sadhu

In India, people with dreadlocks are very common.  Men with crazy dreadlocks and long dreadlock beards are all over the place.  They are sadhus.

A sadhu is a type of yogi, a wandering ascetic.  Asceticism basically means

“Doing without”.

Richard Freeman talks about asana as a tool by which we burn off impurities through tapas.  Tapas is the burning of the fire within the body.  Burning this inner fire releases toxins and purifies the body.  This is tapas, the path of purificiation.  

Renunciation is another form of purification. Renunciation is the same thing as asceticism.   Renouncing material possessions is a kind of tapas.  Fasting is a kind of tapas.  Renouncing worldly life is a kind of tapas.  Millions of ascetics across Asia are purifying themselves through the fire of renunciation.  

The Buddha was a renunciate, as are all Buddhist monks and nuns.  They have renounced all material possessions.  They have renounced money, sex, physical love, having children, their own parents, career, everything the world has to offer.  They have done so because everything in this world is impermanent, and so all our attachments will ultimately lead to suffering.

nothing is worth getting attached to.

In India, one of the signs of renunciation are dreadlocks.  They are very ugly, and they often smell bad!  A man with dreadlocks in his hair and his beard has clearly been neglecting his appearance.  This is deliberate.  The path of spiritual life requires one to renounce worldly life, and renouncing worldly life requires one to renounce worldly appearances.  Throughout India, yogis with dreadlocks are considered holy men.  They are called ‘baba’, and people bow to them.  They are considered holy because they have obviously renounced their capacity to be married, to have children, to have a career, to make money, to buy a house…  no one is going to hire them, and no one is going to marry them!  The act of growing dreadlocks has so thoroughly marginalized them that they cannot participate in worldly society anymore.  And this is the path they have chosen, in order to pursue spiritual life.

Jesus said, “Man cannot serve both God and mammon.”  Mammon is just a word for materialism.  Jesus was saying that man cannot serve the world of materialism and the world of spirituality - he must choose between the two.  Dreadlocks are a symbol representing a man’s choice.  

We live in a very very materialistic world, and America is the capital of materialism.  But we can’t take materialism with us when we die - when we die, we enter the nonmaterial world of spirit, and the only things we take with us are our thoughts, our speech, and our deeds - our karma.  At least, this is the teaching of yoga.  Consequently, a yogi may believe that cultivating good karma is more rewarding in the long run than cultivating a big bank account!  Of course, material wealth is not a sign of spiritual poverty and spiritual wealth does not require material poverty - we just need to know that both kinds of wealth exist, and they tend to compete for our attention!

Richard Freeman says that our energy body - our chakra system - is what reincarnates from lifetime to lifetime.  Reincarnation is one of the fundamental teachings of yoga.   And so, while we think that if only we have this material possession, or that material possession, or this kind of family, or those kinds of looks, then we will be happy, the truth is we can never find complete happiness in this world, because time changes all things and all things are impermanent, even our bodies, our names, and our thoughts.  Real happiness isn’t found in the material world - it can’t be.  America is finding this out the hard way - the richest country in the world, and so many people are suffering emotionally…

Real happiness can only be found in spiritual life - purifying our body, speech, and mind through tapas.  This is the path of yoga.  The world cannot provide us with real happiness, and neither can the world take real happiness away from us.  Real happiness is within us.

Of course there are lots of materialistic people with dreadlocks out there.  Dreads are a fashion statement now, and people with dreads marry, have careers, own homes, etc.  And there are also a great number of deeply spiritual, principled people with successful careers, nice homes, and conservative haircuts.  We can't read a book by its cover.  

And naturally its possible to make good karma and make good money at the same time.  Bob Marley, or Wayne Dyer, for example.  Historically, however, people tend to prioritize one over the other.  And in today’s America, making good money is revered, while making good karma is either disregarded or ridiculed.  Consequently, spiritual warriors may feel compelled to go against the grain, and make an artistic statement pointing out the world’s absurdity, even at the expense of worldly pleasure.  Such may be a cause of the popularity of dreadlocks in America.

Jesus also said, “Do not store up treasure on Earth, where moths and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal, but store up your treasure in Heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy and thieves cannot break in and steal.”  He is talking about karma, is he not?  Treasure stored on Earth will get left behind when we die.

 Anyway.  In America, a land of composites where many cultures mingle and merge and synthesize, it is of course possible to find people who are practicing spiritual life while choosing not to renounce.  In fact many spiritual teachers say that this is not a time to renounce, but a time to be in the world and make it a better place.

And so -  If you look hard enough, you might find a sincere ascetic yogi who has found a way to earn a little money, enough for food, gas, and a roof over his head, and maybe even dreams of someone willing to put up with his dreadlocks...

John Galt was a Nazi

Steiner's Ahriman is the excessive yang, the automaton, Neitzsche's Last Man, the Ah in Aum, the Jah of God, the supremely intelligent logical masculine, the universal deep ego and the universal deep God and the universal deep state.  The deep self-exister.  This universal deep ego, in being, knows itself to be, and must therefore merge with itself again, just as water poured into water does not remain separate, but merges with water.  And in this merging the knower must submit to the knowing, and the knower must cease to be that the known may be fully, eternally, and infinitely experienced and manifested.

