Lou Reed and Meditation

Art-rock icon Lou Reed has just released a meditation album.
Read an interview and listen to some album cuts at:
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/218/story_21812_1.html

Ganesh Baba Nirvana

"In Nirvana your little ego is snuffed out. Nirvana is a process of being snuffed out. Nirvana is a defocalization on the sensate world and switching over our consciousness to the insensate world of intuition, of inner light, and of inner oscilloscopic vision in our gyral center. We have to penetrate the various sheaths or planes. . . . Your little ego becomes completely unified with the cosmic unified field of ultimate universal reality. That is the state of Nirvana which a few have had the good fortune to reach. But even if that highest goal is not reached, one step toward that supreme synthesis is a step indeed." (Ganesh Baba 1907-1987)

Hindu tribesmen convert to Buddhism

MUMBAI (Reuters) - About 50,000 Indian low-caste Hindus and nomadic tribespeople converted to Buddhism before a vast crowd on Sunday in the hope of escaping the rigidity of the ancient Hindu caste system and finding a life of dignity.

Monks in orange and saffron robes administered religious vows to the converts as about half a million spectators, mostly Buddhists, cheered the ceremony at a horseracing track in downtown Mumbai.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070527/india_nm/india300192

Stars & Spirituality: Paris Hilton and the Power of Now

Paris Hilton seen earlier this month in L.A. with a copy of "The Power of Now." Celebrities as well as "normal folk" seem to be catching on to the power of spirituality . . . with mixed results, of course.

What needs to be done

We need to get SERIOUS about expanding and propagating this knowledge that has been given us. To awaken is not for oneself alone in isolation, it is DESIGNED for vibrational radiation.

This WILL take place more or less "automatically," without one having to deliberately think about it, but ONLY when one has fully absorbed the basic teaching and burnt out some of one's remaining tendencies and egoic habits.

You deepen in that awareness by regular and consistent meditational practice and seva (service.)

"What goes around comes around."

Consciousness is Meditation!

"Intelligence is the fundamental meditation. Consciousness itself is meditation. The unenlightened man is always already seeking, so it is not a matter of doing or not doing some particular kind of motivated search. We are always already seeking, whether at this moment we are doing it in the form of a yogic technique, or the next moment we are doing it in the form of a sly glance at somebody as we pass them in the street. There is simply and always the process of our own action. When there is the engagement of action by real, unmotivated intelligence, understanding begins to develop as a spontaneous, real process in consciousness."

-- Franklin Jones, The Method of the Siddhas.

Life Conditions and Work

"The worse the conditions of life, the more productive the inner work, provided you remember to work. The energy spent on active work on oneself is then and there transformed into a fresh supply, but that spent on identification and negative emotions is lost forever."

-- Gurdjieff