The Sublime Path of the Great Return
Paul Muller-Ortega, June 20 and 21, 2009
Last weekend, Paul Muller-Ortega taught “The Sublime Path of the Great Return” at Seattle Yoga Arts to about 50 yogis and yoginis in Satsang. Satsang is a rare occasion for contemplating life’s deepest purpose, and Paul brought a scholarly Svatantra viewpoint informed by decades of study and practice.
It’s a big question, the purpose of our lives. At times, the question burns with an urgency, a persistent itch that grows and grows until we find ourselves in a room with fellow seekers, and here we were, looking for answers, or at least a technology that leads us to our own answers. In Satsang, we sift the thoughts inside in a process of self-examination, looking at motivations, and other intangibles, following the golden thread of what’s most true.
Paul offered tantalizing descriptions of the journey to inner consciousness, those trackless realms of ever-surprising wonder, divine astonishment, and luminous serenity. Through meditation, we increasingly refine consciousness, purifying, stabilizing, and creating circumstances where life organizes itself in the most coherent, congruent luminous structure. With progressive, cultivated, sustained, systematic practice we move into the “Palace of Consciousness”, and out of the garage! The word “outrageous” arrived again and again, outrageous teachings of Maharaji, outrageous freedom, outrageous sound of the Absolute in OM.
We practiced mantras, which Paul calls the “spaceship” to inner planes, inner worlds, to extraordinary vastness where we experience the deepest spaces of the Absolute. The vibrations of the mantras “stir golden sunlight consciousness”, and my experience of meditating with this group was quite different than my meditations in my home studio. It was as if the narrow band of the mental meditative state refracted and expanded into a velvety dark boundless universe. My head started to drop, over and over, as my consciousness journeyed in a free fall…… far from my body. Was I going to sleep? Every time I “fell”, my thoughts had just started to take a little trip away from the mantra. Is this the place ego creates itself? Is this the place Paul calls the Individual Identity Assembly Point?
He repeated that it’s not about the language, it’s about creating and sustaining a practice, a technology, that takes us to our deepest, truest Selves. We won’t be satisfied just reading about meditation, just as reading about yoga practice is not as satisfying as yoga practice. He insisted that “we can’t talk our way into this”, but, Oh My Word, the language was so seductive. Paul’s sparkling, fluid abundance of words was rich and full of promise. His words were a map to expansive mysterious inner lands. My vague hunger turned toward an inner treasure in the heart of consciousness, and at a 1 pm lunch break, the idea of food was only marginally interesting. Nevertheless, in the presence of actual food shortly thereafter, my physical hunger arrived healthy and robust.
We meditated sitting, with the abovementioned risk of free fall, and also we meditated standing which was much more wakeful for me, fortunately. We chanted several mantras, some with the accompaniment of Paul’s wife Barbara, on the Harmonium and Benji and Heather Wertheimer on strings and drums. Paul told us ancient myths, sacred narratives or stories embedded with infinite meaning. We visited with old friends and met new friends.
Now what? Paul closed by saying that we’re all walking a mysterious path, and every meeting shifts and deepens our alignment with purpose and meaning. We’re prompted from inside by a voice of intuition and insight. It speaks to us in silence in the dark of the night, in the wildness of nature. It guides us to the degree that we listen. When we cultivate that listening, that focus, that contemplation, we begin more and more to taste and to touch the always present Divine. The power of Grace is always present, and it’s up to us to find practices, and to sustain practices, that demonstrate to ourselves that such is actually the case.
