One of the principles I study with Sensei: maintain one point. It is also a principle in the martial art of Aikido.

It teaches you how to focus on the deeper point within, and maintain it.

It also teaches you how to look for and see the deeper point within someone else, focus on it… until they sense it too.

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The following is from a blog site visitor who does not personally know either me or Sensei. We have never met nor even talked on the phone. On 9/30/05, Site Visitor sent an email to me that said:

I had a lucid dream last night where Sensei appeared and asked me where I desired to be in my spiritual journey. He was wearing a red almost flannel shirt or perhaps it was a Gi.

I answered his question with,” right where I am.”

He simply smiled and as I chose to move from sleeping to waking…. he dissolved.

What do you make of this?
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Email reply from Mark (same day):

Sensei and I have been together for the last four days, building out my basement. We have been working long hours focused on construction, and although we have been together, we haven’t talked of such things.

His dreams are highly lucid, and he has many people that come visit him and vice versa.

As I was writing you a reply to your email, he called me. I answered the phone and he said, “What’s up?” I told him about your email and your question.

“Well, first of all the shirt isn’t red. It is actually light burgundy and is lined with a flannel like material.” Sensei has been wearing it the last two days during construction.

He went on to say that last night was particularly busy and vivid, with a lot of people. One of the things he recalls was being at some auto dealer kind of place.

“There was a guy at the dealership who owned a large RV type vehicle. This guy was telling me what he wanted to do with his vehicle. The RV had multiple purposes. It could also be a boat, but the guy didn’t want to do that with it. It was exotic, like a split level, like walking into the bow of a cabin cruiser.

He was telling me to buy one. I said, “No, it’s really not for me.” I remember that I was thinking to myself, why would someone want to have one of these?

“The guy said, “Here are my reasons.”

It was an expensive customized vehicle with all the amenities. You could sleep, cook, even go up above to an overlook. This was his “vehicle”. You understand the vehicle thing, right Mark?

“Oh yeah, I do,” I replied. Cars and some other vehicles in dreams typically represent your “vehicle”, i.e. your physical body or physicality.

Continuing, Sensei said he was thinking. “Man, are you sure this is what you want? If you wanted to go in the water you’d damage it, it would start rusting out. It would be better to have a small boat. And the mileage for it is only 2-3 mpg.”

“But he was the kind of guy who wanted all the bells and whistles,” Sensei said, “and he was content with where he was at.”

Sensei said he hasn’t met this guy in this lifetime, and questioned himself in his dream, asking himself “Who is this I am meeting with?”

He went on to say that the guy seemed content with his vehicle. Sensei went back into the dealership. The salesman then said to Sensei, “You want one of those?”

“No,” he replied. “Not one of those. Really, I am not interested in any of the vehicles here.”

He went on to say that this particular person was pretty content in the lavishness of what he had. He said he didn’t mean this in a negative way, but that to him it was pretty bulky and hard to maneuver. He explained the lavishness as being kind of over the top, like the rich and famous.

“If he has a boat, I don’t know if he uses it that much,” he stated. He meant, if he has a boat in real life, he may not use it much.

“If this is who it was, then Sensei confirms he saw you. When I was talking to him, he was showing me things about his setup and where he was at - what was important to him.

“He did things with his set up; he is a function sort of person. He is really into his vehicle, into his home, his car… much more than what’s typical. To me he was trying to put it all together in one place. Maybe he works out of his house and is trying to do a lot of things there. I don’t know. But it was all contained in this one vehicle and in one place, and he was really into that.

“If this is him, then I did see him. He was showing me where he was at, what he was into, and that he was really very excited about having such a cool setup. He was also known at and beyond this dealer for this setup. It was the kind of thing, Mark, where he is getting his spiritual value from. Like he was famous for that type of setup. His creativity was being used in his setup. It was a really cool setup. I am not putting it down.

“It’s almost like one guy who’s into writing a piece of music, and another guy who is really into a studio and having a really cool setup. They are both good positions, it’s just one of the guys, the one who’s choosing to have a really cool setup in his studio.”
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Site Visitor responded saying, “Please allow me some time to consider what has been written here. Yes, there are many elements here that I can say relate. I am processing how this can be. How does this occur; my dreaming, awake, of your teacher…and why?”

[End of conversation]

Used with permission.

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We are training to realize our selves as eternal beings with a purpose to serve humanity.

Collectively we have a purpose to help one another, and to develop an awareness that connects humanity to the source of life.

Individually our purpose is to overcome those things that are impeding our own relationship to the life source within our selves.

Our goal is to become what we came to be, to do what we came to do, and to overcome the difficulties of our purpose.

