Experiencing your birth right, ‘self-consciousness’…

The critique of yoga is par for the course here, but in comparison to our critique of sufism/gurdjieff the critique of ‘hatha yoga’ is almost brand trivia. And there is a possibility of doing it right, possibly. Big deal, do the asanas, then move on to Raja Yoga, another possibly mechanized ‘no longer a method’ method.

I recall encountering hatha yoga from a cheap paperback in the mid seventies and doing a few of the asanas, then experiencing a remarkable state of relaxation. I left it behind and never did yoga again. From there I was curious cat about TM movement which in 1974 was a near comic episode of the burgeoning new age movement. I should not be sarcastic here, but I recall the effect of the method in those innocent days. I have experienced a primitive state of ‘enlightenment’ three times in life and the first was the first time I did the TM mantra meditation, and then never again. The state, which was only a state, lasted only a few days and I left the method and never did it again. The other cases were reading a book on qabalah, and a the strange first volume of J.G. Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe. Those ‘experiences’ were very real but somehow limited, and as I must note that passing through an considerable number of new age situations I found they were all barren of that initial three brief moments all occurring alone with no outside interaction and without expectation. That the situations were all different with a similar result, the conclusion must be they were contingent, and as such irrelevant, The realm of cults and gurus is almost incapable of producing any result, to the best of my knowledge. I had one other experience of sufi ‘baraka’, enlightenment ‘candy’, which appeared out of nowhere and again was very brief as it was entangled with an encounter of a shark sufi who appeared out of nowhere and who recognized the state at once and ripped off the ‘energy’ or whatever and vanished, never to be seen again. A reminder spiritual energy is not the path and the truck of the world’s cleverest thieves/vampires. But the brief experience was a brief hour or two of enlightenment, no doubt fake since ‘enlightenment’ is not as far as know a state of energy. I have always been persona non grata among sufis (but I have never really met any that I can recall). Best to flip the bird at sufis  and move on. You may see why success here is so rare, including the fake versions. But experience occurs with great frequency in beginners doing ‘mindfulness’, and it then passes and is gone. The terminology here is hopeless confusion. Some mean self-consciousness (some usefully refer to self-remembering consciousness, and in the original lingo of long ago, attempting mindfulness, not a result itself. ) when they use the term ‘consciousness’, and it fact they are all the same and yet quite different, to indulge in the usual zen paradox, mostly nonsense… About your case, I have a bad feeling about it: you are probably a mechanized 9/5 robot, a twitching reactive mental case, ‘nuts’, altogether a poor wretch,  but fyi these cases as yours  are never hopeless, perk up.