3-month course - registration open!

After some time away from the blog, Peter has returned with news...

The long-awaited Tantra course is now launched!

3-month course for peace of mind, vitality and profound transformation.

See info here:

Here I Am

Self-Realization is not only possible, it is inevitable, if you are truly open... sincere... focused on living your deepest truth.
Self-Realization doesn't come through effort, it comes gracefully, through breathing in, breathing out... doing, resting... speaking, listening...
Self-Realization comes in balance, truth, openness, courage, faith... patience... Inspiration... and of course, Love.


Self-Realization ultimately is no big deal. It's what's left when all the confusion, fear, and struggle have gone.

Yes this is possible. It's your natural state.

'Think again'

It is fundamental to recognise that we have been taught not to trust ourselves...

We have been taught to create a split between 'me' and 'Life'... between 'me' and 'Source'...

The basis of this split is an idea. It is an idea that we picked up by observing all the 'separate-feeling' people around us - their actions, their words, their interests, their fears...

We have been taught to deny the peace that is right here in the Silence, between the thoughts, behind the thoughts, before, after and even during the thoughts... We have been taught to ignore this Witness that is Pure Consciousness... that is always Here.

No-thing is in the way of Understanding. No-thing needs to be removed or added. It's just that idea of separation that distracts us...

It's JUST an idea.

It's not important. It doesn't justify all that effort that we make to find wholeness again.

It's just an idea.

'Think again' ... or not.

It's just an idea.

Spirituality is just about finding Peace...

The goal of my spiritual work is true happiness... contentment... Peace.

But sometimes we may imagine that spirituality is in some way 'opposed' to involvement in the world. We may believe that if we were content then we would have no impulse towards any achievement.

However, do not confuse true happiness, contentment and Peace with apathy, ‘low-expectations’, indifference, lack of motivation, or stagnation.

In happiness and peace, we rediscover our natural talents, we rediscover our passion, and we find it perfectly natural to live a dynamic, adventurous life, full of discovery and achievement…

In happiness and peace we discover the best of ourselves, we discover the best we have to offer our loved ones and to this world. We discover that by being fully ourselves – just being at peace with ourselves –  actually has a huge impact on our world, because it is a powerful ‘wake-up call’ to those around us. It reminds those who come into contact with us that they too can be in peace… and that peace is not just an idyllic concept. It can be embodied in any moment of our lives.

Ultimately spiritual self-realisation is recognising  that this peace is our unconditioned nature… that it is still here, now as silent witness to all the highs and lows… it is unconditional and eternal.

It is the source of genuine unconditional love. Mystics have referred to it as the ‘Presence of God’… Hindus have referred to it as ‘Satchitananda’ (‘Truth-Consciousness-Bliss’), the Buddhists have referred to it as the ‘Buddha-nature’…

It is always present. We just tend to overlook it in our ‘disbelief’… We cover it up with our thoughts about the so-called ‘real world’, which really is the product of conditioning rather than direct experience.

Ultimately spirituality has nothing to do with belief – quite the contrary – it is what remains when we have the courage to drop our belief systems – both ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ – and experience the power of Life, animating us now… This is communion with the source.

It's too simple to be ‘grasped’, but the ‘cure’ for this strange condition is to recognise why we have been trying so hard to ‘grasp’ in the first place...

We have been afraid. We have developed an unquestioned and even unconscious belief, or attitude, of distrust towards life. This is all that stands in the way of our Realisation… and it has no strength to stand on its own… it is we who are keeping peace (‘God’) at a distance through this lack of trust in life. It is this lack of trust that holds together all our attachment, all our selfishness, all our ignore-ance.

My work – my gift to you – is to help you find that trust again... that innocence.

Spirituality is just about finding Peace.
In that Peace we recognise, and Realise, our very own Self, and the virtues so cherished in the world's spiritual teachings arise spontaneously.

Only in peace can this Infinite Presence of Self be realised, only in Grace. This is why your efforts may be going in vain.

Messages from Shibendu Lahiri

Click here to read, or download, Shibendu Lahiri's inspired messages.

