HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The word Samadhi essentially means intuitive knowledge of the highest state. There are a multitude of classifications of Samadhi, but they can be broken down into two fundamental streams or conditions: Savikalpa and Nirvikalpa. Savikalpa means with form, with identity, with thought. Nirvikalpa means without form, without identity, without thought.
There are many stages of attention within both of these states, but what is fundamentally taking place is the contact of the individual identity with the universal identity, the substance of the infinite creation. The drop of water is dropped into the ocean; the totality of the ocean is in the drop, and the totality of the drop is in the ocean. The platform of identity moves from a point of individual and separate self to the utterly merged and commingled Self.
This is something that occurs naturally at the event we call death. The dropping of the shell of individual self—the body, life force, and mental formation—leads to a revelation of totality and utter independence. This experience is so profound, so dramatic that for the unprepared mind—one unconditioned by yoga, meditation, and the conditions of Samadhi—it simply goes white noise at the end of each life as the mind collapses in the face of totality.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
As each soul transmigrates and reemerges into the stream of illusion, the ocean of infinite consciousness out of which it emerges is forgotten. It is as if there is a wall between the experience base of the embodied consciousness, what we call life, and the disembodied consciousness, what we call death.
The yogi awakens to this situation and becomes aware of the endless wheel of transmigration. The inability to operate consciously on both sides of the membrane separating life and death finally becomes an issue for them. They seek to pass through this membrane and remain conscious, once and for all merging the two poles of the inherent nature of the human being: individual identity and universal identity.
Samadhi, to put it simply, is the conscious passing through the membrane between life and death. This is the final aim of the entire science of yoga and meditation;the conscious merging of individual identity with the infinite.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The average human being operates their attention almost exclusively through the senses. The life force is entirely committed to desire-based activity connected with the senses. This behavior produces a churning within the atmosphere of one's internal theater of awareness which makes it difficult to turn the attention within. It's as if through the operation of the senses you were constantly throwing pebbles into the water, constantly churning the water, making it basically impossible to see past the phantasmagoria of the surface.
One of the first movements of attention whereby a human being is characterized as being a yogi is when, by discrimination, intelligence, and insight, the primary focus of the attention is shifted away from the operation of the senses to the internal seat of consciousness. The yogi seeks to take control of all the dynamics of their behavior and life force. When they seek to dampen desire-based action, they are simply seeking to allow the surface of the water to settle and clear so they can turn their attention within.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The path exists within you as you. Everyone is always looking—looking here, looking there trying to find the path. It's so close that if it were a snake it would bite you because you, yourself, are the path. You arise as the path.
This is something very difficult for everyone to get, especially Westerners, because they are so linear minded. You cannot see the path because you are the path itself. It's as if you were trying to see your own eyeball; it can’t be done. You can see it in a mirror, but that's only a reflection. What you see of the path is just its reflection—the drama of your life as it unfolds.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Arrogance is a psychological posture that serves as a defense mechanism of the ego. You cut yourself off from reality by defining a situation in a way that glosses over its true nature so you don't have to deal with it. You generate a definition of a situation so that you can control it, cause the world to serve you in some way. By placing this template onto a situation, reality is displaced; you override and blur the simple suchness of a situation that is always vivid and apparent.
The immediate antidote to arrogance is humility. Humility is one of the greatest tools of dharma, the great Tai Chi; you are listening to what the great light is saying and aligning yourself with that, without presupposition, without agenda. This listening and sensitivity unveils the presence of truth in any situation. By aligning with the infinite light of creation to the depths that you can observe it, you serve it, and you will find that all situations and circumstances will naturally unfold through and around you, annihilating all false agendas of the personal will.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Always seek to establish a presence of emptiness and humility. This is the whole idea of spiritual life; you listen intently to every situation. No presupposition, no judgment, no set of expectations about anything.
When you see a person and they have three thousand dollars worth of clothes on, you don’t make any judgment about that. You see another person, a homeless person pushing a cart down the street; you don’t make any judgment about that. Because if there's one thing for sure in this world it's that nothing is as it seems on the surface, not a single thing.
The law of dharma that defines right from wrong is very deep and very simple and very direct. If you listen, you can feel what’s right and what’s wrong; you won't need anybody to tell you.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Death is inside you at all times. It’s part of you, not separate, but a simultaneous event. It is the vibration of “not life.” Like the dark side of the moon, it's always there, you just can't see it.
The longer you live in your body, the easier it is to see death. At first, the newness of the body is overwhelming, and because your mind operates in a linear state, dominated by the senses and the three states of waking, dream and deep sleep, you can't see death within you. But as you become familiar with your body as you wear through the fabric of your life, your awareness will change, and your death will make itself more evident to you.
Like a wind, death matches the circadian rhythms of the planet, moving through your body and striking you once a day. When you are still and totally present, and your mind moves into its universal state where it begins to operate according to the spontaneous truth, you will be able to see death within you and witness the event of being struck by its rolling force. When death strikes your body at just the right point, it will kill the body. The event we technically characterize as death is the separation of the mind and the soul from the body. How you manifest the illusion of your death matches your karma—by illness, by accident, by decay.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Karma is the action that is generated by the ego through the operations of the senses. Data comes in through the senses and the ego, along with the list-making capacities of the mind, creates its own closed universe in which it can rule, a false kingdom in which it is trapped.
The false identity of the ego takes the power of infinite consciousness and runs it through the senses, and a river of desire-based activity is produced. The karma that is generated from this activity is the foundation of the cycle of death and rebirth.
During meditation the senses are switched off, the mind stops functioning in a linear fashion and moves into its natural state, universal mind, in which truth spontaneously begins to arise. When this happens, the light of reality arises within, dissolving the fabric of the false kingdom which the ego has held together with its desire-based activity. The ego is obliterated and the Self arises.
Until this happens, you’re trapped in the past, trapped in time. But as the light of the Self gets stronger and stronger, it dissolves all karma. The idea of past, present and future is erased. There is only the moment.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The essence of love in human nature takes root in the relationship between the individual identity and the universal identity. In the relationship between limited self and supreme Self, the dynamic of the expression of love occurs, and this is surrender—the surrender of the drop to the ocean.
The experience of surrender is difficult to describe. It is a willingness to unmask the heart and let it be touched; a willingness to let the heart sit open and unprotected. It is not necessarily a large experience; it’s actually quite personal, quite small, like a yielding, a softness inside. And it is in this softness, in this yielding, that the idea of sacrifice occurs.
In this moment, the raft is abandoned and the ocean is attained. It need not be a huge action. It’s as if you were holding onto a raft and you simply let go. You don’t know what will happen next; it is a moment of absolute trust, of absolute humility. It is a moment of total abandon.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Love is a power. Of all the powers of the creation, love is the power that pervades all powers. It is dangerous and swift.
A life lived in love is profound and does not just happen. It is an act of will. As an act of will, you give rise to love everyday. Love for its own sake, without expectation, an act of complete abandon. You draw the power of love into yourself and it begins to operate in your life beyond all expectation. It changes you in ways you never imagined.
Love will overcome reason, overcome the mind – this is its danger. Your life will be drawn down the path decided by love. But imagine a life without love. What would be the point?
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
A human being is composed of four bodies, like a series of layers: the physical body, matter; the subtle body, energy; the causal body, mind; the supracausal body, infinite consciousness. All vibrating at different speeds, yet present in the same form. They’re so distinct from each other that they might as well be different planets, yet in reality they are different vibrational aspects of our very own Self.
Yoga is about establishing the points of connection between these layers, and love is the fastest and surest way to connect all points within the Self in an instant and bind them together. Love is the ultimate power of attraction that draws the infinite points of our Self to a single place. This is a profound form of pure mysticism wherein the container of body, mind, and spirit are fused together and transformed into something greater than the sum of the parts. It is the philosopher’s stone, the transformation of lead into gold.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
There is a fellowship among those who seek the truth—those seeking the truth, and those that have sought the truth and come to the completion of human destiny, completed their cycle as human beings and thus gone on. When a person begins to hunger for the truth of things, there is an immediate psychic contact with the fellowship of the thus gone—spiritual masters, gurus, yogis, gods, goddesses—all having seen through the surface of things and struck through to the heart of the matter.
As you turn away from the external phantasmagoria of the dream, a resonance with this fellowship emerges out of your very being. And within this fellowship something utterly profound occurs—the descent of grace. We use the word grace because it is a gift. It is not something you’ve earned, it is undeserved favor. And this gift of grace is made available to you within yourself, as a part of your being. The essence of this gift kindles the spiritual force of awakening within you, changing you at the deepest level of being, at the deepest level of spirit.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
What is the essence of a deep, slow breath? Self-acceptance. The acceptance of one’s situation, the acceptance of one’s condition. In the space between one’s breath one finds profound stillness. Any one of these points becomes a gateway, an aperture into the infinite Self.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The essence of the path is relaxation of body, relaxation of mind, relaxation of heart. God is already present within. Truly, we are the drop being pervaded by the ocean.
The dynamic of awakening is not restricted by a specific philosophy or system of belief; it is like a force of nature. This is something one comes to understand only as the inner mystery begins to reveal itself layer by layer, going through one level after another, each more subtle than the previous.
As you relax deeper and deeper, as the stillness of heart and mind and spirit sinks farther and farther into your system, you will become aware of a force drawing you within. Starting as the smallest of threads, it will become a torrent. You must attune yourself to this presence and let it pull you in; it will take you to a place deep within yourself. In this way, everything happens.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
On the spiritual path, the time will come when life's possibilities and opportunities have reached a wider breadth than you can comfortably deal with. The anguish of a being that has begun to cultivate an inner life is well known. It is much more comfortable to go through life happily shallow and blissfully ignorant, because the instant you try to examine and deal with what’s going on inside, you run into paradox after paradox, and no single solution covers the entire situation.
This dynamic is largely based on the complexity of the human form. Part of the struggle we face in becoming fully awakened human beings lies in our capacity to master our form. The more that is awakened within us, the wider the span of possibilities becomes, and the more responsibility we have for mastering our full range of capabilities as human beings.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The concept of Ishvara addresses the idea of infinite truth and the dynamic of creation—the formless and that which has form—arising simultaneously. The energy of Ishvara is an all-pervasive ocean of consciousness out of which countless forms emerge.
We ourselves emerge as an expression of Ishvara. We arise as the indescribable, infinite truth and the formation of individual being at one and the same time. We arise as a vessel of truth, from truth, as truth.
That infinite truth unfolds through us as us brings to light a very essential principle: truth must take a form, must arise inside a vehicle, in order to express itself and operate as truth.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
One of the primary training instruments of yoga is absurdly simple—the breath.
The life-force, the prana that animates us is carried on the breath, and this life-force emerges directly out of the fabric of Ishvara, infinite consciousness, and arises inside the breath of every living thing. Infinite truth arising within us, as us, with every breath.
Twenty-one thousand breaths every day—if every breath is conscious, you can unleash unimaginable spiritual force within yourself. That is the training. To consciously draw the awakening principle into yourself with every breath, to feel it capture the form of your very being, infusing the dynamic of truth into every cell. The gravity that arises from this tells you that you have found the thread of the truth within your self.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
At first, the individual seeks completion in their personal happiness, and will make choices based on this. Like a child that has not understood the situation to any depth or degree, when faced with a negative situation, they will attempt to shield themselves from it, hoping to avoid its impact.
By generating action based on a reaction to a negative condition, by attempting to shield them from it, the individual guarantees the experience of the negative event to its fullest degree. Having cut themselves off from it, they will remain uninformed of its true nature.
As the individual matures, they come to understand that judging events is completely subjective; unless you are very wise, you're going to be wrong about the true nature of an event when it occurs. Time and again you come to see that things that seem negative in the beginning end up being the greatest blessings, and vice versa. So you learn not to react to events that appear to be negative; you remain in connection with all situations. Being present with them and feeling them, you learn from the information they provide, and in so doing, you are uplifted by them.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The transmission of grace is like lightening, striking straight into the deepest part of one's nature. Its light is infinitely subtle and all-pervasive; it's the light of God in the form of liberation. Once having entered, there is no holding it back; it will travel to the full depth of every issue at all times.
One of the realities of this grace is the acceleration and deepening of purification. As the grace pours in, it becomes more challenging to maintain balance within the framework of your life, and you must learn to walk the razor's edge while in constant change.
It's like learning how to drive a high-performance vehicle; it's not at all like driving an ordinary car. Just the process of keeping it in a line on the road when driving at higher speeds is challenging. Precision instrumentation requires that you gain a whole new level of capabilities to deal with the increased swiftness of the fluctuations.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
In the West, the assigning of blame is a psychological concept that is very dear to us, and is something we do very intensely. Our entire sense of social order and justice is one of assigning blame. It’s always somebody’s fault. But the act of assigning blame away from ourselves is a denial of the truth of a situation.
Spiritually speaking, all qualities, everything that has ever happened to us or will ever happen to us, has as its point of origin one place—ourselves. If we psychologically displace the blame away from ourselves and onto something outside of ourselves, we give away the most valuable thing we have—the power to change and transform our lives.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
What the guru tells us, what the wise tell us, is that there is no way around difficulty. There is no way around suffering. You can only go through them.
Assuming the responsibility for all the difficulties that beset us is a sign of wisdom, a sign of maturity, a sign of understanding. Experience teaches us that if we truly have our own well being at heart and genuinely seek to avoid suffering, then taking responsibility is where the action is.
The true path of healing must begin with the direct address of all the problems and difficulties that trouble us.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Going into samadhi for twenty years pumps a lot of light through your consciousness. You untie all your past incarnations, seeing the causes and qualities of this life and past lives.
One of the things that's really strange is that you always recognize yourself immediately. You look a lot like you look, act a lot like you act, and feel about things in much the same way as you do now. In the same way, you can go back to almost any time and recognize society. Go back twenty, thirty thousand years; all you’d need to do is change clothes and you would recognize the patterns of behavior and fit right in.
It hasn’t changed that much. Why? Why does it take so long to change? Because most people haven’t even gotten to the point of taking responsibility for their own lives. Only in taking responsibility for your life can you begin to change it.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The entire dynamic of life, the reflex that draws all sentient beings into life and, ultimately, to dharma, is joy. All beings seek joy. That’s why they do what they do. It's as simple as that and that’s what makes us all the same.
When this is recognized, the seeming complexity of behavior disappears. Yes, karma builds up over countless lives, acting as a filter and veils of obscuration. People act out in this life formations of karma that were formed countless lifetimes ago. But when all is said and done, what is always being sought is happiness.
People engage in all manner of behavior, finding both good and bad fortune: the fulfillment of their wishes, the crushing of their dreams. But both these conditions are fleeting and transitory. The only source of true joy lies within. It is a simple message, constantly repeated by all beings who have spent any time on the subject. The source of all happiness, all wisdom, and all joy arises from the Self. It is the Self that is sought down every turn, down every road, down every alley. In every form, we seek the Self.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Oftentimes to improve a situation, the quality you must have in the greatest abundance is one of patience. Why? Because it is in the dynamic of patience where the truth, true insight, is finally glimpsed.
If you're always shooting from the hip and acting impulsively, chances are you're going to miss the mark. You won't gain access to all the information that a situation has to offer. The truth is rarely found on the surface of things.
It takes wisdom and experience to read the truth of a situation. And wisdom and experience are the fruit of patience—patience of heart, patience of mind. You must gain the ability to become quiet and listen without making demands on a situation before you can fully grasp its true nature.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Because of the shortness of the lifespan in these times, the awakening impulse involves the kundalini. The movement of the kundalini back into the spinal cord and up into the brain can, in the course of a single lifetime, produce self-realization. How long it takes is based on a person's skill, ability, and courage. But it is the animation of the brain by the kundalini which sets the process of evolution on a hyper-accelerated path.
When the kundalini hits the body it’s a very powerful and demanding event. But the spirit comes upon you when and where it will. You have to accept that. It can't be controlled. You have to have strength of heart, strength of will, and strength of body to endure the impact of the kundalini. You must be fearless, giving rise to love with every breath—love of God, love of Guru, love of Self.
This is why you should keep things as simple as you can: a solid routine of daily meditation, your daily work where you fulfill the responsibilities of your life, exercise, a good diet. As you deal with the dynamics of awakening and the power gets greater and greater as it moves into full force, you will most certainly have your hands full.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
One of the first basic concepts you come into contact with in the world of spiritual training is karma. You're directed to become aware of the fruits of your actions and then become responsible for their cause, understanding that you yourself will experience the effect.
This is a very powerful teaching. If honestly approached and dealt with, it gives rise to a very high level of attention; you begin to notice that the fabric of your behavior, the fabric of your consciousness is a very complex weave that is constantly going up and down in the frequency of its vibration.
Over the course of an hour we can experience the most sublime thoughts of kinship, friendship, kindness, generosity, and yet on the other side of the coin give rise to acts of jealousy, greed, envy, and anger. Every day we go up and down this mountain countless times.
If this is done unconsciously, we become enslaved to an underlying force of spiritual cause which is the anchor of all suffering—ignorance of our true Self, our true identity.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
As the kundalini rises it begins to change the vibration of your being, both expanding and accelerating your awareness. As it illuminates the chakras, the chakras begin to switch on and vibrate, sending powerful surges of energy and vibrations up the spinal column into the brain.
These vibrations stimulate the brain which operates with increasingly greater efficiency. The brains ability to detect subtle phenomena expands. Like a very compressed program of evolution, the brain operates in increasingly powerful ways, experiencing reality at increasingly subtle levels. Rather than observing the surface of things that is the report of the senses, you begin to experience reality at its vibrational essence.
What we call yoga, spiritual life, is the experience of the kundalini rising and stimulating the brain, causing it to evolve in its operations. Meditation is the essence of yoga and calibrates this process.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
There is only one mind. There are not two minds. There’s not one mind that is universal in which everything arises simultaneously and spontaneously, and another mind that is relative in which everything arises linearly. Mind is a singularity that operates at different frequencies.
For the person deep within ecstatic equilibrium, everything arises simultaneously with no relativity. From the point of view of the individual identity within mundane consciousness, everything’s relative. This is where the idea of phenomena arises.
