Kabir – by Trevor Hall
I recorded this live on my sailboat Chat d’O
The photos are from the west side of Lanai as we approach Manele Bay.
To hear this song along with viewing the awesome photos, click here:
Kabir is a Hindu spiritual master born 1398.
He thought and preached the essential unity of all religions and the essential equality of all people.
He was famous for putting spiritual practices and mystic experiences into poetry.
A spiritual aspirant seeks the higher meanings of life like:
“Like an arrow and the hunter, aiming for the thunder…”
“Let the King pull back that bow and give rest to the soul”…
The “King” is poetically “God” as an inseparable part of ‘us’.
When this is realized,
one knows by experience that “God” is much more that what we once naively perceived…
“We” are ‘God’… but then,
there is no ‘we’ or ‘us’ or God… it is all just an inseparable ‘Oneness’.
~ ~ ~
The complete system of Yoga was developed to help one find that Ultimate ‘Unity’ of mind, body, and spirit… so deeply that you lose connection with the false sense of who ‘you’ thought ‘you’ were.
please note that :
Yoga is much more than skinny young girls wearing spandex doing butt toning exercises in America.
~ ~ ~
“I stay awake when the country sleeps”.
This is concept is further explained:
There are 3 main states of normal consciousness:
Waking, Dreaming, and dreamless sleep.
The 4th state is called Turiya… it’s considered the “God” state.
This is the highest state of consciousness humans can achieve.
Training one’s self to remain aware during meditation, leads to a practice of being ‘mindful’ during our normal waking state. Then, taking that awareness into the first stages of sleep with the goal of remaining aware during our dreaming state which is called ‘lucid dreaming’.
Thus in the song… “I stay awake when the country sleeps”
In most situations,
a dedicated seeker must spend many years earnestly applying the ‘Right Effort’
to train one’s mind to be ‘one-pointed’.
After focused practices for many years, the higher states of consciousness will begin to unfold in one’s awareness.
In the Hindu ‘Jana’ traditions, there are 4 major stages of this state called Samadhi.
As each stage deepens, the effort to be focused with such a concentration that only a ‘one pointed’ awareness is being experienced begins to lessen.
Once these stages begin…
There becomes a point when no effort of focused concentration is required… yet,
The higher states of consciousness take over… like an auto pilot,
a natural flow towards this ultimate ‘Oneness’.
This can sometimes manifest randomly,
based on various circumstances that just happen to be present in the right way.
Byron Katie happens to be a unique example of this occurring in contemporary times. After her natural experience of ‘Enlightenment’, she created a process she call “The Work” and has been profoundly helping millions of us regular folks with overcoming the inherent pain & suffering experienced by the ignorance of our True nature…
She does this in a very common, everyday way that anyone can understand.
She does this because of her ‘Enlighten’ experience and the fact that she has absolutely no religious or spiritual background… These Wisdoms were naturally unveiled to her and helping others was a natural outcome of that experience.
She was suffering from extreme depression for years and was ready to give up life. She first experience what St. John of the Cross describes as “The dark night of the Soul”. At some point after just letting the overwhelming depression have its way, she stopped trying to fight it, stopped allowing it to be overwhelming… she finally ‘just let it be’…
What happened was very similar to what the Buddha experienced during his moment of ‘Enlightenment’.
An unshakable perspective and experience of ‘Oneness’…
So complete, that whatever one thought ‘they’ were…
was no longer perceived in the inseparable nature of….
‘Being at one with it all’.
She lost all perception of her ‘old self’.
She lost all sense of where or who she was.
All her sensing elements… did not seem to be connected to the person she lost track of… the old Byron Katie.
Sri Ramana Maharshi born in the late 1879 was only 16 when after only about 20 minutes of contemplating “I AM”, experienced what the Buddha went thru during his enlightenment, the same experience that Byron Katie would experience much later.
This is the classic ‘Enlightenment’, in which the wordless Wisdoms are experienced in a way that can never be undone.
One knows without a doubt from the ground of their being…
the answer to the preverbal questions the philosophers of all time pondered…
“What is the meaning of Life”? What is my life all about? And how do “I” fit into the big picture… or ‘the timeless wonder of it all’.
In deep meditation, the goal is to maintain awareness.
When this practice is expanded into sleep, one can experience lucid dreaming.
Throughout the ages, spiritual masters have used this technic to deepen the benefits of various meditation practices far beyond the dept of normal waking meditation.
“What’s is like when it’s turned around, the roots grow up and the branches down. Mute men speak of crowns… only the fearless, only the fearless”.
When our awareness rises up to the ‘crown’ chakra… an ‘Awakening’ is experienced that renders one… Fearless.
The experience of knowing one’s True nature will reveal that ‘we’ are much more than our egos… our True Nature was never born, nor will it every get sick, suffer and die… thus… Fearless.
This again speaks of a very deeply spiritual meditative state.
One way to achieve “Enlightenment” is to practice controlling the prana – ‘life force’ that flows through our bodies. Think of the Chinese acupuncture with the 10’s of 1000’s of meridian lines of energy that flows through our bodies. They have spent millennia mapping out these energy fields.
In Yoga, the practice of controlling this ‘prana’ is called ‘pranayama’.
One practices focusing awareness on each of the 7 major chakras. Keep in mind the Chinese have documented countless 1000’s of these energy junctions, but in the practice of pranayama, only the 7 major ones are focused on.
When one can ‘awaken’ the lower chakras, the prana rises up to the next chakra, traveling through the main highway of subtle energy called the sushumna channel, which basically flows straight up the middle of the spine. This energy is not ‘manifest’…
It is not a physically located solid object, yet it’s affects are widely know and documented by acupressure results… this means these subtle energy channels, called nadis, and the chakras are generally located in these areas.
In the process of ‘Enlightenment’, the energy travels up the sushumna channel from the root chakra at the base of the spine, and ‘awakens’ each chakra all the way up to the ‘crown’ chakra.
Following this energy flow, the state of consciousness become stabilized when this energy is allowed to flow back down to the general area of the ‘heart center’. This is not the ‘heart chakra’, it is not a chakra, but an area that it is described as the center of our ‘being’.
All of that mumbo jumbo is relative, because this experience is for the most part…
ineffable… beyond words.
This experience just described is what Kabir wrote poetically as:
“What’s it like when it’s turned around, the roots grow up and the branches down”.
When attempting to explain the unexplainable, poetry is very helpful when mere metaphorical terms don’t always paint the right picture.
Deeply Spiritual experiences are indeed… ineffable.
And often poetry is the best way to come close to describing it.