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Apollo’s Mermaid says…

Mark, speaking of suffering….a number of years ago I had a terrible nightmare that I can’t escape. I was in a war torn area and seeing such horrors being done to babies. For years since having this dream, I’ve wondered where the dream came from. Last Saturday evening during a silent time, I approached my “google” with the intention of randomly searching without any plan. Some words came from my mouth that I didn’t recognize. I typed them into google and linked to a pdf file written in a language I didn’t recognize, but my husband recognized as Romanian. Actually, upon further searching, I discovered it was Moldovenesc. Link by link my searching led me to Chisinau, and the terrible things in the early 1900’s called Kishinev Pogrom. When I read about this pogrom, I cried and cried, because it described what I’d seen in my dream. What is your take? Could this be a past life do you think? I don’t remember my part in the dream except that I was witnessing this terrible thing beyond any imaginable thing I could explain to you. Surely, some people would think this entirely insane, but it was so real. I hate the thought that I was unable to help or do anything about it, unable to save the babies. What lesson was I learning there, do you think? It is almost too sad for me to wonder on, but I feel like there is a purpose for me finding this information. I wish I could change history.

Yes, it sounds very much like a past life memory, and coming to terms with some things that were very traumatic. It is possible that somehow there was an opportunity for you to have actually saved the babies. Let’s just say that could be what happened. Then you could be dealing with the part within your self that stood by, that didn’t become involved.

I posted a dream recently, where I was standing by seeing someone undergo extremely painful suffering. And I just stood by. I believe I was seeing a past life experience. And in that life I was supposed to stand up for something, but didn’t. So, I am having to deal with that lack of action in this life. And if I don’t deal with it now, than it will certainly be facing me in my next life.

When you did the Goggle search and unrecognizable words were coming out of your mouth, words that were subsequently recognized as Romainian, well, that is another sign of a past life. It’s a sign that you are opening up.

A German exchange student visits my son fairly often. One evening he presented my wife with a gift. It was a CD of his mother, a classical musician. I picked it up and opened the jewel case. I started to read about the CD and the artists. It was only after I had read a few phrases that I realized it was in German. I never studied German, but was completely understanding every word. Once I realized what was happening, “it” shut down. Suddenly the entire document appeared as German. Clearly I had been tapping into a past life aspect of my self.

Not all past life experiences are pleasant. But IMO it is worth looking at them, especially when we are out to use the experiences as opportunities to improve our understanding and awareness.

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(The following is used by permission.)

I think that on the spiritual path loneliness is definitely a problem, not only for women but also for men. What happens when we really are on the path? To be on the path, using the conventional words, is really, how shall I put it? It is friction. It is the law of nature, like the tide, like day and night, like a pendulum. There is nearness and there is separation. When we are in the state of nearness to that which we call “God” or “That” or “Void” or our “Higher Self” (which are all one and the same thing), then the human being is happy. When we are separated the soul is crying. This very friction is the purifying of the mind. You see, friction creates fire; fire is pain and suffering, and great loneliness. It keeps going backwards and forwards. That is how the mind will be purified.

Women are more lonely than men because they have more longing. We bring into this world two qualities: the will to live, and the will to worship. The will to live is self-preservation. The will to worship is the love aspect embedded in the very texture of our soul. This love aspect is the essence of God. It manifests itself in us as longing. Women have such longing. We often feel an emptiness, a great yearning. There is always a place in the heart of a human being reserved for That. No mortal creature can fill it. We are made in God’s image and he is the greatest lover, a jealous lover, who keeps a place for himself. Longing is one of the messages which the soul sends to the human being: “Go home. We must go home to the Beloved.”

Who is this Beloved?
The Beloved is a great emptiness! It is a void, terribly frightening to the mind, but responsive. It is at the same time absolute fullness, absolute light. It is the nothingness where everything is. It is the fullness where nothing exists. It is the fullness of love.

A woman doesn’t want a friend; a woman wants a lover! The moment of union with God is the most intimate thing in the world. At that moment we are united with our Self, with our soul, the Atman, the personal God, the Creator, the constantly drunk one, drunk with his own creation. And that union is bought with suffering.

Tweedie, Irina. Excerpt from “Self Realization and Suffering“. The Golden Sufi Center website, http://www.goldensufi.org/A-SufferingRealization.html.

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(The following is used by permission.)

“Do not take a step on the path of love without a guide. I have tried it a hundred times and failed,” writes the poet Hafiz. The Sufi says that you need a teacher, a guide along the path of love. If you need a guide to cross a desert or unknown land, how much more do you need a guide to venture into the inner world of the psyche, into the depths of the soul? To make the journey from the confines of the ego to the limitless dimension of the heart, you need a teacher, a sheikh.

But the moment we begin the search for a teacher we enter the paradoxical world of the mystic, which presents us with a reality confusing and contradictory. We need to “choose a master,” and yet we are told, “You do not find a teacher. The teacher finds you.” How do we begin on this search in which we do not look but are found? How do we know what to trust? And how can we distinguish between a true and false teacher, particularly when we are told not to judge by appearances? And there is also the spiritual truth that the real teacher is within our own heart, is the light of our own Higher Self.