There has to be a second thing to observe a first thing. A perceiver has been carved out of infinite consciousness, and the perceiver begins the chain of events called perception. Perception produces a product. That product is called phenomena.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
We refer to enlightenment as liberation from the wheel of Samsara—the eternal cycle of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth. This idea of liberation implies that there is a sequence of events, a subtle pathway through the maze that leads to an exit, to freedom from the wheel. Thus the idea that some kind of action—positive actions of goodness, of generosity—will lead one to liberation.
Yet there is no perceivable causal relationship between action of any kind and enlightenment. The process of enlightenment lies somewhere at the intersection of what we would call intent and luck. Enlightenment is something you catch by running into it, propelled by a complex weave of chance and the dynamic of destiny, the intention of existence.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Your identity is built upon a string of memories and their associated emotions. You carry this identity with you like a passport and everything that you experience in your life checks itself off against this passport. It is your face to the world. You use it to define yourself to yourself, to define yourself within society. Your attachment to this definition of yourself is so great, that you will destroy yourself before you will change your idea of who and what you are.
The process of enlightenment is the annihilation of this passport, the annihilation of your personal identity. It destroys all links that you have to yourself. It destroys all links that you have to the world. This why it has been said that enlightenment is a calamity; yet this fear of enlightenment is irrational and only arises from the extreme attachment that you have to the lists of qualities on your passport.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
We have produced such an irrational fear of the death experience that we hold ourselves back from the onslaught of enlightenment, desperately clinging to the very identity that binds us to the wheel. When enlightenment appears in your life, it begins to wipe everything away. It doesn’t say, “Well, this is a good thing so we’ll preserve this, and this is a bad thing so we'll get rid of this.”
It’s as if you were an egg floating around in the ocean, an infinite ocean of consciousness. The enlightenment process is like someone coming along and unscrewing the top of the egg; the ocean just starts to pour in. It conducts itself through the entirety of your being. It's only a matter of time before everything is reduced down to its most basic components—electrons, protons, atoms.
This is the transmission of grace. You are brought back into touch with the ocean of consciousness. What you’re afraid of is that when the ocean of consciousness pours in, it zeroes out everything you’ve ever been, everything you are, everything you'll ever be. Everything dissolves back into the ocean, extinguished. You exist, and yet it's as if you never existed. So you ask, “Why would I want this to happen?”
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
We as perceivers are so absolutely affected by everything it is inconceivable. The template that you declare to be the open portal through which you view your existence is so radically conditioned by past action that the entire framework of your present experience is based on what you have already experienced.
What happened to us before completely conditions how we experience what happens to us now, which will so utterly condition the possibility of what will happen to us in the future.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
You're actually living a multitude of lives simultaneously. Your senses are bound to this life and thus you think this is the totality of life. This is the life of the body but the mind is more like a hologram.
In fact, most of your spiritual practice is taking place in alternate lives. We use the life of the body to produce a magnetic force powerful enough to anchor the force of the totality of life. Once the transmission of grace occurs, the ocean of consciousness pours in and affects all your lives. You’ll start to have memories of events that you don’t remember doing because they actually happened in alternate lives.
All of what we call yoga is not designed to get us to enlightenment; it’s designed to help us survive enlightenment. Spiritual life is a way of keeping up with what's happening to us during the process of awakening, finding a way to deal with it. That’s why you meditate.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
It turns out we enjoy being existent. Nobody wants to stop existing, however painful it may be. Existing is cool. The idea is just to not be trapped like a rat in a maze, always having your choices handed to you, and being forced to think that those choices are yours. It’s better to have true ideas of your own.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
As we move into the third millennium, we're actually getting to the outer stretch of civilization. Life is becoming very complex—technology, the structure of society, everything.
The impact of enlightenment doesn't stop just because it's not twelfth century India, where you sit under the Bodhi tree and become enlightened. Nobody's going to do that anymore because the landscape of modern life just isn't shaped that way. You’ll probably be sitting in your kitchen or at a bus stop or on the freeway going to work, and you’ll get enlightened.
It doesn't matter. There is no causal relationship between your actions and the enlightenment process. At some moment in time you brushed up against the seed of awakening, and the seal of your personal identity began to crack. From there on, it's just a matter of time. Don't kid yourself. The complete annihilation of personal self is an absolute. Not just “sort of” or "kind of” or “maybe.” It really does happen.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The inherent fear of being extinguished is natural, and can’t be avoided. We naturally fear being non-existent. I’ve seen this in all of you. You’ll be meditating along, doing beautifully, and just as you’re about to plunge into the ocean the fear will seize you, and you'll jump back out. You open your eyes, get up, walk around; try to avoid it. I see you do this all the time.
The transmission of grace is like a force of nature, like the weight of the ocean, an indescribable and unbearable pressure arising from all points. You can’t resist it. It’s important for you that you find a way to deal with that ever-increasing presence of truth and light within you. Find a way to align with it. When it bumps against one of those nodules of pain and fear, don’t recoil. Just breathe deeply around it. The fear will be released.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Through the grace of the guru we are brought onto the path of dharma and into direct contact with the light of consciousness. This light acts as a spiritual fire, generating a profound heat that reduces us to our purest qualities.
This process of purification is the daily bread of spiritual life. We experience it as a deep and profound pressure that flows into every place within our being. This is inevitable and cannot be avoided. Everything we have ever been or will be dissolves into the light of consciousness.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The seed emotions and thoughts of everything you have ever done are stored within you. These seeds, through the medium of your personal will, gave rise to an action which in turn became the seed for more action. This is the endless cycle of cause and effect, karma. And all this is stored in you. This is the basis for memory and is what is responsible for the habitual patterns of your behavior.
The entire point of spiritual life is to gain access to a new source of light outside of the system of your own karma in order to offset the force of these habitual behavior patterns. The transmission of grace introduces large quantities of light into your system that physically clear the karma from you. This process is called purification.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The impressions of everything we have ever done over countless lives are stored within us and act like an encumbrance upon our system of consciousness, locking us into a wheel of cyclic repetition. This is the fruit of behavior that is founded on the desire-based patterns of confusion, obscuration, fear, and ignorance.
There's a spiritual state known as the Witness wherein you engage and observe these patterns of your behavior. Over time, you learn to recognize and become familiar with all the chemical, biological, and energetic changes that occur within yourself and give rise to an endless stream of habitual responses.
Having gained access to a higher source of light through your spiritual practice, you must learn how to assert your will upon that point which you recognize as the seed of a negative pattern of habitual behavior; you learn to resist and transform it into a positive movement of energy towards the higher angels of your nature.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Love is an act of will, and it takes skill to be able to remember to give rise to it in all conditions. You have to practice it. You'll find yourself giving way to negative habitual behavior more frequently than you'd think, especially when you start to watch for it.
When you give rise to the lower energies, you commit the totality of your being to that energy, and you transmit it to everyone around you, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. This is how we all hold ourselves collectively in a state of darkness and obscuration.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
When you recognize the suffering of another, that knowledge can go in one of two ways.
You can be judgmental and feel that the person is getting what they deserve. When you do this you give rise to a lower, base energy. Whatever it is that this person has done or that they're going through, you've certainly gone through the same thing yourself. But through a process of self-denial, you refuse to see the interconnection of all life as it resists the forces of ignorance and struggles toward the light.
The person can be just on the verge of coming to some new understanding of themselves and their suffering, and you slam them with judgment, locking down the situation and knocking them back into their pattern of behavior. Their moment of awakening is lost.
Or, through an act of will, you can give rise to love. Giving rise to love can be something as simple as not giving way to judgment. Judgment is a heavy load, both for the person who judges and the judged. Not passing any judgment gives the situation an opportunity to breath and produces a kind of spiritual uplifting.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
All negative thoughts, emotions, and behavior arise from one of three states: attachment, aversion, or delusion. Attachment is grasping, aversion is a form of fear, and delusion is a form of ignorance. These three dynamics define the separation between oneself and all others.
All the higher angels of behavior have as their essence love: the infinite power of attraction; the inclusion of oneself and all others into one's own identity. Any act of kindness, generosity, patience, compassion, or humility leads to the dissolution of the barrier of the false identity that separates us.
Over time, as you include these positive angels of behavior within yourself, and eliminate the poisons of attachment, aversion, and delusion, you will move from a condition of madness and insanity, to a condition of clarity and awakening.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The poisons of attachment, aversion, and delusion produce an endless stream of negative behavior. The karma generated by this behavior is like an enshrouding blanket of negativity, making it impossible to see the truth of a given situation.
What was your thinking like the last time you felt anger, jealousy, envy, greed? What were you like when you were under their spell? You always ended up acting like some kind of demon. And afterwards, what did you feel? You felt shame, you felt guilt. And now you had to carry that around. Nothing is furthered by this kind of negative behavior.
The quality of love, all the higher angels of behavior, draws you into life with incredible force, and you see clearly. Your life becomes fantasy-free; you no longer live in some kind of fairy tale. You see the truth of things as they are.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Look around at the objects in your house, in your life. Look inside your closets. See what's there. Examine the emotional and psychological content of all these things. Is their vibration positive, having come about through generosity or love, or is it negative, having come from an attachment or aversion?
Perhaps many of your clothes are an attachment to an identity you seek to maintain, a way you thought of yourself at one point in your life, but which doesn't represent you now. You may not have worn many of your clothes in a long time, but they remind you of a good period in your life, and you don't want to give them up. So it goes with all your possessions.
It's actually easier to get rid of these things, remove them from your life, and clear up that psychic space; because you're connected to them, and even though you don't recognize it consciously, the connection holds you in the grip of all of those emotional states from the past.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
You'll often find that when you bring your mind to bear on a particular topic, perhaps studying some painful part of your life, that in some uncontrollable way your attention is interrupted; the mind jumps and skips the subject. You'll think, “What was I thinking about?” and you can't remember.
This is just how the mind works, and as dharma practitioners you must become accustomed to it. Ultimately, the mind is a machine and it can be trained to do anything. You must learn to recognize the interruption of attention and forcibly bring your mind back to the subject. This is the only way that you'll begin to see all the reasons why you didn't want to address the subject. This is how you process through a problem or an issue.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The practice of Bodhicitta is a fundamental part of your daily spiritual training. By giving rise to love of the enlightened condition and sensing the presence of the spontaneously arising enlightened mind at the seat of the heart, you will experience the truth that enlightenment is not something outside of yourself, but exists within you as you.
Bodhicitta is the ultimate power of attraction that draws the infinite points of Self to a single place, encompassing the totality of the human experience in a single gesture. It posits the existence of the human form and its emptiness at the same time, expressing both the conditioned aspects of limited existence and the infinite consciousness of enlightenment.
It is the presence of enlightenment within that pervades all conditioned reality. As you bring your mind, energy, and attention to bear on the Bodhicitta, expressing it consistently, again and again, you establish a karmic connection to the ocean of enlightenment that exists within you.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
You can carry issues with you for years and years that you don't address. Because of fear, aversion, or afflictive emotions, every time you touched a difficult subject the mind was interrupted. And now suddenly you're old, and still you haven't addressed it. Then you die without having addressed it, and this just means that you'll have to reincarnate to deal with it.
Sooner or later, all these issues will have to be dealt with. They are the rocks, roots, weeds, and tree trunks that you'll most certainly run across as you plow the field of your life. Where do you get the energy to offset the obstacles in your life, to give you the courage so you can address these difficult areas? By giving rise to love of the enlightened condition, you draw energy from the very center of your being. It is a well of infinite consciousness, and a resource of infinite energy that will give you the power to deal with the problems and issues of your life.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
In spiritual life you are a warrior. You will become capable of placing your attention on any subject, even if it's painful, fearful, threatening or dangerous. This is a form of attention that all warriors must become trained in, because they must be able to place themselves intelligently into the proximity of danger, death, and injury, and yet keep their mind very clear and do what needs to be done.
This is why people are drawn to the life of a warrior; they love the challenge of being able to express uninterrupted attention in the face of the most terrifying situations. As a spiritual warrior, you will be called upon to face extremely intense situations; these will come in the form of information, knowledge and truth about yourself, about others, and about the world. You have to awaken to the fact that you are surrounded by universal suffering.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Nine times out of ten, a given situation will be afflictive by its very nature; it will involve the suffering of any number of beings. But that doesn't mean the quality of truth is not unfolding within that setting.
The ability to see through to your obligation in any situation, to see the truth of any situation, is the dynamic expression of uninterrupted attention. Uninterrupted attention allows you to be present without diminishing yourself or withdrawing into fear. At the same time, you must not demonize others and place all blame on those around you while letting yourself off the hook.
You have to squeeze a subject long and hard to get to the heart of it. There is a very vivid and hair-raising space of awakening in every situation wherein the truth can be recognized. It is the flow of uninterrupted attention within oneself that makes this recognition possible.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
It takes a while to learn how to use forceful, uninterrupted attention to squeeze a subject down to the point where you can manipulate extremely subtle layers of consciousness. That's why you have to sit around meditating for a few years.
You'll go through a period of time where you experience interrupted attention. One moment you'll be experiencing uninterrupted attention and then you'll touch a place and a huge throb of karma will release all kinds of wild emotions, and your attention will fly off in nine different directions. This is a typical experience when you're going through a phase of strong purification. Sometimes the blast of purification will be so strong that a couple of days will go by before you'll say, Wow, what happened? I was doing this and now I'm doing this and I don't remember changing.” Then you bring your mind back onto the object of your attention and you continue to squeeze it.
Once you fasten on to your thread you have to learn how to use forceful attention to hold the line; lots of details must be accounted for at the level of thought, mind, speech, and action until an uninterrupted chain of attention is fulfilled.
It's the same thing with everyday life. If you want to get anything accomplished in this world you have to clearly discern what it is that you want to do and pursue it in an uninterrupted, forceful line of attention and action. People who've mastered uninterrupted attention seem to be able to accomplish anything in life; whatever it is they want to get done, gets done. On the other hand, people who are easily diverted and interrupted can make a thousand great starts but just a short way down the road they wander off the path unable to remember what they were doing.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
When you have interruptions of attention, you have to recognize them and analyze them. The nature of an object will constantly change when observed, revealing more and more of itself.
This is one of the basic tenets of quantum mechanics: an object is changed by our observation or perception of it. This idea is fundamental to advanced yoga.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The primary nature of enlightenment is empty. It does not have a point of origination where it comes into existence, nor does it ever cease to exist. It is neither infinite nor finite, as these would be qualities. Yet we see that the idea of enlightenment has a resonance in all of the dynamics of perception within a human being.
We as human beings are not a single body with a single perceptive field or point of view. The hard-wired architecture inside the human form manifests itself in four bodies: the physical body of matter; the subtle physical body of energy that animates the physical body; the causal body of mind and mental formation; and the atman, infinite consciousness.
Enlightenment comes into contact with these four tiers of human consciousness, comes into view, through the very act of perception itself. Yet it remains completely empty.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
If you've studied yourself closely, you'll notice that there are two primary energies in the body. They are characterized by the red bodhicitta and the white bodhicitta. The red bodhicitta is analogous to the ida, the energy channel located on the left side of the spine. It is the feminine vibration that is the foundation of energy and mind capacity. The white bodhicitta is analogous to the pingala, the energy channel on the right side of the spine. It's the energy that produces the creation and dynamic of the world.
The interaction between these two energies gives rise to all the dynamics of the architecture of the human form. The human form is an inconceivably complex equilibrium of these yin and yang energies. This equilibrium arises in the seat of the bodhicitta at the heart. It is the anchor and foundation of your existence. It is a deep, gravitational center that holds the atoms of consciousness into the collection of the appearance of your existence – physically, energetically, and mentally.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The bellows breath is the best method to release and surrender the spine to the draw of earth's gravity. This is especially important in times of intense pressure and transformation.
The ego-based identity attempts to hold the spine away from its basic relationship with the earth, and this breaks the flow of energy between the spine and the brain. The ego has as its fundamental nature the reflex of separation, and attempts to control the flow of consciousness at the level of the body because the body is the ego's basis of identity.
The whole idea of spiritual life, the whole idea of meditation, is not to form a belief system, but to arise spontaneously in the Self, to directly experience the subtle vibration of God within. It is the instrument of your being that has this experience, and relaxation is the key.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The ego is a despotic ruler and defines existence so very narrowly. You've gone through lifetime after lifetime wrapped so tight that your head's about ready to pop off your shoulders if anything happens to you that the ego can't take. The smallest upset causes a psychic seizure; you clench up and wall yourself off from the flow of your own truth, your own Self.
The study of the relationship of the spinal cord to the earth is one that you must learn to do at all times and all places. After a while you'll feel how the tension around the spine begins to release, restoring the flow of vitality within. It's like awakening from some strange dream. The experience of the Self is broad, generous, and fearless.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
With each and every breath, the Soham mantra vibrates within the sushumna, the central nerve that runs from the root chakra at the base of the spine to the crown chakra at the top of the head. This mantra is the spontaneous vibration of God resonating within the human form; it is not produced by the sound of your voice or your mind. This divine vibration within your being opens the gate at the base of the spine and at the crown of the head so that the light of infinite consciousness can flow in; when this happens, the vibration of the Soham goes higher and higher, raising your attention.
This is a profound mystery, and it is the way of awakening. In this way you will make the journey from the lower depths, where you have taken false refuge in confusion and ignorance, obsessed with the belief in your individual identity, to higher and higher frequencies of connection with God. In the end, your attachment to a personal identity will dissolve, and you will surrender the identity of your individual nature completely, merging with the universal nature of God.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
As you come to recognize that the vibration of Soham is not your voice, but the voice of God, and you learn to watch the vibration of the speech of God within, you'll notice that it's one unbroken stream; the quality of consciousness at the point of individual identity and the quality of consciousness at the point of union with God are the same. It's just your attention which interprets them differently.
Having received shaktipat, the transmission of God's grace, the entire spectrum of attention becomes open to you. It's just an issue of learning to listen. Listening is the key; meditate and listen to what's inside.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
In essence, the Intensive is a day-long conversation with the Guru, a day-long conversation with the force of Shaktipat. The very form of the Intensive is the instrument of Shaktipat—that energy which, when transmitted into your system, carries the signal of awakening. Only a single atom of this energy is required for each person.
