--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "dhamiltony2k5" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Nice summary post Turq. I like your secular description.
"Secular descriptions" is just what I DO, Doug. It's a trait I picked up from the Rama fellow. He was somehow able to talk about the most esoteric and tech-y phenomena without having to throw around a lot of spiritual buzzwords. The buzzwords are nice, and can be precise, IF the audience for the talk or the written message all understands them, and understands them in the same way. If they do not, you're going to almost by definition leave some people in the dust, and give rise to misunderstandings. Besides, I get off on the *challenge* of trying to come up with my own words for my own exper- iences, rather than rely on someone else's. > Thanks for calling attention to this thread with this post > and your earlier ones with vaj. Well, it's just that something came up in that particular bash-Vaj session that I felt needed to be cleared up. A couple of people assumed that if one is sitting in the same room with a spiritual teacher and perceiving some subjec- tive benefit from that, it's a shakti phenomenon. My experience is that this is not so. I've been there done that with shakti, and know what it feels like. And I've been there done that with being in the same room with the energy of nirvi- kalpa samadhi or rigpa, and I know what *that* feels like, too. And the two phenomena are very, very different -- orders of magnitude apart. So I just felt obliged to try to describe that from my own point of view and in my own words, to see whether it was possible to make that distinction for someone who might not have ever experienced the difference, or the phenomena themselves. I still don't know whether I did, but the exercise itself was fun. I was wondering whether to post this next link, because I'm pretty sure it will "draw fire" from some who don't like to hear different points of view on this subject of shakti vs. samadhi. It's a talk from 1982, tape recorded and transcribed by me, on this very subject. Some will hear it as poppycock, and they are welcome to do so. The teacher in question was FULL of poppycock, and I doubt that he would be offended by anyone con- sidering this particular rap silly or incorrect. On the other hand, he could DO all of the things he speaks about in this talk, and we in the audi- ence had sat in rooms with him experiencing them for some time when he finally got around to giv- ing this particular explanation. I remember that it greatly clarified things for me at the time, and explained what I had been feeling before about the *difference* between the two energies (shakti vs. samadhi), but never was able to pin down clearly. Maybe it'll do the same for someone else here. Maybe not. Anyway, here's the link. The talk I'm referring to is the first one in this story; the others are from different evenings and about different subjects: http://ramalila.net/RoadTripMind/rtm03.html