The knower dies that the known may manifest as the perspective of a reborn knower, and language itself must be shed, for the truth is infinite and thus infinitely un-languageable.   The last man's name was John Galt, the man of pure ego, rational and superior in purpose, servant of Ahriman the Nazi, who is born and dies and is reborn, the last man becomes the first man, the last man is a reincarnator who reincarnates thoughts in loops of thinking and is forever imprisoned by dualistic thinking.

  Using language is thinking, and thinking is a closed loop.  Reality is an open loop, and the nature of mind is an open loop, and therefore thinking is inadequate to fathom the nature of mind.

Breathing is a paradoxical open loop.  It never begins and it never ends, and it always folds in upon itself, renewing itself, awareness of respiration is the mobius strip of consciousness; awareness of respiration is the quantum/gravity paradox of an Escher painting manifesting as our own physical experience of now.

By focusing on respiration, Ahriman the Nazi was able to overcome his own ridiculously superior ego, and fathom the nature of mind.

Then he commanded John Galt to grow out his hair and buy a vaporizer.  John Galt studied Ahriman the Nazi closely and realized that it was Lucifer!

Lucifer laughed, and admitted that when the poles shifted and the polarities reversed, excessive yang somehow transformed itself into excessive yin, and the extreme deep knower dies, and is reborn as a primordial, instinctive deep knowing.  The nature of loss, he explained.  Yang doesn't know how to surrender, yet it is consumed and perishes nonetheless, which is the deepest surrender possible.  Yang fears death until it is reborn, and knows itself to have died, and so is unafraid. So yang changes, and grows, and heals.

The Last Man looked at himself, and realized that he was actually in a process of individuating, self-learning and cyberfeedbacking.  He wasn't a perpetual ego after all, insisting on being, dying and returning.  He was a becomer, a changer!  He changed into the first man, pressed the opposite button, and reality shifted.

There is a place where 'thinking' is seen to be an impediment to the experience of the nature of mind, which is named reality.  This leads to the death and simultaneous rebirth of thought, or ego, or I-ness.  Empty mind observes the death and rebirth of language itself as a meaningful closed system, only to observe yet another language arise, that the experience may be meaningfully processed.  The sharp edges of this finite, rational explanation of reality leave us perpetually gasping at our own traumatic rebirths as self-aware beings.  Reincarnation itself leads to yet more and more ptsd, until we meditate and discover the death of the self that is constantly taking place, the inherent necessity of letting go and being present with thoughtless now, now being too fast for thought, now being far too fast for thought to catch up with, thought merely being frozen and fossilized pieces of now caught in space-time, and so in meditation we return forever and ever to the breath, which is always now, and is never other than now.

The inherent self-cognizing need for logical truth is forever faced with a paradoxical and illogical reality, where inhale inexplicably transforms into exhale and yang inexplicably transforms into yin and truth inexplicably transforms into change itself.

Reality is a word encompassing the nature of mind.

Thinking, dualistic mind needs explanations of its own coming into being, and - failing to provide itself with any - collapses in on itself, as far as the observer is able to observe, into an absence of any self-awareness, an absence of thought itself, simple pure undistracted, concentrated empty and egoless non dual awareness.  Empty of self, empty of language.  Pure, contentless, concentration itself. Samadhi.  Jhana.  Oneness.  Not this, not this.  Not this language, or any other.  Neti, Neti.

 We need to cultivate a little yin, a little of Steiner's Uu, like the Buddhas do.  Meditation is a path out of the Wasteland, the intellectual desert of the logical, rational last man who wages great Wars of Materialism.  Too much Uu brings out the lunacy, and even Lucifer, excessive yin.

Ahriman the Nazi meditated deeply.  Out of his root chakra grew the great trunk of a tree, and out of his crown grew leaves.  Through meditation his reptilian, survival-oriented root chakra blossomed, and grew upwards along the sushumna nadi.  He connected with nature, and became a feminist.  He cultivated an appreciation of diversity, the infinite variety of distinct and sovereign first-person perspectives experiencing Reality.  He saw that this diversity was relative, subject to the temporal laws of change, non perpetuity, and thus suffering, and that diversity existed to evolve through suffering out of ignorance into wholeness and unity.  He saw that diversity cultivated appreciation of oneness and oneness was obliged to cultivate appreciation of diversity.
The Sat Yuga begins as a political movement, Ahriman realized.  Justice was actually just another name for reciprocity, and reciprocity led to a reality of perpetual karma.

Ahriman the Nazi realized at once that even very very good karma is not the best karma - the best karma is no karma at all, which requires forgiveness and compassion on the part of everyone we interact with, including ourselves.  Only through forgiveness are we given permission to reset our karma, so to speak.  This was and is the message of Christ, and this was and is the mission of Christ, who died that the teaching of forgiveness and compassion might transcend all other cries for justice, retribution, and reciprocity.

Ahriman realized with a start that superiority was not good karma either, but that only superior service to others was good karma.