Shaktipat, once given, cannot fail. It’s not a matter of if you will awaken, but when. It is only regulated by your own skill, the intensity of your nature, and what you are capable of enduring in the transformation process. Whether it happens fast or slow doesn’t matter. The intensity, spread out over time, does not decrease the impact of its force.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
When the instruments of awareness are kindled and accelerated through Shaktipat, the impact is sometimes dramatic and sometimes subtle. The language of this communication is vibration—a very subtle vibration between the teacher and the student. The process of awakening does not rest on an understanding of concepts; it goes deeper than that. The force of it flows by touch from those who are awakened to those who want to be awakened.
This way of awakening people, this transmission of vibration, is ancient and unfailing. Once planted within your system it can only do one thing—awaken. Once the seed of awakening has been planted, it only awaits the accumulation of needed qualities—the ability and the desire of the student to undergo the process. Its most potent food is the hunger to know God.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
All the impressions from all our lives are stored within us as karma. This karma acts like a cloud or fog which limits us to operating within the system of the senses, binding us to the wheel, and perpetuating the generation of more and more karma. Shaktipat, the liberating impulse, sends a signal to the individual soul for this karmic information to begin to unwind from the system.
The daily bread of spiritual life is the unraveling of these karmic impressions, and they must be unraveled down to the very last thread. Spiritual training and practice serve as the support system for this process of purification. All the spiritual disciplines are designed to help speed up the unraveling of karma.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The unraveling of karma is a very powerful and very intense event. Delivering the shaktipat impulse begins the unraveling of karmic impressions, and regular exposure to samadhi accelerates this process. This is what we do here at Hard Light.
It's up to you to go through all these processes and maintain your equilibrium as the transformative force of liberation flows through you. There are powerful psychological, emotional, and physical aspects to this process that you have to contend with. Regular physical culture keeps the body flexible, vibrant, and strong. Daily meditation on the higher principles of enlightenment keeps the light strong within.
Truth be told, it is the withstanding of the unraveling of karma that most spiritual training is about.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
It is the impact of the Guru's grace that causes this very intense and rapid unraveling of karma. This creates tremendous pressure within your system, and the pressure exerts itself on your psyche, your personality, your emotions, your physical body, your health. It's important to remember that this pressure is a good thing. This is where the rubber meets the road in spiritual life.
People can do spiritual practice for lifetimes with great effort and intensity, but without the grace of the Guru they'll certainly get some experience and learn things, but the unraveling of the karma will not have been triggered. Up until this happens, all spiritual practice is aimed at gaining the Guru's grace. And having gained the Guru's grace, spiritual practice then becomes aimed at withstanding the Guru's grace.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The optimum situation is one in which you maintain a sense of identity as the universal identity is brought forth. If a person gets too much energy too fast they lose touch with the world. The landmarks of their reality change so quickly that they can't keep up with them and become disoriented. The Guru moderates the speed of the unraveling of the karma so that you feel more or less like yourself as you go through all this. You feel a constant sense of pressure and change, but maintain a sense of identity and remain connected to the world.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Bodhicitta is the ideal of enlightenment, and the love of that enlightenment that we use to turn our hearts and minds away from the path of degradation and the endless formation of karma, to the generation of virtuous action. We begin to actively consider the ideals of love, compassion, generosity, kindness, patience. We begin to actively reject the dark energies of jealousy, hatred, greed, envy.
The Bodhicitta is the seat of the deep heart, the place where all four bodies intersect: the physical body of matter, the subtle physical body of energy, the causal body of mind and mental formation, and atman the throb of pure consciousness.
The Bodhicitta is a fountain of one hundred fibers that connect to the brain from this seat in the heart, animating the space between the heart and the brain and producing the event that we call existence, all the dynamics of separate existence, all the qualities of being.
In its highest form, the Bodhicitta is a distillation of consciousness at the top of the central nerve which forms a white drop whose movement from the crown of the head down through the brain and into the heart is one of the agencies of the highest mysticism.
The Bodhicitta is all of these things - deeper, and deeper, and ever deeper. It is the cosmic force of creation and the ocean of infinite consciousness expressing themselves in the fabric of the life of the individual. It is every thought, every feeling that you have ever had in the chain of your existence. It is all the dynamics of every desire of your being every hope, every success, every failure, every lesson learned. It is the living, breathing, soft, tender center of life, where the awesome force of God and the infinite sweep of creation arise inside each and every heart and mind.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Life is the fountain from which all blessings flow. Everything that is meant for you by God, Guru, and Self will appear by virtue of life. How you get to it is the great mystery that lies between destiny and fate.
Destiny is irresistible; it cannot be changed even by God. But fate flows swift and fickle. How quickly you see the truth of a situation, the cost of a moment of hesitation, the cost of a mistake, the rush of victory when you make all the right choices – this is your fate.
Your destiny is to awaken in the ocean of consciousness. The rivers and paths that you take to get there is your fate.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
It's the nature of the Guru's grace to keep you in swift water. Thus you must learn to navigate swift water, and this is where the Bodhicitta comes into play. What we consider our lives are the assembly of our perceptions, and the first nexus point of perception is in the Bodhicitta.
The heart and the mind need each other to operate correctly. This is the essence of the Bodhicitta—they are joined together. The mind alone is an imperfect perceiver. The heart alone is an imperfect perceiver. Knit together they begin to function as they were intended to function.
Bodhicitta is the deep, abiding relaxation of heart and mind which doesn't try to control everything but sits open—without fear, without judgment, and deeply accepting. You find yourself at the right spot, at the right time, vividly present as you become excruciatingly awake to every fiber of consciousness.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Waking up inside this world is a very strange experience. The first thing you see is the unbelievable amount of suffering that takes place here. You think, “Oh yes, the world is a terrible place and there's an enormous amount of suffering,” but most of you still just know this theoretically.
There's an aspect to the process of awakening that puts you in touch with suffering in such a way that it cannot be avoided: the suffering of yourself; the suffering of those around you; the cruel actions that are generated by yourself and those around you; watching this suffering compound itself and generate false understanding and false actions that lead to more suffering. All this must be confronted.
This is one of the things that tends to throw travelers on the path. The only thing I've been able to find that is capable of dealing with the vibration of suffering and pain is the bodhicitta.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
When one's consciousness is externalized, ensnared in the belief of the existence of the personal identity, you're trapped on the wheel of birth and death and experience endless cyclic change due to the laws of karma. Your karmic load is increased with every breath.
The Guru's grace awakens the kundalini and begins the all-important process of the unraveling of the karma. Without the Guru's grace, you would never be able to unravel the karma fast enough. In this time and place, the way reality is put together, even those beings that are enlightened at birth need the protection of the Guru to ensure their successful unfoldment.
The Guru clears the karma, and intensifies and focuses the pathway; this brings about the most dramatic unfoldment and resolution of fate and destiny.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The Bodhicitta starts as a methodology to karmically connect you with your own enlightenment. The mind absorbs what it comes into contact with and most people forget to even think about giving rise to enlightenment. When a teacher says, “Give rise to Bodhicitta,” that means to give rise to the enlightened precepts within your mind. By doing this you arouse enlightenment within your system and connect your personal identity to this enlightenment.
The Bodhicitta gives you the ability to come into contact fearlessly with both the positive and negative sides of yourself. As the karma unfolds, there will be a lot of negative stuff that comes out of you—lust, greed, jealousy, anger, envy. As these dark angels of past karmas are released they will haunt you. It's important not to recatch that virus as they are released. It's so easy to become lost in the maelstrom of your own unfoldment.
You must keep the idea of the Bodhicitta high in your heart and bright in your mind. It is the rising sun, the flag of victory going up on the hill, a point of rally. It is one of the tricks to staying on the path with unwavering attention as your karmas unfold.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
As a spiritual warrior on the path of awakening, you're going to come into contact with people from the outside world who will treat you negatively. They'll feel threatened by you because they sense the power of liberation moving inside you and this arouses feelings of anger and jealousy within them. They'll try to confuse you and knock you from the path.
But you've thought about this and prepared for it. By keeping the ideal of the Bodhicitta highest in your heart, you've learned to hold it there when it counts. Your heart isn't turned in a reactionary mode when these things happen. You see to the truth of the situation and see the jealousy, envy and anger for what they are—no big deal. You don't strike out in the name of suffering. You accept the situation for what it is, and through the burning sun of the Bodhicitta it is transmuted into light.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
If you harbor a seed of jealousy, a seed of hatred, a seed of envy that becomes your Achilles' heel and you can be struck and wounded there. Why? Because you hold the target within yourself and it draws the arrow in as true as fate itself.
By keeping the Bodhicitta strong in your heart you will feel the presence of a deep, circulating fire of pure consciousness, and when you feel negativity come in, by the time it reaches your heart and mind, the Bodhicitta will have transmuted it into pure light. You can't be damaged, you can’t be hurt, and your path can't be changed.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Being in the forces of light means that you carry the light, and your actions must reflect its nature. So often people take the dynamic of spiritual grace and the power that comes with it to produce a kind of superiority. This is a mistake. Superiority is just a form of arrogance and will only lead to the creation of a downward flowing chain of negative karma.
The one thing that slows you down from your own awakening is your attachment to the idea of yourself as a separate identity. If you believe yourself to be a separate identity that's what you empower—with your will, your love, your heart, your actions. If you believe you're separate, you believe there's something to protect. The Bodhicitta allows you to see clearly into your heart and the heart of others; it gives you the ability to see the true interconnectedness of all things and all beings.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
During times of great transformation, karma can be released with such speed that you fear you'll be driven into lines of behavior outside of your control. When something negative comes up you think, "I must be a bad person. I must have done some very evil things." These thoughts only lead to more misdirected energy and more neurotic behavior, which just makes the situation worse.
The trick to dealing with negative energy is that you must be firmly anchored in the positive when you come into contact with it. That's why I tell you to actively give rise to the Bodhicitta every day, to actively give rise to the increase of light within yourself. The Bodhicitta is the tool that gets you to the point where the seed of negativity arises, so you can touch it without being afraid, see it for what it is, and let the Bodhicitta absorb it and transform its nature.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The kundalini is the raw power of creation. It is a force beyond all comprehension, arising as creation itself. It emerges directly out of the ocean of consciousness without origin, without cause, without end. It is a completely paradoxical event. There is no sequence of events, no linear process, it arises all at once; the entire manifestation of infinite consciousness all the way down to the firmness of the earth arises at one time.
The sages use the term “continuousness” to describe this; you should understand the creation as continuously arising, fully formed. This point of non-origin is called spanda, and at this moment of creation, the guru arises. The guru is a fundamental component of the creation, arising at the point of creation itself. The kundalini is the mother of the guru. The guru is the awakening impulse of the creation, the power of illumination and transformation, continuous and eternal; it is the awakening speech of the kundalini.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The kundalini arises in three forms: the para kundalini; the prana kundalini; and the shakti kundalini.
The para kundalini is infinite and universal; it is beyond all qualities, arising as the infinite ocean of consciousness. When the para kundalini folds into the envelope of formation, the prana kundalini arises.
The prana kundalini gives rise to the multiplicity of creation, the diversity of form and consciousness. The prana kundalini is the force of life, vibrating and animating everything in creation.
The shakti kundalini is the animate quality of consciousness, the attachment of the life force to the individual conditioned soul. The creation, having entered the envelope of the prana, lives its existence out in the infinite cycles of time on the wheel of samsara, bound by the law of cause and effect.
The guru shakti is the impulse of release from the wheel, triggering the kundalini to travel back to the source of the creation, merging back into the ocean of consciousness. That which has been created is uncreated. The guru shakti is the “reset” button of creation.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The guru shakti encompasses all three forms of the kundalini. It arises as the para kundalini, pervades the envelope of the prana kundalini, and triggers the awakening impulse of the shakti kundalini causing that which is created to be uncreated.
The guru is the shaktipat impulse, an infinite spirit that arises as the creation and manifests throughout the creation in countless forms. Even though there are infinitely diverse forms, there is only one guru principle, one guru impulse, and that is the impulse to awaken, to uncreate and merge back into the ocean.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Kundalini is just raw power, the energy of creation; this is an inconceivable amount of energy. It would annihilate you within a second without the modulating impulse of the guru principle.
The guru is like a transformer, taking the raw, unbounded energy of creation and modifying it into a flow of energy that is conditioned and useful to you as a life form. Instead of destroying you, this energy awakens you, it illuminates you, causing your spirit to unfold.
This is the shaktipat impulse and it carries within it the compression of time and space. Tens of thousands of incarnations are compressed into the space of one lifetime, making it possible for you to undergo huge evolutionary leaps within a single incarnation.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
By connecting to the guru principle and maintaining a positive relationship with that incredible presence, the force of creation itself starts to flow through you with perfect harmony. You can feel it driving you, always driving you, but at the same time it's sustaining, protecting, and sheltering you while all this occurs.
This is a very intense and extreme process. Once you get shaktipat you will always feel it, you will always have a stiff wind at your back. You must become a very disciplined, powerful, and grounded person to hold it together while you go through this process, but that's your job. Once you receive shaktipat it is upon you to endure the burning off of the clouds of karma that stand between you and the apprehension of your true nature.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Nothing is added to you.
The quality and energy of all your past actions and all your past lives are just unwound back through the chain of creation; the throb of creation which gave rise to formation is absorbed back into the multiplicity of countless vibrations, which then dissolve back into the ocean of consciousness.
This entire event arises in an instant. It only seems to take sixty thousand lifetimes. It only seems to take one life. It only seems to take one breath. The cycles of time are absolute relativity. This idea is called Bhairava.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
At the level of thought, the architecture of the subjective and objective relationship of perception is clearly defined—the perceiver being the subject, what is perceived being the object. This subject-object relationship implies the existence of a perceiver that has a separate identity.
In a human being, the ego's reflexive separation as a distinct identity takes root in the interaction of the intellect, the list-making capacity of the mind, with the instrumentation of the senses; data flows through the senses into the mind and establishes the relationship of the subject to the perceived object, which appears to exist, yet is really non-existent. So-called reality arises from this complex matrix of ego, intellect, and senses.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
There are two very distinct states of consciousness in the subject-object relationship. The dynamic of concentration where one's attention flows towards a perceived object and apprehends it, and the dynamic of meditation where the object and the perceiver of the object begin to fuse into a single thing.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Much of the day-to-day activity of spiritual training involves the process of generating and storing power, spiritual energy. It is this energy that operates within the system of the human form in the phases of illumination, purification, and awakening.
The systems of consciousness must be activated and go through a process of upgrading so that they can conduct higher and higher frequencies of energy.
The major part of spiritual life boils down to the generation of this energy within the system, and learning how to conduct it throughout the totality of the human form.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Why do we spend the time learning the mechanics of stopping the mind and switching off the senses? Because the operation of the senses drown out the most subtle operations of consciousness.
The waves of the mind are like the ripples on the surface of a pond. The water is stirred and becomes filled with reflective light; you can't see through it to what's below. Because the senses are hard-wired into the mind they are constantly producing these waves in your awareness; the mind stays continually agitated.
It's just like trying to sit down and study a complex text with the TV, stereo, and radio on all at the same time. It's just too much. When you want to study something that's difficult or subtle you make it silent around you.
Constant refinement of attention is essential in order to become aware of the most subtle operations of consciousness found within the human form.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
From day to day, lifetime to lifetime, one moves in an endless cycle from the waking state, to the sleep with dream state, to the state of sleep with no dream, and back again. There is a fourth state where one directly moves into a level of consciousness that is referred to as atman, and the individual becomes aware of themselves as the source of universal consciousness.
This state, when experienced directly during meditation, is called samadhi—intuitive knowledge of the absolute truth. The experience of samadhi is the direct result of the step-by-step activation of the full dynamics of the human form, giving it the capacity to operate within the fourth state. The only reason a human does not experience the fourth state all the time is that their system is not operating at a high enough level of energy to produce and sustain the experience of samadhi.
This is why the daily bread of spiritual life consists of the purification and upgrading of all the systems of human consciousness, increasing the amount of spiritual energy within the human form until it can conduct the level of energy required for the experience of samadhi.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Consciousness is oceanic, and the personal identity is like a drop within that ocean; it's not hard to find the ocean, it's all around you, it pervades you.
There's a point in the inward moving breath after you breathe in, but before you've started to breathe out. Likewise, there's a point in the outward moving breath after you breathe out, but before you've started to breathe in. By focusing your attention on these pivotal points within the breath, you gain entry into the causal body, the infinite fabric of the mind.
It's at this point that you can begin the process of stopping the mind, and experience the unity of personal identity with the infinite ocean of consciousness.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
By just paying attention to the breath and letting it flow naturally, deeply and slowly, our attention is saturated with deeper consciousness. This opens the door to the apprehension of the space between the breaths, that point at which the senses switch off, that point at which nothing is happening.
The sense of being a physical body diminishes; you are aware of having a physical body but no longer think of it as “I.” This is the beginning of the perception of emptiness within oneself.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Sacred ground is chosen by the masters of consciousness because in these places kundalini, the force of creation flows very intensely and serves as an amplifier for the spiritual operations that take place there. These spots are stages for universal spiritual operations.
In the same way, the period of time between the Vernal Equinox and the full moon is another type of spiritual amplifier. Something like a God portal opens during this time and the kundalini flows very powerfully; this makes it extremely easy to carry out spiritual work and go into advanced states of consciousness. You have the wind of God's shakti at your back.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
When dealing with the onslaught of God consciousness, you must embrace the fact that it is infinite and relentless. You will find yourself pushed to the edge of your being and beyond again and again. Your inner position must be one of surrender, humility, and relaxation.
One of the strongest points of balance is found by resting inside the stream of the Soham mantra which vibrates with each and every breath. This mantra is the spontaneous vibration of God resonating within the human form.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Universal consciousness cannot be summoned, cannot be controlled, cannot be claimed. You can merge with it, can join it, can drop the points of separation between yourself and its nature, but you can't change what it is.
In the end, all the stories of the great spiritual heroes recount the tales of their sitting in the deep, great silence, listening to the resonance of the Soham and witnessing its mystery.
Over the course of your spiritual life, you will find that awakening is like being drawn into the sun—awesome beyond words, awesome beyond all understanding. But as your attention goes deeper and deeper, all your fear will drop away as you find that this process of absorption is not what you expect, not the end of life, but the beginning of a true eternal life.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Of all the things that happen in the process of awakening, the experience of universal mind can be the most dramatic because it seems like something comes to you that wasn't there before. Suddenly your mind is operating in a way that isn't at all familiar to you.
