View of Great River Institute hiking trail leading to meditation area

read comments (0)

Sensei says… One reason purpose is hard to see is that it is naturally shooting outward, whether you are aware of it or not. And since we typically are focused on outward things, we don’t see it shooting out of us, at least unless it hits something that is reflective, which might then cause us to reflect and say, “What was that?” or, “Oh my, I think I was just purposeful”. Additionally, there are times where it may be productive when it “hits” other people, causing them some benefit, but typically we aren’t even aware of when that happens.

In Jiu Jitsu we learn how to relax and center on a point. We learn how to center on a point within us, a point outside of us, and a point inside of someone else. We learn to do this multi-dimensionally. I can tell you that this takes a lot of training. Very few martial arts teachers are able or willing to teach something like this.

Sensei teaches that we are here to learn how to rotate energy around a point inside of us, to center our energy around that point. And within that point lies whatever we have previously deposited if we have centered on it before. Our purpose is there, along with all that other stuff surrounding it. When we deposit something in there, it stays with us forever. It forms both our karma, and our character and individuality.

So, to learn how to center and balance in our purpose means that we have to be willing to go through the things that we need to go through, in order to achieve the deeper experience. That includes all the things that make up our experience as a person, all of our past, our traumas, our highs and our lows. That’s a lot of stuff that ends up accumulating, making it very hard to find our way through it to see our purpose. It’s a lot of stuff to have to go through.

Sensei explains that on the way toward our center, this stuff encircles the center. As we learn to become more centered, we initially find the experience to be a very uncomfortable one. It typically puts us in a lot of anxiety. We don’t understand that on the other side of our anxiety is our center. Instead, we become repulsed by the experience of journeying toward the center. And, unfortunately, this sets up an association in us that says becoming more centered is a bad or unpleasant experience.

read comments (1)

From the opening pages of my study notes, a two month course taught by Sensei at Great River Institute:

• The Golden Flower, which is a Taoist perspective, is when the light, which life itself is made of, returns to itself, via the individualized consciousness. The Taoist is interested in transforming the highest qualities that come out of a situation and putting a value on that.
• The Taoist says “your main problem isn’t dissolving into the light; your main problem is that you are not going through the light”.
• The Taoist says the truer Golden Flower exists within the light itself.
• Each religion represents one or more of the aspects of transformation, and if you could put them all together you would see they are a process that has something designed in it for the problems you are dealing with. And the souls that are on the other side designing all of this and running it, are the same souls who come in and set it in motion here.
• A Great One is someone who has risen to a point that you can’t see anyone above them.
• An explanation about the greatest point inside of you, the greatest and highest point, is something you find out from the Great One, known in Christianity as the Christ. He will reveal information about that point, the secret of the Golden Flower of the great one. When you go deep into the light of heaven and dwell there, you will have a much better perspective of earth.
• The eyes are the window to the soul. The light is in your two eyes. It’s not just what you see, it’s in them. It is also coming out of them.
• You have to learn to look in to the eyes, whether your own or someone else’s. It’s not what you are seeing outside, unless you are looking in to the eyes.
• The Golden Flower is the light. The light is the Light. It is the true energy of the great One.

read comments (0)

From the opening pages of an incredible three month study on the Gita, taught by Sensei at Great River Institute in 2003.

“We can see that the conflict inside of ourselves is a form of warfare that’s being projected out into our world. In other words, we’re going out into the world, wearing a set of clothes called our physical body, or our occupation, or the subject matter of a particular argument or dispute — whatever you want to call it.

“As an individual you can keep tracking it, backing all the way up to your eternal quality. At that point you will see that as you look toward the physical conflict, that the more physical you go, the more you get drawn into the reason for what supports the physicality of it only on the physical plane.

“As you do this you’ll be losing sight of the fact that there’s no conflict on the spiritual plane that doesn’t have an inner one that’s occurring through the physical plane. If we were to face each other in battle, it’s simply our inner conflicts coming to the surface. It’s our differences that we don’t understand because of our inner conflicts. It is these differences that we have in the physical plane that define our war. But really, it’s just a war to understand more about ourselves inside. I hope I’m giving this picture.

“The idea behind the Gita is that we’re going to look at that conflict that exists within us, and the conflict that exists outside of us, and then really take a hard look at that. Why? Because for spiritual seekers and for people that are really looking to become more attuned to their eternal selves, that conflict represents the biggest obstacle in your path, in whatever form it takes.

“Just being here as a human on Earth represents a conflict in itself, because humans don’t even typically know without training, and without faith and deeper examination within themselves, what their true connection to life really is. They don’t typically know their purpose, they don’t typically know where they came from, where they’re going to, what the nature of those things are.

“So we have conflict just in being human itself. And then it starts stacking up. We get frustrated because of that lack of understanding, but we don’t realize that one person’s lack of understanding could be compounding another person’s lack of understanding. So, now our conflict ends up growing even more.

“The real question is: where is it really coming from and what are we willing to do about it in those situations? Too often we look at the conflict and define the conflict as being something that has more constitution or more merit than it deserves. That’s typically what we do. When we start to have a dispute or an argument, we tend to build it up into being more than what it needs to be. Then we end up living and staying inside this sea of conflict. And that’s what keeps us from having our connection.

“This is a study of one of Hindu’s sacred texts, a very interesting book. It’s not a very long book, but it’s a very powerful book because it looks deep into conflict. It looks at conflict and at how to answer some of the difficult questions that happen when you’re in the face of conflict.

“The idea of it is that we have a character who is our person in conflict. He is in the middle of a physical-world situation. He couldn’t be more in the thick of it. And there, in the thick of things, he is being given advice as to why the conflict exists, why things are the way they are, what he should be thinking about, what he should be doing, and why he should be doing these things he is being advised to do.

“Right there, in the moment itself, there is actual conflict. But more importantly, he is also dealing with the conflict within himself. He is being told that the only reason you’re in this outer conflict is because you are looking to overcome the one inside yourself, as are all the other people that are in your field of battle.”

Sensei

read comments (1)