"A multiplicity of paths to the one Truth."

Shibendu Lahiri in Portugal - April 2010

Shibendu Lahiri at Quinta dos Milagres, Lagos.

Shibendu Lahiri is giving a lecture tomorrow night (16th April 2010) in Lisbon at 9pm, and Kriya Yoga initiations over the weekend and then a retreat in Fátima.

You can also find information about this and his upcoming events (UK, Germany, India, USA, etc.) at:

www.kriyayogalahiri.com/htmluk/program.htm

He is a true Advaita master - a voice for the Infinite.

His teaching is not 'comforting', it is profoundly disarming and dissolves the 'I'-centred illusion of separation...

If you meet him or 'his' teaching, prepare to be 'blasted'.

Another opportunity to see the whole series

about Self-realisation and the non-dual (Advaita)

teachings of Nisargadatta Maharaj.

First film at 18h30:

Second film at 21h:

Nisargadatta Maharaj and Ramana Maharshi are considered to be the two greatest representatives of Self-realisation and Advaita (non-dualist understanding).

Contribution: €3

Bring your dinner :o)

Guiding Light - The Teacher (quoted from Feuerstein's 'The Yoga Tradition')

As Mircea Eliade pointed out in his well-known study on Yoga, "What characterizes Yoga is not only its practical side, but also its initiatory structure."

Yoga, like all forms of esotericism, presupposes the guidance of an initiate, a master who has firsthand experience of the phenomena and realizations of the yogic path. Ideally, he or she should have reached the ultimate spiritual destination of all yogic endeavor - enlightenment (bodha, bodhi), or liberation (moksha).

Thus, contrary to the "pop" Yoga espoused by a large number of Westerners, authentic Yoga is never a do-it-yourself enterprise. "One does not learn Yoga by oneself," observed Eliade. Rather, Yoga involves, as do all other traditional Indian systems, an actual pupilage during which a master imparts his or her secrets to the worthy disciple or devotee. And those secrets are not exhausted by the kind of knowledge that can be expressed in words or printed in books.

Much of what the teacher (guru) imparts to the disciple falls under the category of spiritual transmission (sancara). Such transmission, in which the guru literally empowers the student through a transference of "energy" or "consciousness" (corresponding to the "Holy Spirit" of Christian baptism), is the fulcrum of the initiatory process of Yoga. By means of it, the practitioner is blessed in his or her struggle for transcendental realization. As a result, the initiated yogin or yogini experiences the necessary conversion or "turn-about" that is crucial to the spiritual process: He or she begins to find the Real, or the Self beyond the ego, more attractive than the numerous possibilities of worldly experience. The basis for that attraction is a tacit intuition of the Self, which grows stronger in the course of practice."

The 'guru' and self-realisation (from 'The Yoga Tradition', by Feuerstein, PhD.)

"The God-realized teacher grants "divine knowledge" (divya-jnana), as the Yoga-Shikha-Upanishad puts it. It is knowldedge that springs from enlightenment and attracts to enlightenment.

The Advaya-Taraka-Upanishad gives an esoteric explanation of the word guru, deriving it from the syllable gu (indicating "darkness") and ru (indicating "dispeller").

Of all the teachers, God-realized adepts are even today given a special place in Hindu society, for they alone are capable of initiating the spiritual seeker into the supreme "knowledge of the Absolute" (brahma-vidya). They alone are sad-gurus (sat-gurus) - "teachers of the Real" or "true teachers." Here, the Sanskrit word sat connotes both "real" and "true". These teachers are celebrated as potent agents of grace. As the Shiva-Samhita states: "By the teacher's grace, everything auspicious for oneself is obtained." And the Hatha-Yoga-Pradipika affirms that without a true teacher's compassion, the state of transcendental spontaneity (sahaja) is difficult to attain.

Because of his or her spiritual realization, the guru is considered to be an embodiment of the Divine itself. [...]