Universal mind is capable of everything; it denies nothing. There are infinite possibilities. All points are equally distant; nothing is farther from you or closer to you in the entire universe. Everything is you. When you want to know something about somebody or something you don't look outside of yourself, you look within. The entire concept of who and what you are has no meaning because you are whatever you think you are.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The experience of universal mind can be likened to swimming endlessly in an infinite ocean; sometimes you'll find that it's nice to rest somewhere. This is one of the great uses of mantra; it's a point of assembly that allows you to establish yourself in a given place. This is true regardless of the mantra.
Soham is the spontaneous mantra within each and every breath that arises because you exist, and studying it to its depth is an incredibly profound experience that leads you to the realization of your true nature.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
In the spiritual concept of phylogeny, the human form is considered to be a final form. Inside this one form it is possible to realize both the totality of one's individual identity and universal consciousness. The instrumentation of the human form carries within it the capacity for full awakening.
You need not have anything added to you. Everything you need is present in this body. What is not present is the complete consciousness, the complete awareness of what is present in the human body.
And this is the basic premise of meditation: that you become increasingly more conscious of the true dynamics of your own existence and the form you currently occupy. It is not that you seek to acquire something that you are presently lacking. You only need become conscious of what you already are.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The waking state, sleep with dream state, and deep sleep state are the three states of the average person's life; back and forth between these states they go at least once or twice every day of their life. They don't experience the fourth state—Atman, the light of infinite consciousness—until the body is worn out and forced to drop, and the event of death occurs.
To a state of consciousness that has only been accustomed to cycling back and forth between the waking, dream, and deep sleep states, this event is so profound and so alarming that it isn't remembered—like a blackout between the moment of death and the moment of rebirth. We can't remember the conditions of past lives, can't remember dying, can barely remember being born.
Meditation is the way in which one prepares oneself to experience infinite consciousness, to meet God. This is no different than anything else you've learned to do in this life; by directing your attention fully to the matter at hand, you gain awareness and understanding of that which you are seeking.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
One of the hallmarks of universal mind is the direct experience of things as they are. Nothing appears to be anything other than it is; the thing is the thing itself. What it looks like, what it feels like, what it seems to be—that's what it is.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The ability to act without any expectation, without any desire, is an advanced spiritual condition. In this state, all actions are free. To reach this point requires the elimination of ego-based identity at its most subtle levels. If there's even the slightest desire-based intent present in an action, that's what will characterize the action.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The idea inherent in mysticism is that one uses the substance and constituents of one's own being as a pathway through the creation to connect with the innermost state of the Self.
The idea of the Self is very profound and subtle, and is one of the most recent ideas to have arisen in the scriptures; it refers to that point of union wherein individual identity and universal consciousness meet.
It is the very fabric of your own consciousness and all the qualities of your being that are the vehicle through which you travel for this conversation to occur. Nothing is transcended, nothing is left behind, everything is used.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Shaktipat is an energy of incredible force that emerges from the creation itself; it is an explosion of awakening from within your very being. Shaktipat holds within itself the direct recognition of all the qualities of existence within the envelope of the human form: the physical, material body; the subtle physical body of energy; the causal body of mental formation; and the supracausal body of pure consciousness, Atman.
Through Shaktipat, the state of potential that exists within the human being in an unrecognized condition becomes awakened, and the individual begins a process of unfoldment wherein all the components of the human form become illuminated and active. This process of unfolding is affected by countless forces, and is unique for all of us.
Yet the awakening process remains the same: the attention moves from the entrapment of the operations of the senses and the apparent world into an increasingly deep contact with the subtlest realms of the unseen within one's very being. The polar opposites of individual identity and universal consciousness are reconciled.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The awakening process is like a bird which needs both wings to fly straight and true.
The first wing is the grace of the guru, shaktipat, the transmission of the seed of awakening. Once shaktipat occurs it is like an event in nature; it can't be stopped. It is a moment of incredible potential.
But it is the other wing, a form of intent that arises from belief that determines how this seed develops. Through belief, the individual actively attends to and cultivates this seed bringing it to its best possible fulfillment. The person's intent is seen in their cooperation with the awakening process, and their recognition of the transformation taking place within themselves.
If through a lack of attention, lack of interest, or lack of belief, a person ignores the experience and never gives it a second thought, the seed will still mature but the process will move much more slowly.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The process of awakening is fivefold by nature.
In the beginning comes belief, faith, in which one's attention is positively turned towards the deep and profound spiritual principle that arises within you as you. The fruit of this faith appears as knowledge, and as knowledge is gained and accumulated it matures into understanding. When this understanding deepens it transforms into realization, and the fruit of one's life becomes realized.
The spiritual force of realization rising within a sentient being finally gives way to the capacity of recognition, the ability to directly recognize universal consciousness within oneself as oneself; you no longer need the filters of an individual identity to know that you are conscious.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The word liberation is often used to refer to the fulfillment of spiritual life. The idea of liberation always sounds good to everybody when they hear about it; but liberation from what? It is liberation from your belief in the personal identity. There's a crisis that takes place in every person's spiritual life as they approach this point.
One of the effects of meditation is that your consciousness is accelerated so that it no longer needs the support of the identity structure of ego, intellect, and memory; your consciousness begins to operate outside of the matrix of personal identity. As the event of liberation actually approaches, its reality — the annihilation of personal identity – becomes very evident; and then suddenly, everyone becomes very attached to their individual identity.
Why? Because as you glimpse that ocean of infinite consciousness, its sheer vastness is terrifying, and a hunger arises for the familiarity and simplicity of the personal identity; you hang on tooth and nail as you are irresistibly swept beyond the bounds of individual identity and plunged into the ocean of universal consciousness. This is a profound shift, and once you make it, you are changed forever.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Intuition is not magic. It is the profound compression of an extraordinary base of experience from countless lives. As you awaken, the experience of all these lifetimes becomes available to you. The memory of these lifetimes is veiled by the drama of the event we call death.
Reality is an infinite ocean of consciousness; the process of creation provides a body as a vehicle for the force of our spirit while in the physical world. But life in the body lasts for a very short time, and when the body is dropped, the mind is freed from the shell of the physical body, stripped bare. Because the mind has taken false refuge in the individual identity while alive, the liberation of consciousness at death is so dramatic and intense that the mind is shocked into forgetfulness.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
At a certain point in meditation, the mind will stop. When this genuinely happens for the first time you will begin to see that the dream of embodied life, whatever it may be, is just a dream like any other dream. As you come to recognize the dream-like nature of existence, you will begin to remember the dreams of other lifetimes.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
You need to learn to adhere to the discipline of your spiritual practice in order to continue pushing yourself to ever-higher levels of consciousness. Once you get Shaktipat, it's best just to ramp up the level of spiritual energy inside your system and deal with the challenges this brings on. There will be times when you run up against changes in your life that will be very difficult. This is why discipline in spiritual practice is so important.
When you're inspired and everything seems to be moving along effortlessly, it's easy. But inspiration comes and goes, it's not a constant. There will be times when you hit a difficult phase of your practice and you just have to grind it out for a while. Hold to your discipline, because even if it doesn't seem like it, you're making spiritual progress. Truth be told, most spiritual students are not very good judges of their own spiritual progress; what they think is progress and what they think is not progress is almost always wrong.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The lifetime in which you receive Shaktipat is a pivotal moment. Nothing will ever be the same again. The process of pouring the light of God into a person causes the spiritual heat to rise, and as the heat goes up, different things happen to each individual as their personal identity begins to cook down. You'll come into contact with anything and everything based on your past actions, your destiny, your fate. This is a universal experience in terms of the awakening of a human being.
There is no particular way you have to live or be. What you want to do with your life is up to you. You can draw on the warmth and friendship of your fellow travelers on the path as you will, but in the end, everybody has to accept and take responsibility for their own life. This is the warrior's path.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
There is nothing out there that is the thing itself. The apparent reality of all things is an illusion, a dream. All perception is relative.
Appearance is subject to imputed terms. Through a series of complex operations based on the dynamics of each perceiver, we give reality and meaning to a thing based on the terms we assign to it. Through this framework of imputed terms, the individual gives rise to the appearance of creation.
The only thing that stands between you and the enlightened condition is the complex framework of terms that you have used to define existence. These terms are the very source of your bondage. You must step away from the absolute lock of imputed terms and allow things to move without any requirement of the dream of control.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Once Shaktipat occurs, enlightenment always follows. The only thing that varies is the speed at which the process unfolds, and this is based solely on your ability to surrender, your willingness to go along with the movement from mundane to universal consciousness.
Free will is never touched in this entire process. What you do after Shaktipat is up to you. In a way, it’s a kind of test: do you take the power and stay true to the path, or do you use the power to fulfill your base desires? After Shaktipat, enlightenment is inevitable, but if you make incorrect decisions, it will just complicate things for you and entangle you in more suffering.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
In spiritual terms, the word emptiness is often used to refer to God, because no matter how you slice it, God is beyond thought, beyond understanding, beyond all qualities. If you insist on assigning qualities to God you must understand very clearly that those are simply your imputed terms; they are only real inasmuch as you make them real. If you think of God in some particular fashion, God will respond to you in this way.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
What is Samadhi? Stopping the mind. The mind itself has no qualities, it only carries the momentum of what it comes into contact with, and when the mind stops, reality emerges. This is why all yoga is designed to bring about the event of Samadhi.
Everybody talks about ascending to the higher planes. This process involves making the mind perfectly empty, and the first stage of this process is stopping the mind, and stopping it for increasingly sustained periods of time. When this occurs, the event of enlightenment arises.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The intent of the siddha lineage is to awaken human beings as fast as possible through the energy of Shaktipat. The masters of this lineage have the ability to ripen a person’s karma in order to prepare them for the moment when they will receive Shaktipat. This ripening takes place in the lifetimes just before you meet your guru.
These lifetimes can often be very difficult because the elimination of karma takes place at an extremely accelerated pace so that the individual's karma, both positive and negative, is brought into equilibrium. It is this state of karmic equilibrium which signals the guru that that you are ready for Shaktipat.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
As an individual's spiritual practice matures the mind begins to stop, and you feel yourself to be arising in everything and everything arising in you. When you get really sensitive you start to hear and feel what's going on inside people whether you want to or not.
When this first starts it's oftentimes experienced as painful. It's one of the reasons that many people prefer isolation for yogic practice. But the world is the world and you have to understand that there is no quality present that is more or less you. There really is just one mind and it is a shared condition.
You have to come to the point where, as they say in Zen practice, you come down from the mountain and learn to live with the tiger of the world. Otherwise what good is your spiritual practice if you can only live in a cave? Your practice just became a prison.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
In the course of your daily life, you're going to encounter individuals who are difficult for you to deal with for any number of reasons. The fundamental practice designed to address this issue is called “taking and sending.”
In all situations, whatever you receive from people, be it positive or negative, you see it as equal, you accept it, and you take whatever it is. In return you send back light, love, and hope for that person's future enlightenment.
This is the movement onto the wide road that gives you the ability to move through life with an open heart and open mind acting from a condition of freedom. Acting otherwise will only reaffirm your believe in the limited personal identity and prevent you from realizing your higher self.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Until you go into samadhi, you are constantly experiencing the residual conditioning of the past in the present. The weight of all the unresolved karma stored in your physical, subtle, and mental bodies creates a situation wherein your experience of the present is so heavily conditioned by the past that it becomes impossible for you to experience the present moment.
When the shaktipat impulse passes through the physical, subtle, and mental bodies, it breaks up and removes this karma, freeing you from the burden of karmic conditioning. As this process takes place, you may find all kinds of thoughts passing through your mind. The trick is to not grab onto these thoughts and engage them; just let them go by.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Once a human being incarnates on earth, they'll tend to reincarnate here until they are able to stop the mind and break free from the unwavering gravitational pull of the magnetic field of the earth.
The good news is that there are only seven planes between incarnation on earth, and the Om point and all seven planes are stored within the human form. You don't have to go anywhere to find them; they're inside you.
If you think you have to go somewhere else or be someone else or think something else in order to awaken, you've missed the whole point. Once you understand this, it's as easy to go into samadhi in Grand Central Station as anywhere else.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
There are times in spiritual life that are really difficult. You're always being pushed beyond yourself; that's just the nature of the practice. The pain comes from the false refuge you have taken in your attachment to the personal identity, the idea of “I like this” and “I don't like that.”
Tantra is considered to be the fast path because you are taught to ignore the surface of things and pay attention to the essence no matter what the flavor of the experience. By training yourself to do this you get to a condition of 'one taste' where you are able to see the underlying truth of anything. If you remain trapped on the surface, you remain trapped in the endless cycle of attraction and aversion.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The fruit of spiritual life is never what people expect it to be. You're constantly leaving behind any fixed assembly of identity as you begin to move freely on the infinite ocean of consciousness. You face whatever comes to meet you on your path. The moment begins to define identity.
One of the realities of spiritual life is that existence truly is eternal. It never comes to an end; it just continually changes. The idea of a recognizable and familiar pattern of life is an illusion. The nature of existence is ever-new and surprising.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Death, like life, is highly complex, subject to ignorance, superstition, fear, confusion, all of which can lead to errors in judgment. We have a desire within ourselves that mixes with a set of conditions, and we make a choice which can be the fruit of clear perception or, more likely, our desire for what we want to have happen. We see what we want to see; our choice is not based on the reality of a situation, but rather a hope. Depending on the quality of the choices we make, our lives can go fairly well or can seem to be nothing but a journey from one disaster to another.
Death is just like this, only much more dramatic; life seems to be spread out over a phase of time, but the event of death unfolds very swiftly. What is most important at the moment of death is the ability to recognize what is happening. Unfortunately, most often the event of death is unprepared for because our lives are designed to keep the subject of death as far away from us as possible. The basic theme of spiritual life, of all yoga, of the Bardo Thodol, is that life and death are the same; life should be used to prepare for the inevitable encounter with death.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The power of thought and the impact it has on the nature of one's life and death cannot be stressed enough. The quality of one's thought is the event. This is not an abstraction. All of the components of life and death arise within your own thought constructs.
People think they can choose the kind of thoughts they will have when they die, but this is not the case. Your life and death are the same, they mirror each other, and the thoughts you hold in your heart and mind during life, are the thoughts that will be present at death.
It is because of this all-important understanding that we engage in spiritual training. We learn to meditate because when meditation is strong, it is like a trip between life and death traveling through the bardo of our own nature.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Sacred ground is chosen by the masters of consciousness because in these places kundalini, the force of creation, flows very intensely and serves as an amplifier for the spiritual operations that take place there. These spots are stages for universal spiritual operations.
In the same way, the period of time between the Vernal Equinox and the full moon is another type of spiritual amplifier. Something like a God portal opens during this time and the kundalini flows very powerfully; this makes it extremely easy to carry out spiritual work and go into advanced states of consciousness. You have the wind of God's shakti at your back.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Worldly dharma is the dynamic of psychology: the control of one's appetites, the resistance to the poisons of hatred, anger, greed, lust, and jealousy. As an act of will we filter these poisons out of our thoughts and behavior because if we give rise to them they manifest in our life as our life. In their place we give rise to the higher angels of love, kindness, generosity, and patience, and these become the dominant forces of our life.
Our heart, mind, and being are perfect recorders; every single thought, every single feeling, every single action is recorded within us as subtle bits of samskaric data in the energy channels of the ida, pingala, and sushumna.
What they say about death is true. At the moment of death your entire life passes before you. The dynamic of death tears away all the buffers of the personal identity and the raw energy of everything stored inside you manifests within your mind stream with incredible intensity. As we live, so shall we die.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
You should understand that the dynamic of the deconstruction of one's being, the traversing of the Bardo Thodol at death, has one unifying principle: it is designed to bring you face to face with the clear light of reality in an ever-descending formula.
If at the first dawning of the great light, you recognize it at that moment for what it is, you are absorbed into its nature and become enlightened. If however, having lived a life of superstitious misunderstanding, you see in the clear light of reality a fearsome light of a billion suns that carries your certain destruction, you will reject it in fear. The price of this ignorance is that you go down a step; the conditions become more complicated, the mind is thrown into turmoil, and the level of confusion intensifies.
Thus the clear light of reality presents itself again and again, and each time you have the opportunity to recognize it for what it is. How you perceive the great light at the time of death is a mirror of the fabric of your life and all the conditioning that weighs on you.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
In life when we give rise to a desire, time may pass before that desire is fulfilled, but it will always be fulfilled. It might not come to fruition when we want it, it might occur in a different time and a different place, but having produced a desire, that desire will always be fulfilled.
This is why they always say, “Be careful what you want.” You must remember that everything you desire you get. The irony of it is that many times these desires are fulfilled at the moment of death, and they end up distracting you so that you entirely forget about the clear light of reality.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The higher angels—love, generosity, patience, kindness— don't just happen by themselves. You have to give rise to them as an act of will, and this is a lifelong study. If you've ever had the pleasure to meet a person who has mastered this study you will feel the complete absence of greed, of jealousy, of envy. They're just not there; all you feel is a quality of luminosity.
This may seem like an abstract proposition to you, so you'll go out and do whatever you do in the privacy of your own home and that's fine. But at the moment of death, it matters; the exact weight of every ounce of the poisons of envy, of jealousy, of greed, will rise and it's not pleasant. You can deny the presence of these poisons in life, but you can't deny them in death. The intention of every action is measured, and there comes a day of reckoning.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The guru is not a place or a time or a person, but an eternal spirit of true consciousness that arises as that. It is the key to awakening; the reflex of unbinding that is the essence of liberation. That which is created goes into a bound condition, and it is the guru that absorbs that which is created back into its original nature.
The end result of the meeting of the guru and the disciple is the dissolution of separateness between the two. The disciple absorbs the nature of the guru, the guru absorbs the nature of the disciple, and they become one thing.
Even in the cases of the incarnation of the most profoundly enlightened beings, contact with the guru principle is required in order for them to gain access to their latent enlightenment. The guru-disciple relationship is a primal role in the play of creation.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
When you find states of mind, feelings, and thoughts that bother you coming up again and again, these become the perfect target for you to address and remove from the fabric of your mind. This is a project you'll undertake when you finally come to a point where something has been bothering you for so long that you decide you're going to get to the bottom of it no matter what.
