning of the title of the article above). The situation you are in right now — I suggest that she is putting you there so you will do something to grow spiritually toward Self-realization.

      I’ve noticed over the years that this process goes in stages. Using the metaphor of the road map and the car she is driving, the car passes through different terrains. Some parts of the trip are very pleasant — beautiful scenery, optimal climate. Some parts of the trip are harsh and painful.

      Some parts of the trip make us think the car has broken down and the driver has abandoned us. But in my opinion, this is never true. Once we have a strong desire to ride in that car, it never stops carrying us onward.

      Christian mystics have a name for those parts of the trip where we think the car has broken down and the driver has abandoned us: “dark night of the soul.”

      I hesitate to give you any advice about what you should do now because really, I’m not an expert and I don’t know. Maybe you are the only one who can know.

      Maybe you should look for subtle hints, subtle forms of guidance, in your innermost intuition.

      But as I read your letter, several things stand out for me. First, up till now you relied a lot on teachers. Maybe Amma is telling you the time has come for you to become like your teachers, and that can only happen if you learn to make these things happen on your own, without a teacher.

      There is a famous story among Ramana devotees about one of his main disciples, Annamalai Swami, who lived with Ramana for 12 years and was as close to him as anybody. Then one day Ramana told him to leave the ashram, never return, and meditate on his own. Annamalai said Ramana never left him (I think Ramana continued to visit him occasionally in his new home). But they both knew Annamalai had come to a place in his car trip where he had to stop seeing Ramana every day face-to-face in order to progress toward Self-realization.

      (But if you want help from a teacher, I still think Jan Esmann is a good one to try.)

      Two more things that stand out for me in your letter: (1) You know how to give yourself deep experiences through bhajans and deep prayer, but for some reason which I don’t know, this isn’t satisfactory for you, and (2) you tend to have Kundalini activity easily but it’s frightening.

      Putting those two things together, maybe Amma is telling you, “Like it or not, the time has come for you to make an effort and sing bhajans and pray, and like it or not, the time has come for you to open yourself to the Kundalini and let it do its work.”

      It has been my experience that although she arranged some painful experiences for me, she never subjected me to anything that I couldn’t tolerate. For some reason she drove the car through places where I suffered but at the same time, she protected me.

      As a result of these experiences I am certain that when she imposes something on us, when she asks us to surrender to something, she always arranges that we can bear it. And of course the outcome is always beneficial.

      Another thought. One of the reasons I wasn’t disturbed when she stopped talking to me was because I felt intuitively (I don’t think she ever explained it) that the time had come for me to graduate from duality to nonduality.

      There’s a famous story in Ramana circles about the first time H.L Poonja met Ramana Maharshi. Poonja bragged that he could see Krishna. If I remember the story correctly, Poonja told Ramana that he was dissatisfied because he could see Krishna only occasionally. He asked Ramana to help him see Krishna constantly. Instead of helping Poonja do this, Ramana explained that God is what sees out of our eyes.

      I always took this anecdote as a story about a person’s spiritual path moving from duality (duality can be spiritual) to nonduality. When the Goddess stopped talking to me, I took it that way. I remembered the first thing she had told me, “You should meet my husband.”

      Perhaps it’s true that even though both of them (Amman and Shiva) are the two aspects of the Self, nonetheless we can see Her as something external, but Him, Shiva, we can know only as Self, only as something internal, only as that which looks out of our own eyes.

  4. Dear Freddie,

    Thank you for taking the time to answer my message.

    As a child I was told God was unapproachable, inaccessible and so, in this life, it was not worth the try to lead a spiritual life because, anyways, once we pass from this world, if we do good we will get a place in heaven. The responsible, proud, educated, overconfident, arrogant who desperately wants to fit in and be accepted by who knows who, which is a problem because he doubts all the spiritual experiences in my life. He tells me ‘no you didn’t see Amman, no you didn’t see these Divine Beings… no you don’t have any bliss… it’s all in your head just fantasy… you torture yourself hiding in your cocoon to feel the pleasure of releasing false Ananda in your heart’ and the rebel in me defends himself saying: ‘well yes I’m a great spiritual person with loads of mystical experience!’ And then I think what a stupid mind always creating noise for attention! And what has provoked that self-doubt? It can only be an outside source! So chasing away the ideas of the outside worldly mindedness leaves us a tremendous potential for peace and great spiritual experiences. That’s from my own experience. I shut myself in a room for 4 years and I can safely say it was much easier that way… Things just peeled off from me… my family were very against this and tried everything to prevent it… but I did go far enough to see that they had no real impact on my spiritual life other than trying to sabotage it!

    It leaves me in silence and cluelessness as to what to do next in the future! And really I’ll admit : I cry everyday not knowing what to do… Who will accept me for who I am! Who will share with me without trying to dominate and put me down? Because this is the problem for me you see… I don’t doubt Amma or Krishna’ s existence nor their potency because I’ve seen enough to know they are real Spiritual Beings… but how can I accept them in my life on a deeper level where it will not be clashing with others who refuse Love and kindness when all my surrounding world is collapsing and is preventing this from happening??? we are at a crossroad in humanity where not only do we have to think of our own safety, our spiritual wellbeing but our children and grandchildren because that’s where our real spiritual value lies… I wish at least once in my life I could see a society which operates out of Love and kindness in an atmosphere of peace and true Love.