The teacher is not a specific deity but the all-encompassing Divine. This "deification" of the God-realized master must not be misunderstood. He or she is not God in any exclusive sense, but rather is coessential with the transcendental Reality. That is to say, he or she has abrogated the ordinary person's misidentification with a particular body-mind and abides purely as the transcendental Identity of all beings and things.

There is no trace of egoity in the truly enlightened being, for the ego has been replaced by the Self. The body-mind and personality continue for their alloted time, but the enlightened being is no longer implicated by his or her automaticities.

The unenlightened individual, by contrast, believes himself or herself to be a particular "entity", or individuated consciousness, somehow lodged within a body and associated with, possibly even driven by, a particular personality complex. This fatal illusion is gracefully shattered at the moment of enlightenment."

What is a true 'Guru'? (from the Kula-Arnava-Tantra)

"There are many gurus, like lamps in house after house,

but hard to find, O Devi,

is the guru who lights up all like the sun.

There are many gurus who are proficient in the Vedas and the Shastras,

but hard to find, O Devi,

is the guru who has attained to the supreme Truth.

There are many gurus on Earth who give what is other than the Self,

but hard to find in all the worlds, O Devi,

is the guru who reveals the Self.

Many are the gurus who rob the disciple of his wealth,

but rare is the guru who removes the afflictions of the disciple.

He is a [true] guru by whose very contact there flows the supreme Bliss.

The intelligent person should choose such a one as his guru and none other."

(Translation from Feuerstein's 'The Yoga Tradition')

On Yoga and Tantra - 'transcendence' and 'integration' - from 'The Yoga Tradition' by Georg Feuerstein, PhD.

"India's Psychospiritual technology has been subject to a ruling paradigm, which can be described as verticalism: Reality is thought to be realizable by inverting attention and then manipulating the inwardly focused consciousness to ascend into ever-higher states in the inner hierarchy of experience until everything is transcended...

This vertical model of spirituality is founded in archaic mythical imagery, which pictures Reality in polar opposition to conditional existence: Heaven above, Earth below. As the contemporary adept Da Free John (Adi Da) has shown, this model is a conceptual representation of the human nervous system. As he put it succinctly:

The key to mystical language and religious metaphor is not

theology or cosmology but anatomy. All the religious and cosmological language of mysticism is metaphorical. And the metaphors are symbols for anatomical features of the higher functional structures of the human individual.

Those who enter deeply into the mystical dimension of experience soon discover that the cosmic design they expected to find in their inward path of ascent to God is in fact simply the design of their own anatomical or psychophysical structures. Indeed, this is the secret divulged to initiates of mystical schools."

More recently, Joe Nigro Sansonese explored the somatic origins of myth in his [...] work The Body of Myth. He defined myths succinctly as "culture-laden descriptions of samadhi."As he explained, each meditation takes the yogin or yogini deep into the body [...]. This somatic journey is then externalised in mythic utterances. There is much truth to Sansonese's statement, but it is not the entire truth. Some states of consciousness go beyond proprioception, beyond the body, and it is precisely these states that the Yoga adepts seek to cultivate. Enlightenment or liberation itself is definitely a body-transcending condition. Here the entire universe becomes a "body" for the liberated being.

The most severe limitation of the verticalist paradigm is that it involves an understanding of spiritual life as a progressive inward journey from unenlightenment to enlightenment. This gives rise to the misconception that Reality is to be found within, away from the world, and that, consequently, to renounce the world means to abandon it.

It is to the credit of India's adepts that this paradigm did not remain unchalleged. For instance, in Tantra, which straddles both Hinduism and Buddhism, a different understanding of spirituality is present. [...] Tantra is founded in the radical assumption that if Reality is anywhere, it must be everywhere and not merely inside the human psyche. The great dictum of Tantrism is that the transcendental Reality and the conditional world are coessential - nirvana equals samsara. In other words, transcendental ecstasy and sensory pleasure are not finally incompatible. Upon enlightenment, pleasure reveals itself to be ecstasy. In the unenlightened state, pleasure is simply a substitute for the ecstasy that is its abiding ground. This insight has led to a philosophy of integration between spiritual concerns and material existence, which is particularly relevant today."