The sword of discrimination is the best way to remove these poisons from your system and extinguish them; take a ray of the light of the Bodhicitta, form it into a sword, and strike precisely at the poison's heart as if you were using a laser. Dealing with these very subtle poisons at the level of the mind when they first take form as a vibration is a skill you will develop. They'll have a form and feeling; emotional content and memory is attached to them.
This is something you should do a little bit every day. Make it a part of your meditation to deal with this kind of problem solving; you'll have phases where this will be all you'll do for an hour a day for an entire week. This is something you will have to do regularly; it's not like you'll ever come to the end of it.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
All attachments serve as a false refuge for the personal identity. It's not so much the specific attachment itself which is important, since ultimately consciousness is everywhere; it's the fear of losing the attachment which is the actual issue. Everyone carries within them a subtle terror of the unknown; this is why only one in a million people have the nerve to go all the way through to samadhi.
You have to learn to face this fear. You face it day to day, in your daily practice, in your daily meditation, with the absolute certainty that you will face it at the last moment of the last breath of the last day of this life. You have the choice to put it off till then, or you can do it now. The fact is, it's just like homework; the more you do now, the less you have to do later and when the moment of death does come, it will be smoother.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The recognition of consciousness is the swiftest and most profound pathway to enlightenment. It is one of the most powerful forms of Shaktipat, a reflex of consciousness itself—consciousness recognizing consciousness. This takes place in you as you. One simply recognizes the truth of the nature of self as consciousness. The relative perceiver of the self ruled by the egocentric identity becomes aware of the totality of its own nature. This recognition can take place in the space between the breaths.
The basis of the idea of recognition of consciousness is that the assembly of identity arises out of the expression of truth itself. No second thing ever occurs. The individual takes an inner journey through the subtle fabric of identity, clearing a pathway from the tier of attention ruled by the sensory fields all the way to the supracausal body of pure consciousness—Atman. As the individual approaches this point of infinite consciousness, the qualities of personal identity are absorbed until the individual drop finally merges into the ocean and they become a single thing. Because there is only one thing—the ocean of consciousness—when that truth is realized by a single person it produces an explosion of consciousness that arises in everyone.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The lineage is an endless, glittering, radiant chain of beings. Each in their own moment looked within themselves and found the ocean of consciousness; this happened because they were touched by a person that had looked within themselves and found the ocean. And when they look within themselves, they will touch others and cause them to look within themselves and discover the ocean.
This is the engineering of the lineage and it is very simple. It moves on the principle of touch, of contact. It is irresistible and cannot fail. In this way, the dream of awakening lives within the dream of the creation.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The fuel of the operation of the individual existence and egocentric identity is desire. Everything that comes into existence is born of desire.
You appear out of the absolute and integrate into existence as an individual and separate identity. Yet you yearn to feel the all-inclusive connection and acceptance of the absolute. Humans characterize this experience as love, and the dynamic of desire in humans manifests as the yearning for love. This is both a conscious and unconscious process.
This yearning for love and the extent to which the individual perceives that this love is given or withheld in the flow of their personal experience produces the effect of desire. This is a universal energy.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Having been given fortunate birth in a time and place where the Sadguru was present, having gained the company and grace of such a Sadguru, having gained Shaktipat while living in a time and place where spiritual life is possible, do not allow the maya of the world to turn you from your destiny, out of fear, out of ignorance. Having won such a precious treasure, do not allow the jewel of Shaktipat, the divine grace—which is the capsule of the divine will of the Sadguru—to fall on hard and unfertile ground, out of laziness or inattention.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The instantaneous product of desire manifests within the psyche in what we in the West call behavioral drives. Desire is invisible, endless, and universal, but it is within the behavioral drives that desire makes itself apparent. We define who we are based on these drives and their outcomes.
The dynamic of behavioral drives is not one of fulfillment. Be it sex or food or money, it's not as if at any point in time these drives can be fulfilled and you can put an end to them and move on. After a very short period of satisfaction, you want to repeat them. Drives are of the nature of repetition; they are not meant to be fulfilled, they are meant to be repeated. We derive pleasure not from the fulfillment of the desire itself, but from the ability to repeat the drive again and again.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
In an unawakened condition, your consciousness moves from one place to another with no continuous line. You feel this, you think that, you remember something else, and because they happened next to each other you associate them with each other, completely randomly and with no real reason. You come up with a general flow of associations and somehow you sketch together a life out of that, but there is no continuousness between those events.
Underlying all this is a flow of light, a flow of consciousness that is continuous. You have to learn to get to the point where you can embed yourself in that flow of consciousness. When this occurs you experience continuousness, and you can feel this thread unfurling at any time, any place, in any lifetime. Once this happens, your journey is very swift and very true. The compass reads correctly and you will make choices not out of the random selection of the unfolding of your karma and desire-based choices, but from a deeper place.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The identity of the 'I' consciousness is actually an assembly of qualities: the reflex of the ego, the list-making capacity of the intellect, the operation of the senses, the dynamic of memory and its chain of associations, not just from this life but from all lives. This is the idea of emptiness. At no point are you absolutely you. You were always just an assembly of qualities.
When you meditate with a teacher who enters into samadhi, the incoming wave of consciousness dissolves this assembly of qualities. The apparent solidity of the 'I' consciousness seems to flicker in and out of existence. It only seemed real because it was interconnected and interlocked.
It's not as if you disappear. What disappears is the apparent separation between you and consciousness. From the standpoint of the world you're flickering in and out of existence. But from the standpoint of consciousness, where did you go? You were always there. Life is just a dream.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Why doesn't every cause produce the desired effect?
Often times we think in terms of 'my' karma or 'our' karma. If it were that simple it would be a lot easier. But all of us end up dealing with the compound karma of the whole until we understand that the wielder of that karma does not and never has existed. As long as you believe in an 'I' and believe that you exist, that you are the perceiver, that you are the doer, you will experience the pressure of the collective force of all of your accumulated karma as well as the collective force of the karma of the whole world system. You buy into the collective force of an entire world system by believing in the imputed terms of 'I.'
The imputed terms of the bound and conditioned soul hold you in place. It's much like being tied to a tree in a terrible storm. You can't escape, you are stuck where you are, and the onslaught of the collective force of your own actions and the collective force of the world system pound on you and pound on you until in the end you are inevitably worn down and tired out by all that pressure. Over the course of a lifetime, you can see the record of this pressure on a person that's lived sixty, seventy, eighty years.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Intention is a very powerful spiritual energy. It is the speech of intention that drives the vessel of spiritual life—the ability to focus the force of one's life irresistibly to the purpose of spiritual awakening and realization without turning away from the goal. Intention is not so much seen on the surface of things; it is the underlying speech.
Through unwavering intent and a spirit of abandon, the ability to commit to the way is the secret that presses through the obstacles and the difficulties of the path and draws the attention of the guru's grace. It's a kind of conversation of commitment and conviction, a request to be shown the way. If this intention, this vibration, occurs again and again you will begin to be taken seriously. But if one day it's one thing, and the next day another, more maturity is needed.
The question the guru is always asking is, "What are you interested in?" Often times we can confuse ourselves with the intensity of our passions and desires, and dress them up in a kind of self importance. As we begin to align heart, mind, and body to the service of the spirit, these begin to fall away and ring hollow. What runs underneath is what we become truly interested in. We stop being fooled by the glitter of the surface.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The conversation with the guru can be very confusing because although it may seem to happen in words, it utterly happens from within, flowing from the inner depths of the spirit to the surface. Yet we keep talking to ourselves on the surface and we end up getting caught in that endless reflective hall of mirrors that is the mind.
The meaning of what I say is not contained in words that fly across the room, hit your ears, and trigger your mind. Our dialog takes place at the lowest levels of being and is immediate. The words happen afterwards, and are really just like pointers to the truth. That's why I can talk with you about the most subtle and esoteric concepts using very mundane words, yet you'll understand exactly what I mean.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The conversation with the guru can be very confusing because although it may seem to happen in words, it utterly happens from within, flowing from the inner depths of the spirit to the surface. Yet we keep talking to ourselves on the surface and we end up getting caught in that endless reflective hall of mirrors that is the mind.
The meaning of what I say is not contained in words that fly across the room, hit your ears, and trigger your mind. Our dialog takes place at the lowest levels of being and is immediate. The words happen afterwards, and are really just like pointers to the truth. That's why I can talk with you about the most subtle and esoteric concepts using very mundane words, yet you'll understand exactly what I mean.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The transmission of grace given by the guru produces an instrument of awakening that is virtually perfect. All the aspects of an individual are ripened, even those that lay deep beneath the layer of consciousness in the depths of your being. At the same time, your identity is sustained; your assembly of reality is preserved so that the main thing you feel is the pressure of the dynamic force of creation as the transmission moves through your system and burns off the karma. Your life changes. Something was there and now it's gone, you feel yourself becoming clearer and clearer.
How quickly you ripen depends on your hunger to know God. To what degree are you willing to surrender to this indescribable and unknown quality we call God? You might think that if you were fully aware of all of the aspects of this process as it unfolded within you, that this would speed things up. The truth is that if you were made aware of all of the dynamics of the grace as it moved through your system, you would immediately become disoriented and fearful, and this would be deleterious to the process and end up slowing things down.
The guru's grace is the ingredient that prevents this from happening. And this is why they say that you don’t want to enter the path without a guru, and you want to look for a guru that has had a guru, so that you’re not dealing solely with a single individual and their own personal level of realization and enlightenment, but you’re dealing with the cumulative effect of the transmission of grace as it has passed from guru to guru to guru, in an unbroken chain.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The transmission of grace is like a blast to the internal structure of your being and tends to be disorienting. If the spiritual seeker does not have the ability to stay balanced and to continue functioning within the arrangement of their life as the grace pours in, this disorientation becomes an obstacle. Selecting a path with heart will give you the balance and endurance you need to hold true to your course and see it to the end.
A path with heart connects you to the internal flow of life, and all your strength flows from within. You don’t have the sense that you need something, or that something is lacking. You can maintain an anchor to your identity and feel like yourself no matter how demanding the process becomes. Your attention won’t be diverted, and as a result you’ll burn through all your karma very quickly with a minimum of suffering and effort.
This is how you test for a path with heart. The path with heart is not about feeling good or feeling bad. Many have been lead to believe that a path with heart has less suffering on it. Nothing could be further from the truth. There’s just as much suffering on a path with heart as with any other. But the path with heart has the virtue of being the true path for you, and when good fortune comes your way you will be able to move swiftly enough to take advantage of it, and when bad fortune comes your way you will be strong enough to withstand it.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The transmission of grace from the guru releases the vibration of enlightenment within the human form. Before this, the individual usually exhibits patterns of behavior that are entangled with the fulfillment of desire. With the transmission of grace, a metaphysical chemical reaction takes place in the heart and mind of the seeker, and enlightenment gets thrown online directly.
The individual no longer seeks solely to fulfill their desires, their emotional and psychological necessities; they develop a love for that aspect of God that can only be called the truth. Like an addiction, they become sensitized to truth and seek it out. At the same time, the grace begins to neutralize the hungers, the appetites, the desires within the psyche, all of which, one by one, are transubstantiated into one taste, this one flavor that can be called truth.
This experience has been called the first joy - to seek and find the one taste in all things, the flavor of truth itself. Rather than being caught on the surface of phenomena, your heart and mind go to the truth of a thing spontaneously. They will seek out truth, and respond to the truth of a thing without words, without conceptual foundation. The individual now observes the presence of truth in all things to whatever degree it is present. One's heart and mind form an ever-increasing attachment to truth, and you are inexorably drawn to the presence of truth in all things.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
We are bound by our karma; it is the law of cause and effect. Every desire must be fulfilled, however incidental or misdirected it was when you produced that energy. You pulsed with the energy of life at that quality of desire and you produced a seed of karma that is present inside your mind stream and follows you from lifetime to lifetime.
The guru is the incarnation of mercy. There is one single guru that flows in infinite directions like a sun and arises in countless times and places and personalities. Wherever the presence of mercy is required, then the guru incarnates and generates relief from the relentless law of karma. Contact with the guru results in the elimination of the obstacles of your past karma at a super-rapid rate. This is the gift inherent in the transmission of grace. Oceans of karma from past actions are vaporized instantaneously.
The grace starts to go through the layers of your being as if it were peeling an onion, layer after layer. It does so at varying rates of speed based on the strength and courage and destiny of the individual. Some people will quite literally gain enlightenment upon contact with the guru. They’ll meet the guru, the guru will say something to them, strike them, touch them in some way and in that instant, they awaken and become enlightened. Every time you come in contact with the guru, that enlightenment is absolutely present and full. What you’ll oftentimes be dealing with is the length of time it takes an individual to move through their karma and get back to ground zero, so that the process of illumination and enlightenment can take place.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Karma is action that is generated by desire arising from the source of the individual ego, the aspect of mind that thinks of itself as separate from creation. The mind uses the senses to reach out and touch the creation, and in coming into contact with it, tries to force it into generating the fruit of its desire, what we want in our lives.
This behavior is the source of suffering. Desire-based activity is the absolute cause of transmigration from one lifetime to another. The karma doesn’t play out fast enough for us to keep up with it in a given incarnation. It tends to accumulate. We only fulfill a very small percentage of our desires within a lifetime.
So the karma builds up inside your system and you quite literally get caught in this time loop where the entire thrust of a given lifetime is to redeem karmic coupons that you generated maybe five to eight centuries ago when you were incarnate in the Dark Ages and your life was really full of ignorance and superstition.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
When you meet the guru, the conversation just starts rolling. What are you willing to do? How far are you willing to take this? What is the nature of your heart? What are your interests?
The guru does not hold out. They’re like the presence of an incredible fountain that you can go to and drink from as deeply as you wish, as often as you can. To the extent that you can drink from this river, drink to the depth of your heart’s fulfillment, you will find that the power of the guru's grace will be the fuel of awakening and transformation in your life.
But, of course, you have to realize that you’re drinking holy fire. The power of grace can be utilized in many ways. The secret of learning how to employ the spiritual force of grace is clarity and intent. Do you wish to know the truth? If that is your will, if that is your intent, then the grace will go to this place and operate with the greatest efficiency imaginable.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
A siddha is a being that has awakened fully. They have incarnated inside an incredible number of incarnations in the human form and brought it to its full potential of realization. Not only realized the potential of that human form, but mastered it completely.
To come into contact with such a being is of such great fortune that it cannot even be measured. To even hear their name, to hear of them, to think a thought towards them is to invite a flow of energy towards you of massive, oceanic proportions. To come into contact with them, to align your life with them, is to be bound up in this incredible sweep of profound dharma, of profound love, of profound will.
It's so intense that it has a funny side to it. When I personally met my guru, Swami Muktananda, I was going to art school and playing rock and roll. And now here I am, a spiritual teacher in Los Angeles. How that happened, who knows? The contact with him exploded my life, and I've been swimming in this stream for some twenty-plus years and unfolding the process that we call grace, absorbing the dynamics of yoga and meditation by breathing.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The guru’s nature is to accept strength and seek out weakness so that it can be made strength. I’m not so particularly concerned with what you are already good at but what you need to know. Things can always be improved upon. That’s the guru’s motto.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The conversation with the guru can be very confusing because although it may seem to happen in words, it utterly happens from within, flowing from the inner depths of the spirit to the surface. Yet we keep talking to ourselves on the surface and we end up getting caught in that endless reflective hall of mirrors that is the mind.
The meaning of what I say is not contained in words that fly across the room, hit your ears, and trigger your mind. Our dialog takes place at the lowest levels of being and is immediate. The words happen afterwards, and are really just like pointers to the truth. That's why I can talk with you about the most subtle and esoteric concepts using very mundane words, yet you'll understand exactly what I mean.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
When a powerful transmission of light goes into your system, it continues to roll through you over the course of days and weeks and months until it has touched every part of you.
When the pressure of the light really starts to hit, and up come those dark spots you've been avoiding, you have to learn how to hold the pattern of your life in place, because you will go through what the light wants you to go through. This happens in different ways with different people, but always leads to varying degrees of disorientation.
To keep your life stable - your emotional life, your psychological life, the dynamic of your physical life, family, work - I always advise that when you are involved with a teacher, the structure of your life should be kept very simple, stripped down to its essentials. In this way, you will be able to keep your balance under the stresses and strains that the process of awakening inevitably generates.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Hard Light is a collection of beings that agree to take a genuine chance on the edge of spiritual life for as much time as they can stand. Time counted in lifetimes, not in months or years. And we learn in these kinds of settings that spiritual life, like life itself, has its peaks and valleys, its challenges, its victories and its difficulties. People come into this study with various kinds of expectations and degrees of inspiration; they have their strengths and weaknesses, skills that need to be learned. It is, by all means, a learning opportunity, a place where we come to grapple with the issues of the spirit and come to truly know our Self.
Human beings are very complex and are ruled by emotions. They have a tendency towards judgement. Now I’m doing well, now I’m doing poorly. Now I feel good, now I feel bad. The one thing that I’m always trying to express is that there is something underlying all of this. We are always trying to see to that next degree of depth, that next layer of subtlety within our being, to find a deeper and more profound basis of existence.
This is the idea behind meditation and spiritual study. To get off the surface and swim in the depths of one's own being, and in the process to not become disoriented but to maintain just enough identity to be present as we undergo the countless transformations and transitions within. This is the daily bread of life, let alone spiritual life. Spiritual life just ups the ante by accelerating the process.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
We are formed by the pressure of our experiences, and in this life we can see where experience does not always lead to truth. We can begin to see the relativity of experience and that penetration to the true core of life calls for something more.
We can gain great occult powers, have vast yogic skills, yet still have very little experience of God. We so often make the mistake of using spiritual practice to add to our greatness, to add to our own splendor at the level of the personal identity. Spiritual experiences become credentials like a resume. This only adds to the difficulty of hearing the voice of the divine within.
The essence of meditation is seeking the quietest point within ourselves, that point where one resigns to the inner presence of the divine, offering up what one has for the sake of love, with no promise of return or benefit. This resignation is the only true doorway to knowledge of the Self.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Honesty is the fundamental pathway to the acquiring and deepening of all virtues. It is simple and direct, and it is the most important quality you can have in spiritual life. It clearly illuminates the point of union between individual and divine nature.