    Maya is real and it’s much more powerful than we could imagine. Thinking that we are invincible and that our help is most needed in this world doesn’t drive me anymore… I see it now as: what is my duty to be the less of a burden for this world? That’s why Guru is necessary not only to encourage and guide but to empower us to fulfil God’s mission and not our mission…

    it’s impossible to share Love and cultivate it seriously around people don’t have even the basic understanding of moral conduct to make Love a spiritual communion with God in their society: People who love lust and will never ever give it up! For me it is clear… lust is the enemy of ‘Love’ and is actually a traitor towards Love… It will never work for Love but sabotage it… And most humans sabotage their potential Love of God for lusty pleasure that society was built upon. It’s the wasting of the essence that is wasting prana and destroying the spirit of humanity. That’ s the real issue in our modern world. Who will dare talk about it? I read in Vijaya Kumar’s blog that after 12 years as a celibate one’s kundalini will surely rise! So all spiritual experience is directly proportionate to one’s sacrifice by giving up the world and returning to the source throught the blissful body… All philosophy all religions all politics, all societies are nothing but distractions from the real issue: how much can we overcome maya and be overcome by God’s intoxicating Love?
    There’s something inside me that is just burning with anguish to know and feel the presence of Amma. I always feel she has gifts for us, she knows what her child needs most and what we truly like and arranges things for our well being.

    At 39, I had to learn the hard way the importance of secrecy. It demands a lot of self-control and restraint so much that a large part of my personality starts to fade away with time, like someone inside me is really not that important after all…

    I deeply enjoy getting advice from wiser elders such as yourself, it reassures me that we are not alone on this journey. Thank you!

    Funny you mentioned Meenakshi Amman… whenever I hear her name, ‘that’ feeling comes in my heart… Sometimes I feel Shiva comes to me, other times Krishna and then Amman again…
    So I asked and she said ‘I have given you everything… when I decide to come down in a body I stay… You need to meditate it will come out!

    I think you are right, it’ s time to start trusting one’s own inner guide instead of depending on outside gurus and teachers. But I really do believe that a real guru would give us the support emotionally and psychologically as well as the spiritual power to raise our kundalini.

  5. Freddie:- Everything is God! The thought that there is separation from God is God. The thought that you are unenlightened is God. Pain is God. Pleasure is God. The thought that there needs to be less pain or more pleasure is God. The idea that things could be different from the way they in fact are is God. There is nothing you can do or cannot do to be one inch closer or further from God, because there is nothing that is not God! There is just this, everything, existence existing, life living itself. It has always been this way and it will always be this way, whatever anyone says, thinks or does! Your whole story of searching for God is absolutely perfect as it already is, and will be whatever happens 🙂

    1. Hi George,

      I agree that everything is God. I’ve said so many times on this blog, including in the article above, and I’ll quote that part in bold italics in a moment.

      The article doesn’t say that the desire for God is special because it’s God. It says it’s special because it’s unlike other desires. Why? Because (I quote from the article):

      Such a desire is not like other desires. It’s based on a misunderstanding that tries to correct itself, and because the correction of the error is the gratification of the desire, the desire is self-fulfilling.

      What is the misunderstanding? The same one you correct in your comment. I quote again from the article:

      The ego can desire God only by making a mistake, by imagining that it’s apart from God. When the ego intuits God, it reacts by desiring God; therefore in a way this desire is the ego’s representation of God; but God isn’t a desire; the representation is faulty; and since God is everything, the ego is God and can’t ever not be God. It occurs to me now that the ego can be defined as the fantasy that it’s something other than God.

      I hope the quotations have made clear that the article takes for granted that everything is God, and that it makes some of the same points you make in your comment.

      Why doesn’t the article say these things as clearly and simply as your comment? Because that’s not the subject of the article. The main subject of the article is, “Why in 1985 did I have the experience that is described in the article?”

      1. Sorry, I misunderstood the chronology!

        Your comment in bold reminds me very much of the way I try to explain Nagarjuna’s “samsara is nirvana”. Samsara (suffering of cyclic existence) is caused by the belief that nirvana (freedom from suffering) is an experience lying outside of samsara. When you understand that this is not possible, then you realize that samsara is itself nirvana. It’s the hope of an escape which causes you to suffer, whereas giving up the fantasy of an impossible escape actually turns out to be the escape!

        I only really understood this after awakening, but I think it’s in the same spirit as what you are saying about the ego being defined as the fantasy that it’s not God (or already enlightened or however you want to call it).

  6. Freddie,
    I discovered your blog this morning. I really don’t know what to say, except thank you. A heartfelt thank you. This post moved me to tears. I have been walking the spiritual path for a while and have had some small spiritual experiences. Recently there have some difficult times spiritually, a feeling that everything has gone dry. It felt that something was blocked. I used to sometimes cry when I felt deeply connected to God– those feelings and tears had evaporated and I was unsure whether they would come. This post brought back some of those feelings and tears. Thank you, is therefore, all that I can say. May God bless you.

    1. Hi Aparna,

      Periods of dryness have come to me too. I think they come to many people who have these sorts of experiences. But I think it’s only our emotional response to our awareness of God that has gone dry. The awareness, if we look closely, is always still there. The emotions are a great loud blaring thing, impossible to miss. The awareness is quieter and more subtle. So it’s easy to think the connection is gone completely when in fact it isn’t really. Also, I think maybe some of the dryness is a side effect of moving from duality to nonduality which is a good thing. We expect the awareness to be awareness of something separate from us. That’s why we feel it as a connection. But in reality there isn’t anything separate from ourselves.

      Maybe desire for connection leads to knowledge that everything is God, and that brings on surrender, and that’s the real goal.

      I know what it’s like when we read something and it touches off tears. I’ve had that experience too. I’m glad that post had that effect.

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