This whole problem is compounded for the Western seeker by the fact that we do not have a tradition of the relationship with a spiritual teacher in our culture. In India the relationship with a guru has always been a part of the culture, while in the Middle East the Sufi sheikh has been a recognized (if sometimes persecuted) figure of spiritual authority. But in the West the relationship of master and disciple, although imaged in the life of Christ, has never been part of our spiritual landscape. As a result we are naive and easily misled, and at the same time approach this relationship with the tools of rational discrimination which are valuable in the outer world, but totally inappropriate when we are confronted by a real teacher.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. Excerpt from “Through the Glass Darkly: The Paradoxical Nature of the Relationship with the Teacher”. The Golden Sufi Center website, http://www.goldensufi.org/A-RelationshipwithTeacher.html

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(The following is used by permission.)

What is the role of the teacher in spirituality?
The whole spiritual life is getting rid of the ego. We have to get rid of the ego in order to get anywhere. Two masters cannot live in one heart. Either I or That; either the little self is there, or God is there. (Let’s use the word God, because it doesn’t matter what we call it). The role of the teacher is to get rid of this little ego. It is a very simple process, but it is very painful. The teacher must erase the ego and it is done through suffering. The master does nothing but his duty to help us get rid of it, but by jove, it is a painful thing. It is crucifixion, absolute crucifixion. The teacher’s duty is to turn you inside out, but you are never the same again.

The goal of every yoga is to lead a guided life, to be able to listen. So the master must be able to reach the disciple and vice-versa. It’s a two-way process. (Either it is the master, or it is your higher self - they are the same thing). So spiritual training is really analysis, but much harder, much worse, done with yogic power. Human beings want to run from such power and from such pain, but before a great teacher takes you in his hands and turns you inside out, he will give you something magnificent. He will show you what human beings really are like, what they look like, somewhere where they are not human anymore, but divine. There is such greatness; you are like a great fire! And from that moment you can never look at another human being without remembering. You will see each human being as part of the Beloved.

How does one find a teacher?
There is a spiritual law which says, “When the disciple is ready the teacher will be there.” So going out and looking for a teacher is grabbing the wrong end of the stick. If we aspire, if our torch is lit, in the darkness of the world somebody is bound to see it. Every one of us has only one teacher. Only somebody who has deep karmas with you has the right to subject you to what only a teacher subjects you to. Only one person in the world, the infinitely pure, disinterested one, can do that and not incur karma himself. The relationship with that teacher is a great grace from God based on mutual past karma. It is not something we can accomplish. It is a great grace.

Irina Tweedie. Excerpt from “Suffering and Self Realization”. The Golden Sufi Center website, http://www.goldensufi.org/A-SufferingRealization.html

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Sadiq M. Alam gave me a link to a great Sufi site. On that site, under The Eleven Principles, I found this little story about a form of selfishness.

One Sufi was concerned that he was not sincere, and was ashamed. So his sheikh took him to a Sufi who was on the path of absorption, and this sheikh told him that absorption, not hair-splitting, would free him from his problem. The wayfarer realized that in his worry about his dishonesty and shame, his wants and needs, he had been focused on himself, separating himself from his Beloved.
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Here is a link to one of Sadiq’s posts, a collection of The Golden Rule from various Religions. Which one is your favorite?

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I see the world is going to be destroyed. I am dreaming in the early morning hours of 14 October 2005. Some people had taken some actions that caused this. Actually, I had done just the opposite: inaction. I saw the people who were making this decision. The character, flavor, tone of their decision was business-like, direct, matter-of-fact, objective, practical.

My inaction was a part of their decision. It wasn’t an immediate destruction that was going to happen; it was more like a phased down process. I have seen this before, and it is described in one of my earliest posts; I had seen a ’shut-down’ of the planet. In my dream, their decsion was a step that was now implemtend, bringing the world one step closer to shut down. It didn’t feel irreversible, but it certainly seemed highly significant and closer to the precipice of shut down than anyone on our planet would like to consider - even for a moment.

I think it was right after this decision (but maybe it was right before) that I saw a teacher on some kind of hill. It seemed part of the same dream. He was standing there being assaulted by what looked like constant bolts of lightning. They weren’t just coming from the sky, they were hitting him from every side. They looked like static electricity charges. It was killing him. He seemed resigned and fatalistic, but in great pain. It was a voluntary position. He was just standing there, and could have walked off the hill. It seemed like he had positioned himself deliberately on high ground to be a lightning rod for the electrocution.

I was watching from a distance, with mixed emotions of being fatalistic myself but also upset. There was a small crowd there, men and women. I want to think that I climbed up the hill to push him off and out of harm’s way, to save his life. I can’t remember, but I don’t think I did. I feel shame, as I write this, to say that. Either way, the teacher had been damaged.

(’Damaged’ is a deliberate choice of words, and it seems to be an odd expression in this setting.)

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