Honesty is what gives you the possibility of true direction in the seemingly arbitrary selection of choices and possibilities that you will face over the course of your lifetime. Without honesty, you will slip and slide everywhere You will never find the touchstone of reality within yourself, and without this you will become fatigued and confused in your way very quickly.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
After enough lifetimes, your breadth of experience becomes so wide that you actually have a superabundance of information, and this information begins to act like a kind of poison; there are so many choices that you can’t even think straight. You get to the point where you can form a logical argument for anything. You can talk a topic up or down with equal skill. When this time comes, it becomes extremely valuable to develop the ability to discern what is important from what is unimportant in an endless field of possibilities and opportunity. In the end, you have to make a choice, and inherent in every choice is the commitment of your life force, your entire spirit.
If you avoid or refuse to make a decision, which is really a decision in itself, that is the one choice that is absolutely certain to generate disaster. What is important is the process of making the decisions in your life, and the commitment to those decisions. It doesn't matter if the end result is success or failure. The point is that you commit to a decision, bring it to its conclusion, and experience its fruit; this forms the basis of wisdom.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The primary measure of your character is the ability to do what you set out to do. If you can carry a decision, however difficult, through to its completion, whatever else people may think of you, they will admire your character because you do what you set out to do. The same thing occurs in spiritual dynamics. When you demonstrate a dodgy approach to life's challenges, when you abandon the field with the first sign of difficulty, you will get nothing done because difficulty is a part of life.
One of the signs of being experienced in life is that whatever the world and your fate bring you, you face the difficulties of life with aplomb and creativity. As the more experienced human beings know, it is not the goal but the journey that matters. The concept of victory and defeat is but a shadow play.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The warrior, having traveled the path and won the grace of Guru, having won the transmission of Shaktipat which is the essence of awakening, is in a positive condition. At the same time, the accumulative impact of this blessing is not to pat you on the back over and over again telling you how good you are, how bright you are, how talented you are to have gotten this far.
More often than not, the nature of the Guru will be to bring all of your imperfections and impurities that must be resolved to the surface. And thus we often hear of the stories of those who are treading the path and faced with great difficulties, met with greater and greater challenges.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
When we are attracted to that which is easy, that which is beautiful, that which is increase, and we fear the approach of challenging conditions, the arising of difficult components of one’s own nature, the expression of difficulties directed at you by others, we miss the point of the whole thing and end up in a kind of condition of increasing neurosis where one’s attention accumulates misdirected mental energy that will continue to build up. And perhaps as an act of will one is capable of holding things in balance to a certain point. But on the scales of life, if any one quality accumulates too much to one side, what does it do? It becomes its opposite.
When you are experiencing a constant flow of difficulties, that means that the negative weight of your karma is unfolding itself in a manageable way. It is also one of the signs of grace. What you want to fear, what you want to be suspect of, is the absence of difficulties, because that means that it is all accumulating in a great ball and it is going to come down on you like an avalanche. There is no avoiding both sides of the scale.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
When a person has gained Shaktipat, the totality of the equation of God, Guru and Self is in one place, at one time. The gaining of the grace of the Guru, the gaining of Shaktipat, is one of the rarest of jewels, hard won over thousands of incarnations, coming about when a person has brought the dynamic of positive and negative influences in their life stream into equilibrium.
When this occurs, the opportunity for freedom becomes available and God manifests in the form of the Guru. The presence of the Guru is brought into existence by the necessity of the liberation of the soul of the individual. The totality of that origin of the Guru emerging out of that infinite light of God into the life stream of the individual is the most personal of conversations - of the infinite creation, of the oceans, to the drop of the individual that is a part of that ocean. It is profound and mysterious.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The process of awakening is dramatic. Once you come into contact with the opportunity of awakening, meaning a guru that has the capability of generating the seeds of Shaktipat, you should think very carefully about the fortune that has taken place in your life. Out of grace, out of the force of evolution, you have come to a condition where you have acquired a form complex enough to undergo this process of awakening. The human form is difficult to acquire, human birth is rare. Rarer still, having acquired human birth, do the conditions arise in any person’s incarnation where there is the opportunity to awaken from limited identity, transforming the base of identity to the universal and limitless condition. This gift is a grace, it is a grace from God.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The Meditation Intensive is a conversation with the Guru, a conversation with the force of Shaktipat — that energy which, when transmitted into your system, carries the signal of awakening.
Within the body of the Meditation Intensive, there is a very profound and secret message that carries the voice of the Self, the speech of God, coming not out of heaven in a fiery chariot, but as a thief in the night. Silently inserted, it begins to transform you.
The Meditation Intensive is a doorway. Once you step through, your life is never the same. You are changed forever. From that day forward, you will carry the light of awakening physically within you. You will nurture it, accumulate it, and cause it to grow, until it overwhelms your consciousness, burning away obscuration and confusion and forgetfulness, like the sun burns away clouds.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The essence of the perfection of wisdom is that Consciousness arises spontaneously and perfectly. It has nothing to do with the body. It has nothing to do with the mind. It's a paradox. It is absolutely empty, yet arises perfectly, without origin nor conclusion.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
One of the dynamics of spiritual life is the personal generation of intent and resolution to live life on another level. Awakening to the illusory nature of appearance, and the deadly nature of its false refuge. One turns one's heart, one turns one's gaze - in the deep occult terms they call the phrase 'turning one's head' - so you are out of the hypnotic effect of the maya. There is an extraordinary momentum to the appearance of the world and there is the underlying reality which is beyond description - that has a quality of glory... that can't be described. To begin to see the true underlying nature of things - it's very powerful, very inspiring.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
It takes awhile to learn, to teach yourself to feel the subtle flow of spiritual life that is invisible to the world. That very powerful expressions of consciousness. And most especially when we are dealing with the dynamic of the Guru we are dealing with an idea that is, in Sanskrit termed sankalpa, translates as Divine Will.
It is the sankalpa of the Guru that is the magic ingredient in awakening, where one's awakening becomes a matter of Divine Will. It is because the Guru exists, because the Siddhas exist, because the lineage exists - and they exist to focus the sankalpa of the Guru's shakti on those that seek to awaken. What I'm talking about is the highest form of mysticism, the capacity to speak in this incredibly rare language, be present and attentive to it. It's very interesting in spiritual life, you are moved to spiritual life through a series of causes that appear in one's heart, mind, soul consciously and unconsciously manifesting, and we begin to make choices that to many and to all appearance would seem to be irrational, the attunement and alignment of one's life force with this profound power of Divine Will.
We involve ourselves in many aspects of the training, and learn and accumulate the abilities and skill sets of spiritual life: the capacity of the pranayma, the dynamic of concentration, meditation, discrimination, the pratyahara, the stopping the mind, samadhi. And one undergoes these practices as if one were training for the Olympics - very rigorous, very strenuous, direct application. And there would seem to be a link between these activities and the awakening process - and there is indeed when the presence of the Sankalpa, the Divine Will of the Guru is present. In a certain way the dynamic of spiritual practice is a form of training oneself to connect with that Divine Will, learn its speech, gain the capacity to endure the process of transformation that is generated, the very areas of study in physical prana and mental control, all are by-products of the training of spiritual life. Just like training in any discipline.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
It is important to generate endurance, in other words to be able to hold a strenuous stance for a deeper and longer amount of time, gives you the ability to dig in to the meat of the matter. If our attention is weak, if our mind flutters from subject to subject, from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, without sustained concentration on a single matter, we'll only gloss the surface or touch many flowers, but not gain the fruit of any one of them.
To gain the capacity, just the strength - it's like you're forging yourself in the fire of what is called tapasya, spiritual fire, your identity, your will, your true nature is forged in that fire. The practices are very powerful and very profound and carry a great impact, but the impact of those practices is only a fraction of what it is when that kind of spiritual life is in concert with the Sankalpa, the Divine Will of the Guru. When the Guru's grace is present - and the Guru's grace IS the Divine Will of God - and it is that will that you awake. When that will is present, what we call Shaktipat, it is then that every dynamic of spiritual life bears incredible fruit. And one will be seen to be moving through the stages of spiritual development at every level of self simultaneously.
The Guru's shakti and the Siddha lineage is an extremely powerful and extremely active ray of awakening present on the earth. It is one of the most certain modes of liberation. The process of awakening is not random in the slightest bit. It is very specific, very personal, very direct.
In the way that the Divine Will of the Guru is the fiber of the line that draws you to liberation. It is, in our part, what we see, what we feel, what we connect to as we consider the mystery of the Guru.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
In one of his last public sessions before he passed, Baba Muktananda spoke very simply, just a very few words, but they were filled with meaning and direction. This was his manner.
In clues about his commands he simply said "if I tell you to do something, just do it." And the question would be 'for how long Baba?' ... " until I tell you to stop". Thus an unchanged or unconditioned statement would take on the force and power of a standing order that would be filled with his sankalpa, his intention, his divine will.
And this I found and learned from experience - the full force of his divine will would be present in that order, that command, that direction, and if you aligned yourself with it you would be in absolute contact with him in the deepest way, at the deepest place - unfailingly so.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
In the last few talks that Baba Muktananda gave, that were never more than a hundred words or so at the end, he simply said "fulfill the destiny of your existence".
Having been given fortunate birth, in a time and place where the Sadguru was present, having gained that company and grace from such a Sadguru, having gained shaktipat living in a time and place where spiritual life is possible do not allow the maya of the world to turn you from your destiny, out of fear, out of ignorance, and having won such a precious treasure, do not allow the jewel of shaktipat, the divine grace - which is the capsule of the divine will of the guru - to fall on hard ground, unfertile ground, out of laziness or inattention.
That the seed of awakening (he spoke very directly) had arisen in Nityananda and been passed to him and he had passed it to us. And we were forever one. And never have any doubt about that.
To guard this treasure in the deepest place, and bring it to fruition. (When he spoke publicly, he always had a subtle formality to his speech) "Fulfill the destiny of your life". Don't become confused by the world and take what is great and allow it to go astray or waste. He said, "Whether it is big or small has no meaning. It is only the Truth, it is only the Guru, it is only the God that counts."
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
What is hoped for is a student of genuine abandon - someone willing to go where they need to go for awakening to occur.
What is hoped for is a teacher of genuine experience, not speaking by rote out of a book they read somewhere, but speaking from a place of direct experience of unfoldment within their own selves; which is most undoubtedly the fruit of their own conversation with their teacher, with their Guru - which indeed, never ends...
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
When you gain access to the higher source of light that is the fruit of Shaktipat and your daily practice, you must assert your will and recognize negative habitual patterns of behavior and transform them into a positive movement of energy towards the higher angels - generosity, patience, kindness - which all have love as their foundation.
When you give rise to love as an act of will in a situation where you could have expressed greed, anger, hatred, or envy, you give the situation a chance to breathe and give rise to a moment of awakening instead of reasserting old, restrictive behavior patterns.
Love is an act of will and it takes skill to be able to remember to give rise to it in all conditions. You have to practice it. You’ll find yourself giving way to natural tendencies of negative habitual behavior more frequently than you know. When you give rise to the energy of the forces of restriction, you commit your life's energy to this and transmit it to everyone else around; it becomes a net with which we collectively hold ourselves in darkness and obscuration.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The identity of the 'I' consciousness is actually an assembly of qualities: the reflex of the ego, the list-making capacity of the intellect, the operation of the senses, the dynamic of memory and its chain of associations, not just from this life but from all lives. This is the idea of emptiness. At no point are you absolutely you. You were always just an assembly of qualities.
When you meditate with a teacher who enters into samadhi, the incoming wave of consciousness dissolves this assembly of qualities. The apparent solidity of the 'I' consciousness seems to flicker in and out of existence. It only seemed real because it was interconnected and interlocked.
It's not as if you disappear. What disappears is the apparent separation between you and consciousness. From the standpoint of the world you're flickering in and out of existence. But from the standpoint of consciousness, where did you go? You were always there. Life is just a dream.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Once you are drawn into the wheel of dharma and its operations through contact with the guru, you are changed and transformed, often in ways you can't imagine. This process is spread out over a lifetime and can be difficult to spot at a single glance, but the effect is irresistible and absolute.
The enormous amount of light that is moved through you during this process acts like a spiritual fire. It purifies and reduces you. This is what a fire does when it burns something - it reduces it to its purest qualities.
Dharma acts on us in this exact same way. The force of dharma generates a profound heat that we experience as a deep pressure flowing throughout us, reducing all qualities into the light of consciousness. This process of purification is very much like the deep and immense pressures of the earth that turn carbon into diamond over vast stretches of time.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The beauty of the spiritual life and what makes it serious is the fact that we are seeking. The human form is understood as a vessel, and we are seeking to perfect a vessel capable of attracting and sustaining contact with, and becoming filled-up with, the most perfected and divine radiance of the Self, of creation. The fact that it can be done is what is incredible. The basic building-blocks of the human form have within it that possibility. It can be done.
What is essentially given is the carbon that is transformed into the diamond. All the components are there. Spiritual life - sadhana - what our relationship brings is the pressure to generate that transformation, nothing else. When it comes down to it, that's what occurs - the seeking of the perfecting of being, the seeking of the supreme identity within oneself. We assemble along principles of identity - that's what we do. When we finally understand all the components aright, the supreme identity can be put in place and function hand-in-glove with the totality of the human form. It takes some doing, obviously.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The fact that the name of our world system means ‘endurance’ merits some attention. One of the characteristics of existence in this world system is pressure. As you go through your life arc, you see the exertion of that pressure read on the texture of the mind, the quality of the heart, the appearance of the body. No life form in this system is exempt from this pressure, exempt from the quality of endurance.
We experience this pressure with every breath. We feel pressure exert itself upon us psychically, spiritually, and from the force of our social order. From the dynamic of the deepest impulse of identity we experience a quality of being driven. In this world system even exalted beings experience a very intense and somewhat brutal existence. Thus we have endurance.
What cause creates this world? What is it that is conditioned by this quality of endurance? It is an energy that we would call ‘cause and effect.’ ‘Cause and effect’ is the ruling principle of this place, the source of all pressure, and that which gives rise to the need for the quality of endurance.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
We tend to act in fixed patterns. If we act one way at one time, when we're faced with a similar condition the next time that similarity will be recognized by the karmic data stored within our system, and we'll act in some variation of that same behavior. This happens because we haven't really thought about it. It's a habit.
The entire point of spiritual life, the entire point of the transmission of Shaktipat, the entire point of hanging out around gurus, is to gain access to a new source of light outside of the system of our own karma that offsets the force of these habitual patterns of behavior, both emotionally and psychologically.
The massive amount of light injected into your system knocks these things loose and changes your relationship to them so that you can engage and observe the habitual patterns of your behavior and come to recognize them for what they are.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
One of the effects of spiritual training is to allow you to be able to conceive of an experience-based flow of events that does not have an immediate relationship with the yardstick of body and mind. The effect of sustained contact with this mode of operation is that one begins to truly experience oneself as the drop in the ocean.
At what point does something become nothing? To rest your attention at the nexus of the point of arising between the creation and the ocean of infinite consciousness puts the mind in the perfect position to recognize the formation and modality of the moment and bring about its collapse.
The true recognition of emptiness, the insight into the nature of things that are present in the unbelievably complex resolution of opposites that infinite consciousness and creation represent quite literally causes the mind to move to a different level of operation. This movement of attention is referred to as samadhi, satori, the insight of realization. It is experienced as an inconceivable pressure that finally causes the mind to shift its mode of attention so that its order falls away.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Negative thoughts, emotions, and behaviors can be grouped into one of three basic categories: attachment, aversion, or delusion. All positive thoughts arise from a single quality: love. Negativity - be it desire, fear, or ignorance - separates us from others. Love dissolves the distance and separation between us and others; it is the inclusion of others into our own identity.
It's understood that the dynamics of all forms of love - kindness, generosity, patience, humility - are energies that arise at the beginning and pervade to the end of creation. They are infinite; they have no end. Over time, as these positive angels become a part of you and eliminate and leach out the poisons of negativity, you will move from a condition of madness and insanity to one of sanity and awakening.
Love calms the mind and brings it into equilibrium so that the truth may emerge. Each one of the poisons will only lead to another poison. They make it impossible to see the truth. What is your thinking like when you're under their spell? You'll act like some kind of demon, and then afterwards feel shame and guilt. It's just another weight that you have to carry around. There's nothing to be gained by this. On the other hand, the qualities of love draw you into life so that you can see clearly. Your life becomes fantasy free and you stop living in some kind of fairy tale.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
If you have the opportunity to meet an agency of the Guru, and perhaps you've even had the opportunity to stay in continuous contact with them, in other words, seen them frequently, you will find deposited in you a library of grace waves. The speed with which you process that information will very powerfully impact how fast your unfoldment occurs. Most people are not prepared for how fast it really is. Even though it may seem like a long time, I assure you it's not.
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HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Our world system which would be considered an ocean of consciousness, is just a bubble.
Even the Wheel Monarchs that are operating in a thousand world systems - each incarnation existing at least what we would consider eighty thousand years - their consciousness is so powerful that they dominate the world system that they operate in... they are servants of the Original Soul. And the descending energies of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, Sages, Solitary Proclaimers, Sadgurus, Gurus, Yogis, the Masters, Angels, Archangels, Teachers, ocean of messengers, all serve.
I'll tell you... true JOY is finding your place in the universe.
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HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
"The mind has conscious, subconscious, and unconscious states. Because we have a proclivity for one level of attention over another, we rarely remember what takes place in the subconscious and unconscious states.
The deeper subconscious and unconscious states emerge out of the primal energies. The primal ignorance is the creation and identification with a separate identity; this is oftentimes characterized as a kind of primal rage or anger because of the amount of psychic energy employed to generate this state. Anger, jealousy, envy, lust, greed - all take root in the primal ignorance necessary to support a false identity.
What makes the Siddha path so dynamic is that it gives you access to your full range of consciousness. How can you come into understanding, control, and eventual realization of every part of yourself if you're afraid to open the closet door and go down into the basement to see what's there? At one point or another you have to do this. The Siddha path is one of immediate and direct attention into the matter. Because of its speed and directness, only certain kinds of people are drawn to it. You need to have the willingness to be aware on all the floors of your attention, to go down into the basement, to see what's down there and, most importantly, to take responsibility for it."
