Crisis, Disturbance, And Struggle Part 1

June 27, 2014

This week, I’m going to post a few excerpts from “Real Meditation,” an unpublished spiritual anthology that I put together in 1978. I’m going to post these because it’s important to periodically emphasize how difficult spiritual life is for everyone, including me. We all periodically get discouraged on the path, and these excerpts, from Adi […]

Under the Influence

June 19, 2014

Even though I’ve been doing less formal meditation than usual these past few weeks (because I’ve been working almost non-stop on my forthcoming novel), I’ve had some great meditations. And I attribute this to being “under the Influence.” By being “under the Influence,” I mean being spiritually “positioned” to receive the Benediction. For years I’ve […]

The Liabilities of Devotion

June 13, 2014

In my previous blog post “The Importance of Devotion,” I wrote about—what else—the importance of devotion. In this post I’m going to consider some of the liabilities of devotion. J. Krishnamurti, the great iconoclastic mystic, criticized devotion when he said, “Devotion obstructs understanding.” But Krishnamurti himself practiced communion with what he called “the Highest” or […]

The Importance of Devotion

June 6, 2014

Yesterday I received an email from a fellow who is suffering, as we all are to one extent or another. And his email is similar to many others I have received, in that it was concerned with meditation methods. All I could tell him was to turn to the Divine and receive Its Grace, because without this […]

The “Electrical-Spiritual” Zen Teaching of Hui Hai

May 30, 2014

I recently wrote a (four-star) Amazon review of the “The Zen Teaching of Instantaneous Awakening,” which is a translation of the teachings of Hui Hai, a great Ch’an master. Hui Hai emphasized the practice of non-dwelling: “Should your mind wander away, do not follow it, whereupon your wandering mind will stop wandering of its own […]

The “Asward” Path of the Mystics

May 23, 2014

In my previous blog post, I focused on the “inward” path of apprehending the Real, the Self; and I described the epitome of this path: Ramana Maharshi’s Self-inquiry. Advaita Vedanta, and its poor sister, neo-Advaita Vedanta, principally concern themselves with the “problem” of Identity, of finding out Who or What one is. And to this […]

Inward Versus “Asward”

May 17, 2014

There are two fundamental approaches to directly apprehending Reality—the “inward approach” and what I call the “asward approach.” In this blog post I will focus on the inward approach. The direct inward approach, epitomized by Ramana Maharshi’s Self-enquiry, is based on inverting one’s attention to find the Self within. This approach seeks to find the […]

Welcome to Integral Spiritual Meditation

May 13, 2014

This is my initial post at this new blog. I will generally, but not always, post at least one new article each month. The article will generally, but not always, pertain to the subject of Integral Spiritual Meditation (ISM). I am also “reviving” my website, electricalspirituality.com, at this time, and also will be posting a […]

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