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Oftentimes we see that when a person first comes into power, the first they do is to play out their anger - 'I finally have enough power to get away with expressing my rage towards the world for every pain I ever experienced.' This is very immature and leads to disaster very quickly. What we're interested in on the Siddha path is a mature and cultivated response to the idea of power and empowerment. You need to bring that force to bear so that it arises as a positive energy in your own life, and then to go even further, and begin to express that energy positively in the world and the lives of all sentient beings.
This is not something that just happens. It has to be willed, it has to be intended, and it involves lots of trial and error. It is the ultimate test that really never ends. Once you begin to understand power and understand that its source arises from the deepest place within you, then it becomes a matter of bringing yourself to have the courage and the ability to express that power and take responsibility for it.
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HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Desire is fire, and playing with fire is always dangerous. The formula of spiritual life is always very simple. Simplify the life, and withdraw as much as possible, if not totally, from desire. Seek enlightenment. You are trying to strip down the impressions that you are generating, because at the moment of death everything surges in. The reason you meditate every day of your life is so that at the moment of your death you will be able to concentrate and arise as an enlightened being.
If you're acting one way on the outside and you have all these secret desires on the inside, those secret desires will not be secret at the time of death, they will have their play. The idea of spiritual training in life is facing this condition with very clear eyes. That's what's implicit in spiritual training. You can see this in people who have gone through enough incarnations that they have begun to spot the pattern, and are interested in an alternative.
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HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Bodhicitta is the arising of spontaneous love, arising in the heart and flooding the mind. It is the equilibrium of awakened heart and awakened mind that is the nature of the Bodhicitta. It is the essence of enlightenment, spontaneously born and present within you as you.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Always remember that it is the life that is cultivated, the life that changes. The body comes and goes. As we move in and out of this envelope of creation the body falls away but the mind essence which carries the bill of lading, the content of experiences, migrates from lifetime to lifetime.
The content of each life is a constant renegotiation of these qualities. Every single quality from every single life doesn't reincarnate into the next given life. At the moment of birth there is an arrangement made between the creator and the conditioned soul. What qualities are going to be brought to bear?
Oftentimes when you regard the qualities of your life they will actually be a balanced list of strengths and weaknesses - areas of incumbent strength and areas of newly applied challenges that will bring about new strengths but are presently undeveloped. You need the basic strengths as your foundation, but although you may be very good at some things, there are other qualities that haven't been convincingly cultivated and need to be included in the mix.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
We are all born with a personal destiny. We come into being for a reason. You have to learn how to skillfully read yourself, to discover who you are and why you are here, to see yourself as you are 'warts and all' - nobody is all good, nobody is all bad. To not take responsibility for acting in concert with your soul will produce an enormously reckless use of life.
If you don't undertake the task of figuring out who and what you are, of generating actions that are in alignment with your own destiny, you will invariably produce rash and destructive actions that will bring about your downfall. Acting out of concert with your spirit, with your personal destiny, will take the form of psychologically destructive states of mind that will harm both yourself and others.
You must give rise to love for the sake of love so that it is present in your heart and your mind, and so that it finds its way to the cells of your body. Then, as you rub up against the situations of the world, that energy will be there for you. You will not have to take a position of fear or rage.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Because the senses are hardwired into the brain, they have come to dominate the activity of the brain. The flow of information coming from the senses accounts for 99% of the brain's activity. Because they've taken the lion's share of the mental force available to each individual, the senses become like an energy consuming dictator. They won't allow the mind to go into a deeper state, they won't allow the mind to just sit quietly and rest for a couple of seconds. Always swirling, always moving.
The mind becomes like a bee going from flower to flower, it stays on the surface of things and never gets to the heart of the matter. Everything has been observed, but nothing has been understood. One of the greatest experiences you can have in life is to understand something. When you experience this, when you see it in another person, to watch the mind open and understand, it's an incredible thing.
As long as the mind is in the thrall of the senses, you will never have enough time or energy to make the inquiry, to plunge into the deep water of your own nature and see what is going on there. If you don't make this inquiry, all this activity will stay unconscious. You'll continue to build up this huge storehouse of observation, but you'll hardly understand any of it.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Under the constant agitation of the senses the mind is just like constantly churning water. You have to gain the capacity to stop the mind. To do this you have to be able to switch the senses off. When this occurs the mind does something that it has never done - it goes still. When it goes still it begins to perceive in a different way.
The value of being able to stop the mind is that you begin to see clearly into your own life, your own nature. You can begin to see with absolute clarity the various qualities of cause that are functioning at different levels of consciousness within your own system.
The force of observation is incredibly powerful. Anytime you look at something it changes its nature because you looked at it. You can begin to break up the conflicting forces of intention that are present within your own heart and mind. Fear, anger - these forces will be perceived directly, drawn into the light, and absorbed.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
How sophisticated is your ability to perceive reality? Are you still watching the light shine off the surface of things and getting caught up in the phantasmagoria of existence? Do you still believe in the report of your senses and call that reality? Or have you begun to experience things in enough depth that you know to look past the surface into the deeper inner workings of reality?
This is always a matter of experience, and this is one of the essences of skillful means - the ability to read the underlying truth of a thing while ignoring the apparent appearance of a thing. Things are rarely what they appear to be. The origins of being are obscure. The spirit is deeply veiled.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
If a Guru is described as a Siddha, it means they're outside a tradition, and spontaneously arise as enlightenment. They are the manifestation of a Whisper Lineage or a Whisper Tradition, and engage in the direct transmission from the Guru to the disciple. If a Guru is described as a Shiva Guru, that means that the path is the shortest possible way, because all qualities are dispersed instantaneously. If a Guru is described as a Siddha and a Shiva Guru, it is code for the swiftest way one can move through the process of awakening. All of those principles are present here in Hard Light and it is how Hard Light operates.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
In the world system of Earth, the spinning molten core of Earth holds your mind in this sphere. The magnetic core of Earth has so much force that it even magnetizes thought. That's why once you incarnate on Earth, you continue to incarnate on Earth again and again. Your mind has a magnetic connection to the spinning movement of Earth's molten core.
They say that once you're born on Earth you live as many lifetimes as it takes until you learn the things you need to learn in order to move on. What do you need to learn? How to stop your mind. Then you can move on and go anywhere you want. But until you learn how to stop your mind, you're here. It's simple. Forget all that other stuff and work on this.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The big issue when you reincarnate is the downloading of the new brain. What out of the incredible storehouse of experiences - countless feelings, thoughts, actions and their results - is the most necessary to download to form the new identity? You don't need it all; you don't have the force to download it all even if you wanted to.
We're in the Kali Yuga, the age of darkness, which means that you are pretty much on your own. Nobody has taught you anything about the downloading of the brain, and you end up picking stuff randomly because you think you need it, or it's a shiny object and you just want it. It's just like kids, they always want what's worst for them first and somebody has to be there to guide them to keep them away from disaster.
This is where it becomes useful to gain a relationship to the Guru. More than anything the Guru guides you in the downloading of the new brain, and within ways that can't be described will cause you to incarnate as close as possible to the Guru who happens to be operating on the planet at the time so they can set things in motion in your favor before you can get too messed up. This is very important.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
It's easy to think of the generation of karma as spooling onto the system, and it is the accumulation of this data, the record of cause and effect, which is the conditioning energy of desire-based action. This produces the quality of attachment to various forms of behavior, which creates a quality of fabrication - the karma conditions perception and brings about proliferating obscuration.
As the kundalini moves in the three central nerves of sushumna, ida, and pingala, descending from the crown and rising from the base, it strikes the chakras and activates them, and as it does so a force of incredible purity and intensity begins to flow which has the effect of erasing these stored and accumulated piles of karma from countless lifetimes
As the accumulation of karma is erased by the movement of the kundalini through the system, the effect of the proliferating obscuration is removed very much like the sun burns off fog, and the underlying fundamental consciousness begins to emerge. This is the essential process of awakening.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The mind has no quality. It is pure consciousness which reflects what it comes into contact with. Even if you look directly at reality, from the standpoint of the mind all you will ever see is the reflection of reality in the mind. This is why you can never think your way into reality even if you are a really good thinker. It is only when the mind collapses that reality appears.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The past has never gone anywhere, it's here with us today in the form of our own instincts. Our modern minds can barely connect to these deep unconscious instincts because we live in a different world, but they're there. These unconscious impulses shape the world system and we aren't even aware of them consciously. This is how evolution works - nothing goes away.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
As pure consciousness moves through your being, it lights you up like a city. You begin to see yourself in intense bas-relief; it's just like when you're inside a canyon at night and a flash of lightening occurs and for a split second you can see every detail of the canyon, and then it's dark again. This is very much the process of sadhana and especially the impact of interaction with a teacher.
The teacher has access to the states of samadhi, the formless reservoirs of pure consciousness, and they use their being like a lightening rod to draw the attention of consciousness, to pool its energy, and express it with great force producing the explosion of illumination within the student. Once a phenomenon is perceived it is changed by the very impact of that perception.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
One of the things that you do that generates a difference in your capability in spiritual life is attracting, storing and integrating power and spiritual energy. The more you have, the higher performance you’ll see in the operation of your mind, body and being – your human form. The more power you have, the better results you get. You’ll feel the power moving as a pressure inside your system, conducting power through the nadis, the hundred fibers of the six wheels, the thousand fibers of the sahasrar, along the three channels, and also along the formless pathway of mental formation, the causal body. This spiritual power also intensely stimulates the kundalini – power and kundalini are hand and glove.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Power, the basic thesis of spiritual energy, is one of the key qualities needed for the ability to generate change in your life. This energy can transform the life – kindling, awakening, cultivating and empowering the human form, which is the vehicle of enlightenment, the vehicle of awakening.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Power, spiritual energy, spiritual force, and the skill and application of that power, is the key to success in all endeavors of life. The underlying thesis of the retreat is the embracing of one’s power, coming into one’s power, and having the courage and skill to claim and use that power with skillful means and application.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
It is your power that dictates the terms of your life and dictates the terms of your death – directly and utterly so. The presence of power is the greatest and most wild-card factor of producing an improvement in your condition – improvement being defined by a minimal of suffering and the greatest amount of efficiency in spiritual work of each life.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Power is possibility. All possibilities are related to the presence or absence of power. There’s different kinds of power. There is the power of the City, which is social power, higher and lower classes, economic power, having a lot or having a little. That’s one kind of power. There’s also a kind of power that is just sheer force, sheer power. It’s like looking at the ocean, and you see all of that force just laying there. Some days the ocean is wrathful with terrible and terrifying storms – that is power. Power operates that way. Sometimes it’s quiescent, sometimes it’s wrathful and swift. This kind of power is the unseen power of spirit. It is the true power. It is awesome, it is terrifying, and it is exact.
When you get involved with power, everything that you bring to the situation is manifest. So you come to understand who and what you truly are. This is why it’s a little bit dangerous, and why you want to have as much training as possible when you come in to more and more access with power. Are you mature enough to handle that power? The ability to arise in a state of power, and operate in a cultivated and mature state of psychology is harder than it looks, because of the infinite possibilities present in power. There are deep challenges to attracting, gaining, storing and integrating power. This is what spiritual training is about.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
In tests of power, karma is moving instantaneously. If you gain a lot of power, and generate activities with positive benefit and dharmic activity, you immediately get the impact of the use of that power. If you use that power selfishly, that karma also arises instantaneously, and it will essentially destroy you. When people come into power, you’ll often see that they will seem to prosper for awhile. But secretly, they’re making one selfish choice after another, and the power is just regulating that, amplifying that, and making it instantaneous. Before very long, you’ll just see that they’re being overtaken by calamity. The calamity didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the fruit of their choices, being driven by power.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
When you gain power, you have to understand that it generates the access of complete possibility. So to keep the system open ended you learn to never make it yours. It’s like, the ocean is here before you got here, and it’s going to be there after you’re gone. So if you are swimming in this piece of the ocean and say, “This piece of the ocean is mine”... So what? Power is really endless. If you act in a selfish way around power, it means that you haven’t understood something. You think there’s only so much, and this is your power and somebody’s trying to steal your power.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Before exposure to Shaktipat, you are ensnared in the nature of your own tendencies. All of your experiences are conditioned by the quality of these tendencies at the level of mind, energy, and body. These tendencies are so strong that everything you experience is subtly conditioned by them, even before consciousness. You can never think your way fast enough to get past these tendencies and their snare remains firmly in place.
The effect of exposure to the samadhi states is, in its essence, a kind of argument against the nature of your own tendencies. The states of samadhi offer the expression of an alternative to the bound condition. Their information is stored in you, and you can sit in silence and draw up a mental picture of that information and begin the process of addressing the subtle patterns of your tendencies and how they match up with modes of habitual thought and behavior in your life.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
Directly addressing the habitual thought and behavior in your life is just like plowing a field. It's very easy to think of your life as the field that is transformed. You come to the field and it is overgrown with scrub, trees with intense root systems, covered with rocks, and layers of hard and soft clay; you want to transform this field into a verdant field where rich crops and flowers can grow.
There is no single sweeping activity that will do this all at once, you have to chop up every piece of that field and transform it. You have to carry the rocks out, dig out the roots. This requires a very strong continuous act of will, energy, power, and focused attention. You're transforming the field of your own life from something hard and overgrown into something rich, breathing and luminous.
There are two clear avenues of the development and transformation of this field that is our life. One is the direct improvement of the soil. All of the obscurations and constrictions of the body, all of the seeds of karma in the subtle physical body, all of the subtle assemblies of habitual behavior born in the mind, they all have to be chopped up square foot by square foot, enriched and made luscious.
But there are also behaviors, the idea of character, and the actual changing of your nature of being. It's one thing to gain more and more energy, but we have to adjust our behavior so our character is also changed, uplifted, and clarified. Frankly, changing your character is the more difficult of the two tasks. You can teach a human being to access power relatively quickly, but to get them to change the nature and quality of their behavior so that it reflects a higher character is a greater battle and of the highest importance. This is a conversation between you and God, between you and the Guru, which takes place in the deepest nature of self.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
The day in, day out aspect of spiritual practice involves a lot of struggle, a lot of pain. If you've ever taken a pick and a shovel and turned a piece of rocky ground into rich soil, you know it's a lot of hard work. This very much characterizes the process of awakening. Much of what sadhana amounts to is a very direct, to-the-point conversation, and not necessarily all of it feels very good. There is no immediate correlation between sadhana and feeling good. A deep commitment to the idea of transforming your life is what is necessary, and the idea of a very deep love, especially applied to yourself because of the depth, intensity, and longevity of the ongoing conversation you will be having with yourself in the process of transformation.
At the same time you'll be rubbing up against all of the elements of the creation. This is where the dynamic of character arises. Finding your place in this world, in this universe, and accepting the truth of that with love, and recognizing the truth of the place of others is the essential component of character. Character implies a connection to yourself, and you can't have a connection to yourself without having a connection to others because there is no second thing. The fear and terror of this is one of the major obstacles to spiritual practice. Taking on the world on its own terms. It's a ferocious place, we all know that.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
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Simply put, an unawakened condition reacts completely to the changing tides of fortune by taking everything personally. Things are bad, I must be bad; things are good, I must be great. Of course, neither is true. One of the fundamental aspects of the awakened outlook is that one does not attenuate your view of life, of existence, in relationship to the conditions of life. Good fortune is accepted and experienced with the same aplomb that ill fortune is. It's understood to be a kind of bubbling chemical brew that is the fruit of your own karma.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
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So we have this idea of stopping the mind – cessation – that is the effect, the accumulative effect of shaktipat, the Thunderbolt of awakening – in tandem with meditation; and this quality of Bodhicitta – Relative Bodhicitta which is the examination of your behavior and your actions, and absolute Bodhicitta which is direct apprehension of enlightenment within yourself as yourself.
See meditation is a constant approach. There is meditation on yourself. There is meditation of insight. There is meditation on objects. There is meditation on deities. There is meditation on the Guru. There is meditation on God. There is meditation on the nature of knowledge itself. There is meditation on the movement and dynamic of energy within oneself. It's a constant tool.
Meditation... it's how you get in to the game. And as you start to get the effect and benefit of meditation, Bodhicitta – relative and absolute, your meditation deepens. And when you start having the first events of cessation, in otherwards the mind starts to come to a stop, you begin to have glimpses of underlying truth.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
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It's one of the things that I've always found amazing is that as you begin to have experience of this extremely spiritually profound state, you begin to experience both emptiness and the phenomenal world with simultaneous intensity and vivid impact. In other words you experience everything – absolutely everything – as if you're seeing it for the first time. There's no overlay. You don't run tapes over: "Oh, that's that and that's that, and there's the Starbucks."
And it's like every time you go into the Starbucks it's like it's the first time you've ever walked in there and you feel everything there with just extreme clarity. It's very interesting because it makes your life, you see everything, and experience everything with that raw perception.
In a pre-awakened condition of contact with cause and effect and the experience of phenomenal perception, you are engaged in a kind of memory loop which kind of layers on, and layers on, and layers on with the repetition of various activities. The mind goes into habitual patterns.
The Power of the Mahamudra is that it shines a light so steady and burns through everything and burns off all of those patterned behaviors, so everything it touches just simultaneously arises as empty and arising as the appearance of the world. It's a paradox really, and in that paradox the mind goes through a kind of traumatic crisis. "Is it empty? Is it the world?"
And so the mind will be driven to a kind of collapse. And what's collapsing are the behavioral structures of mental habitual pattern behavior. When this happens it is synonymous with the satori of breaking through it, like you just feel this pressure building up and then finally it'll just slice through and you'll touch vivid reality. It produces an unforgettable event.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
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It's very interesting because in many meditative states you'll feel a kind of divergence, and before the meditation you'll feel a part of the world and you experience the body and your perceptual field, and you go into meditation and there is a kind of separation where one loses track of the mind-body awareness, and you seem to be moving through different fields of psychic and spiritual states; the primary basis of which are a kind of mind-forms.
But the Mahamudra is on the other side of that where we are experiencing the vibration of the essence of being, which is empty. But we've traveled there, we've gotten there through the pathway of the mind. In other words there's a dynamic within the fabric of mind that I would refer to as attention, and I also call the witness, which draws a kind of focus of experience out of the fabric of awareness itself, out of the fabric of mind itself.
But even the mind has a dynamic of formation. In other words as we move through the mind, there are mind forms that span the gamut from the lower spectrum of karmic and samskaric conditioning factors up through the dynamics of the planes, which are assembled around elements – earth, water, fire, air, space or ether.
The basis of the mind is essentially ether – space. The mind itself has a fabric. It's not an empty void. It's a vortex of light that has a volume or a presence and is supported by space itself as space. And over the course of meditation we come to learn about that. In other words we treat the mind as if we're traveling through space. And it's just like traveling through space, you know... fly by all of these different formations of energy.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
listen to this quote as you read:
The varying speeds of the process of awakening come from the sheer intensity of the soul's desire to awaken. It's a subtle algorithm. By keeping one's attention on the divine principle of the Guru it produces a constant flow of light into the system and generates this enormous flow of just sheer awakening. In this way our spiritual life of constant mindfulness, the SoHam and the breath, maintaining the discipline and rigorous activity of meditation and the various practices of mantra and meditation, intensify a relationship with the spiritual aspect of ourselves.
It is the growth and illumination of the subtle body that is, probably more than anything, the driving force of your awakening. You can actually tell what epoch a person chipped off the great light and became an individual and started their cycle as a human being by the shape of their subtle body. It's just like all human beings: they all look human, but some are black, some are white, some are red. But they're all human. There are subtle differences and in different phases and in different times, certain forms of subtle bodies got generated. You can tell where a person came from by looking at the shape of their subtle body - what program they emerged from.
But they're generally all the same in that regard and it is the awakening of the subtle body which is a driving energy.
That's what makes it the fast path. It's the Vajrayana. You're dealing with the Thunderbolt. You're just plugging it straight into the Thunderbolt, and the Thunderbolt is just driving the energy into the system and producing awakening. And you're dealing with that experience, and that's the awakening force, and that produces the insight, not the other way around.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
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People will have experiences where they will be in various stages of life, and they will have a leap forward and have a direct experience of a very advanced state, that will occur for a moment or for a stage of time, and then seem to go away. And they go, “Why did that go away?”
This is trying to give you an idea how this works in that stages have a progression. The stage of spiritual life you’re in is irrefutable; but the capacity of states has a kind of variety to it, because states exist in time. Why? Because they have qualities. It’s actually very possible, in this moment, as you sit here in this room, to have a direct experience of the state of realization that is present in your own future.
That time and this stage can attach to a state, and in that state you can bridge time, and have a temporary experience of a state where you yourself are already in a condition of realization. You have experienced your first, direct apprehension of the nature of your own mind. Why not? It’s your mind. Time is infinitely fluid; and in fact, in the entire enlightenment process, we use that to advantage. That’s half the idea that we sit here.
One of the things that goes on when we sit together is we can bridge the time and space between this moment and the moment you enter samadhi and experience your own state, and have an experience of that state. Then when you experience that state, you can form a karmic connection to it. In so doing shorten the amount of time between this stage and that stage, where that state arises spontaneously and naturally within you. Isn’t that cool?
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
listen to this quote as you read:
All of this takes place in the framework of time. The framework of time is relative to the body, relative to energy. Part of mind is attenuated to time: ego-centric “I”, etc. Mind essentially is formless. It only seems to attenuate to time, but not really, because the nature of mind can change. You can be born in an unawakened condition, and in that very lifetime be in a realized condition, by changing the nature of mind.
That’s what Shaktipat’s about, that’s what all of the dramatic practices of the Vajrayana are about – to cut across time and space with an intense focus and precision. Rather than spending the time inside one’s body in a random experience of varying states attenuated to the stages of life and karma, we can focus our mind, focus our will with the instrument of our knowledge, come to know the nature of our mind and experience it directly – gain access to that infinite power, and begin to truly change our nature.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
listen to this quote as you read:
The essential point is that enlightenment is not something separate from you. Your actions can not separate you from it. It arises within you as you. It always has. But the path to that place within you takes the form of understanding. First it takes the form of knowledge. Now you have the knowledge: I've told you – but you have to understand what I've said, and after you understand it, understanding starts to turn into realization. And as your realization deepens then you recognize it as truth.
Experience has taught us that a phase of conditioning between the shaktipat event, the striking of the ground by the Thunderbolt of the shaktipat to the moment of the recognition and fruition of the indwelling enlightenment, it's best to have a phase of time so the person's mind, body, being matrix can condition itself to the impact of the truth – which is not just a little bit. It's a lot. Even a little truth is extremely powerful, as we all know.
It's one of those tastes that you develop. The taste of the Truth. It becomes your favorite. Then from your favorite it evolves into the truth at any cost. And then you join Hard Light.
Excerpt from The Ground ~ The Path ~ The Fruition, the Intensive of May 30, 2009
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
listen to this quote as you read:
It is the expansion, illumination, and manipulation of the subtle physical body that most swiftly draws more and more and more of the fourth body into the system. And that's one of the dynamics of Shaktipat is the illumination and expansion of the second body, the subtle body. It increases the draw of the fourth body into the three relative bodies. Thus the relationship between the student and the teacher – by expanding the subtle body can cause your system to draw more and more of the fourth body, the formless consciousness of the fourth body, into it. The energy does all the work.
The spiritual teacher is kind of like an electrician. As more and more of the pure formless ocean of consciousness is drawn into the drop of the individual, the more they will become like the ocean. It's just a matter of time where you get that inevitable point of critical mass. The ocean becomes the drop and the drop becomes the ocean.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
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The essential idea, the essential thesis is that the egocentric "I" – the ego, and the universal Self are one and the same thing. It's a very powerful idea and I want you to give it some consideration. The understanding and recognition of this underlying idea will draw you into a very powerful experience, which is fundamentally a form of cognitive dissonance, which is the experience that occurs, the experience that arises when two different ideas seek to occupy the same space.
I am the ego / I am the Self
...will set up a dynamic struggle within one's understanding that will bring pressure to bear on the very fabric of the mind. It is this pressure that will lead to a very powerful realization.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
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It's kind of like a hero's journey. You travel through the three worlds to get to the last gateway – the ocean of consciousness, pervaded and supported and arising from the fourth state. Out of the maze and into the three worlds. But the last gate is always a trick. It's always opposite. It has an inborn trap. And that's the nature of the movement out of the creation of the three worlds into emptiness. You can't pass through it – YOU can't pass through it. The "I" is never going to make it through that doorway. And here again we begin to see the even deeper meaning of Love. Cause we find that love itself is the secret doorway. The means by which the "I" is dissolved and ceases to exist. The you is dissolved and ceases to exist.
It is the indescribable power of the agency of love that makes this possible. You travel to the edge. You'll spend however much time it takes looking for that secret door and in some way, in some surprising way you'll find it and you'll go through it out of love.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
listen to this quote as you read:
Spiritually speaking, what's most important – where most of the actual dynamic activity takes place in the awakening process is in the subtle physical body. This is the body that can be changed by the nature of attention itself, by the nature of consciousness itself, by the application of mind itself.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
listen to this quote as you read:
First rules of meditation: you have to learn to sit down and sit still. You have to learn to sit without moving your body for as long as it takes. Sit down - you don't move for an hour. Why? You don't want to think about the body. You want to be free from the body.
Oh. . . the mind starts racing. It starts seeing the quality of thoughts. You learn to just stop reading thoughts and see thoughts like clouds in the sky. Then you start paying attention to the space around the clouds. Then slowly but surely you can start thinning the clouds down. Slowing the mind. This is all basic meditation. Everybody has to learn it.
You often times see people start the process of meditation way before they get shaktipat. These people are so brave. Without having access to the force of cessation you can begin to plunge into the nature of yourself without Grace. . . my God. But it will win you Grace just by putting up a fight, taking a beating and that's what it is.
Once you win Grace, draw the attention of the Guru, draw the attention of God and the thunderbolt [of Shaktipat] strikes and you meditate on shaktipat itself. Watch it work inside you. It will teach you about itself just by watching – the movement of the shakti, the movement of the kundalini. They are one and the same thing.
See what you begin to do when you start a meditative practice is you plant a flag in the fourth state. This is done by virtue of the Grace of the Guru. The Guru helps you do. Before you meet the Guru you don't know where the fourth state is. This gives you an immovable point of view cause the fourth state is pure consciousness. It does not change. It's just consciousness. Once that starts you generate the resolve to expand the presence of the fourth state inside your life stream. How do you do this? Practice.
Spiritual life is the most intense. It's the wildest life that you can select. Of all the kinds of life you can chose spiritual life is the wildest. And what you start doing once you gain the Grace of shaktipat and the presence of the fourth state, what you need to do is once every twenty-four hour cycle you need to amplify the presence of the fourth state by sitting down and meditating for one hour of that twenty-three hours. Where you dedicate your entire being to the realization of the fourth state. You do it every day. You'll catch a glimpse of the fourth state every single time you meditate. At first it will be just a little, but it will grow, it will grow, it will grow.
Practice in Hard Light is: come to Hard LIght, come to an Intensive, get shaktipat, meditate an hour a day, come to see me once a week.
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
listen to this quote as you read:
It's important to understand that concentration when applied to the light is not just energy based, but it's also mental based. It also is flowing into the mind. As it flows into the mind, karmic syndromes of psychology, emotional, and psychological components of behavior and insight into such forms of behavior are illuminated. You take the infinite energy of the SoHam and apply it physically, apply it subtle-physically and you apply it mentally as it begins to unfold. Because these cumulative little causes are actually a part of a vast body of causes that are the obscuration that is between you and the direct apprehension of the fourth state, the fourth body – the state of Samadhi.
They accumulate like a dense fog. The sun and the clear sky is on one side of the dense fog and here you are under that fog when you look up and you're in this dark grey kind of forest and you look up and it's a dark grey canopy and that's the accumulated effect of all these countless forms of cause. But as you get this rush of oceanic energy of SoHam moving intensely in sushumna, ida and pingala, it generates a force of pure clearing of obstacles, pure purification. It's that rushing of that energy, just like the way a river as it rushes along picks up tons and tons of soil and sediment and carries it down river. The rush of kundalini that is the movement of the SoHam is taking the tons and tons of obscuration in the form of cause and effect and pushing it out.
It's not necessary to understand every single grain. Most of it you can catch kind of on the fly because it's repetitive. But every now and then there is a kernel, a sweet morsel of information about identity, that has to do with your psyche that has manifested in your behavior that you will find very interesting.
Excerpt from the SoHam Kunda, August 7, 2009
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
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This energy of pure consciousness can be driven into your system, and in this way your system is overwhelmed with the energy of consciousness and forced into a condition of change.
This is essentially what the Guru does. The Guru is the Grace bestowing power of God – that energy that conducts the energy of pure infinite consciousness and channels it to you and into you and through you personally and irresistibly and unfailingly. This is the idea of awakening.
The Guru Shakti arose at the beginning of the creation and it exists as a kind of safety valve, so that everything that is cycling through the endless wheel of dependant origin and cause and effect can be brought to a point of equilibrium, at which point the energy of transformation, awakening and enlightenment can be directly applied to any given sentient life form at any time. This is the energy of the Guru.
The light of the Guru Shakti is eternal spirit that arises at the beginning is present in the middle and is present at the end. It is a Universal energy and has the capacity to go anywhere inside the wheel.
Excerpt from the Mahasamadhi Retreat - Intersection With The Guru, October 2, 2009
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
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There should flow from the student the request that the Teacher remain in the world. There is something special in the dynamic relationship that takes place between student and teacher when both are incarnate and occupying the same world system. And for instance I’ve had the experience of having a teacher I could go see and sit with every day and in learning to sit close, could hear the truth.
And then the day came when that opportunity went away. And its not like he disappeared he just went to a world system that is not apparent and not in this world.
So in a way it kind of made it more difficult to stay in communication with him but it’s an interesting situation. And it’s something that you recognize as important. It shows intelligence that you understand the situation as it is.
You’ve actually gone around the world many, many times and not run in to a walking talking breathing guru capable of giving Shaktipat, unwinding the samscara in content and expressing the truth of emptiness and the ocean of consciousness. Just seeing what it looks like is everything. Seeing it and feeling it.
That’s one of the reasons why I always do special meditations, especially on these big days, the day of his solar return of his Mahasamadhi, the day of his lunar return of his Mahasamadhi.
It’s easy to feel close. I’d always do it before I met all of you and now that I have met all of you, I still do it, I brought you to it. I brought you to come and share it with me.
Excerpt from the Mahasamadhi Retreat - Intersection With The Guru, October 2, 2009
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
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And in this way we also always generate a dedication; we offer the merit of the event to all sentient beings. When samadhi is present when the formless nirvikalpa samadhi the pure speech of the creation is present it is boundless and on one level it is present in this room but when we offer it in dedication to the world system it traverses the world and produces an expression of total unity in truth, a total unity in dharma. Uplifting all beings and uplifting ourselves.
If we try to hold it within ourselves we haven’t understood and we think that we have something, we’ve gained something and we don’t want to lose it or if we give it to another person that we are that much diminished but in truth it is much more like a flame lighting another flame.
You can take a flame and light another flame and the original flame is undiminished. This is its nature.
Inside this dedication is a constant idea of generosity and it comes from where we are coming from. If we perceive ourselves as a bound afflicted being then we will see ourselves as being under such and such a situation and having so much. And if we give it away we are diminished by that much. We have lost.
But if we understand ourselves from the absolute sense, experience ourselves from the absolute sense there is no separation no diminishment and all beings are uplifted.
Excerpt from the Mahasamadhi Retreat - Intersection With The Guru, October 2, 2009
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
listen to this quote as you read:
When the consciousness of ida and pingala are activated, the vibration of the movement of the life force produces the vibration of Ham Sa – the vibration of Ham on the right, the vibration of Sa on the left channel. But when Ham Sa merges into the central nerve, it changes its nature, and becomes SoHam and they lose their identity.
But when consciousness is externalized, the vibration is Ham Sa. When it is internalized the same vibration is SoHam.
The vibration of Ham at the crown of the head, the field of universal consciousness; that vibration of So at the base of the spine. And when this is the case you feel a constant flow of throbs and vibrations. First conducting themselves along the left and right channel of Ham Sa. As they internalize they become SoHam.
And you have to become so intimately familiar with yourself that you can tell when the consciousness is moving in the left and right channel - it has a certain feel. At just a twitch of consciousness, a twitch of will power the Ham Sa will become so SoHam and merge into the central channel.
When this happens all four bodies become internalized. It is an advanced condition and one that is sought after by yogis, by those trainees that are seeking to come to knowledge of themselves. You listen to what I’m saying. This is a very important division of attention and it’s like a milestone: the ability to externalize and internalize your consciousness at will.
When your consciousness is externalized you know it’s externalized. You want it to be externalized because you’re driving your car. But when you get where you want to go, you want to internalize your consciousness. You want to withdraw your consciousness from the surface. You want to leave behind all of the elements of being, that have to do with physicality, sense of being embodied, etc., sensory fields and sensory activity, memory.
You can draw consciousness into sushumna, the central nerve. Sushumna is beyond time and space, which is to say that everything you have ever been and everything you ever will be, emerges out of sushumna. It's an unusual idea to get your head around, but when you begin to get a grasp but when you start to experience it...
But one of the things about meditation is we learn to do such things consciously. We seek to analyze them, why do they happen and how do they happen. And we observe what it looks like, what it feels like, in the externalized position of Ham Sa and then, what kind of bump does it take to move into a SoHam condition of complete internalization. Which is what meditation is; the ability to internalize at will.
Which is also why they use the term spiritual practice, its spiritual, but it’s also practice. Why is it practice; because you have to practice it to get good at it. It’s got a couple tricks to it. So you’re training yourself to internalize.
What happens when you see a being that is progressing along and beginning to experience the advanced spiritual states, a spontaneous expression of spiritual power, is that they’ve trained themselves to be internalized to such a degree, to such a depth that enormous spiritual force begins to vibrate in that place in a very profound way. When your consciousness internalizes – the mind stops. When the mind stops your experience of reality changes.
Excerpt from the November 21, 2009 Intensive - Form and Cosnciousness
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
listen to this quote as you read:
The world system that we are in has twenty five worlds that operate and all have human existence on it. The only world system where the Guru operates as manifest and Shaktipat is available. So everybody has to move here.
Ever wondered where all these people are coming from. No it’s not just manifestating from the first man and the first woman that walked out of Eden, there pouring on from multiple worlds systems because Shaktipat’s here.
It’s the only world system available to the human tribe with a doorway.
Is God not merciful?
All this by way of description of the manifestation of the Guru shakti, as grace here in Hard Light, that is driven by one energy and that is love.
When you touch love you know it. It can’t be mistaken. It operates at every level of existence. From the base up through the entire array of desires, all of them love.
Then we have this kind of division in the full capacity of love. We have personal love and we have divine love.
Simple, personal love is connected to all the stuff, attachments, desires, all our forms of yearning. And divine love is able to strip out of love, all of its objects and experience the pure energy, pure love, without connection to anything.
Love for it’s own self.
Love in its own nature.
As you gain knowledge of love, you gain the capacity to shed lesser and lesser desires because there’s something about love that is a form of food for the spirit.
And when we gain the capacity to touch love and experience love directly, we are healed of the need for their objects.
And we gain the ability to live and flow and breathe in love.
Attraction is like a form of magnetism, its infinite energy endless energy.
As we learn to increase our capacity for love, we increase our capacity to awaken. The evolutionary force is one that expands our capacity. We become more and more complex life forms.
So our power of experiences increases our power of influences increase. But involution is beginning to learn the subtleties of the totality of our self.
We are indeed complex.
Excerpt from the Decemner 19, 2009 Intensive - God Guru and Self are One
HARD LIGHT CENTER OF AWAKENING
Excerpt of a talk by Mark Griffin...
listen to this quote as you read:
It is important that you adhere to your discipline. The energy is becoming very intense and very focused and penetrating very deep into your system. Keep to your discipline of daily meditation, performing your work and as you are moving throughout your life, meeting your responsibilities, it’s important to stay mindful, the vibration, the So Ham, the breath.
Stay connected to the sensation of gravity and your connection to the earth. Cycle your breath through all four bodies, even as you move about your busy day. This is very important. You don’t want to set up a kind of world or reality where one part of your world over here is your work and you’re so called life and over here is your spiritual practice. They must fuse, permeate and blend throughout each other.
The mindfulness of the breath and the So Ham is one of the most effective ways to maintain this awareness. These days of our lives go by so swiftly and they are over before you know it. You have to make them count.
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