Discussion Questions (chapter by chapter)               

 

Introduction and Before  (day 1)

1. What is the difference between an introduction and a first chapter?

2. a. How have you judged intellectual/‘book’ knowledge throughout your life?

b. How and when did you realize that there were other types of knowledge?

c. Did this realization happen gradually over time or suddenly in a burst of insight at some point? 

d. Which have you trusted more in your life: intellectual knowledge, personal experience or personal intuition?                  

3. Do the foreign words in this book bother, frighten, anger, excite you? Why?     

4. Where do you fit in your first family system (eldest, middle, youngest)?  How large/small is your first family. Does/did it make a difference?  

5. a. When did a spiritual or philosophical interest enter your awareness?

b. What was your early relationship with  conventional religion? 

c. How do you see your personal, scholarly and professional history relate to your interest in spiritual matters, your evolving in consciousness.

6. Are there images from this chapter that feel particularly relevant to your sadhana (see Images at www.recognizing.ca for colour images, & press each image for additional discussion questions/ personal contemplations)?

7. What Reminder resonates with you this week (see p. 110-112 or website)?

 

Awakening (day 2)

1.a. Are there ima​ges from this chapter that feel particularly relevant to your sadhana (see Images at www.recognizing.ca for colour images, & press each image for additional discussion questions/ personal contemplations)?

b. How does your experience of music/art/dance operate in your sadhana in profound, unexpected ways?                              

2.a. In what situation has the energy/shakti compelled you to make unexpected but beneficial change?

b. Have there been times when following the shakti/energy felt frightening?

c. How do you understand/explain such fear? How do you support yourself face it and move beyond?

3.a. Have there been times when you felt ‘out of balance'?

b. What did you do about it?   c. What were the consequences of your choices?

4. In your early life did you have some sort of saying that you used to support yourself in an uplifting way?

5. Has there been one area of your life (eg. profession, family, relationship etc..) that has been more challenging than others?

6a. In what situations do attachment, terror of the unknown, abandonment  manifest in your life?

b. How did you cope, move beyond these emotional reactions?

c. What limited/false beliefs does your mind entertain around such reactions?

7. Is there an event in your life that changed your emotional reaction from mostly unhappy to mostly happy ?  b. In other words, is there an overall ‘before’ and ‘after’ in your life?

8. Have you experienced being taken care of by someone/thing beyond this physical world?

9. What Reminder resonates with you this week?

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Sadhana and Seva  A  (Day 3)

1.Are there images from this chapter that feel particularly relevant to your sadhana (see Images at www.recognizing.ca for colour images, & press each image for additional discussion questions)?

2. How did you identify yourself in your early life?

3. Did you have a distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ world back then?

4. What practices were important in your first acquaintance with a spiritual orientation (eg. prayer, hymns)?

5. Have you noticed that over time you have felt compelled to change your practice in some ways? Do you have any insight why?

6. What does purification and transformation mean to you? Do you use other words that are equivalent?

7. Do you have an experience in which words have become ‘alive’/ true to you in a profound way?

8. Have you had experiences of people/places that could not be explained by this current lifetime?

9a. Is there an experience of selfless service or seva or volunteering that you remember that brought up a challenging situation that led you to purifying/transforming your personal beliefs, values, perceptions?

b. That led you to changing the prescription of your glasses so to speak?

10. Is there a Reminder (p. 110-12) that feels supportive this week?

 

Sadhana and Seva B  (Day 4)  p. 63-107

1. Are there images from this chapter that feel particularly relevant to your sadhana (see Images at www.recognizing.ca for colour images)?

2. How do you negotiate institutional rules that appear to curb your highest energy/shakti & creativity?

3. How do you work with your ego's desire to be right at the expense of being happy?

4. How have the demands of the relative world supported your evolution of communication?

5. What distinction do you draw between your emotional and spiritual work?

6. How do you recognize your use of intellectual versus experiential knowledge in your life?

7. How do you deal with emotions: anger/ fear/ judgement, comparison, self-absorption, entitlement and selfishness?

8. Describe your journey of trust, surrender, faith?

9. How has a longing for unity/integration affected your choices?

10. What does ‘false’ identification mean in the context of your sadhana?

11. What Reminder resonates with your experience this week?

 

Merging  (Day 5)

1. Are there images from this chapter that feel particularly relevant to your sadhana (see Images at www.recognizing.ca for colour images)?

2 a. How have you constructed notions of truth in your own life?                                   b. How do you negotiate interacting with others whose paradigms/belief systems have led them to different versions of truth?                                                 

c. How do you determine whose version is ‘truer’? Is that important?                     

3. Think of a time when what originally looked like a challenge, you later realized was a blessing.                                                                                                  

4. How do praise and criticism support you in your sadhana? Is one more effective than another? Why?

5. How do you learn to recognize what is your responsibility in an interaction and what is the others?   

6. What beneficial triggers do you have, or can your create, like hearing yourself say ‘impossible,’ to signal you are entertaining a ‘false’ belief.         

7. Describe your experience of creating. Is responding to this question easier/ harder than the others?                                                                                                

8a. Do you have a special place (like the ashram to me) in which you felt life was simpler?

b. How can you use that experience to transform more challenging experiences? 

9. Remember situations in which you have felt truly ‘seen’:  what do they have in common?

10. What does ‘true’ identification mean in terms of your sadhana?                               11. What Reminder resonates with your experience and feels supportive this week?

 

Surrender (Day 6)

1. What are alternate ways of understanding the 2nd paragraph of the quote that begins this chapter?

2.a. What is your current understanding of the word ‘liberation’ in terms of spiritual sadhana?                                   

b. Do you want to be liberated this lifetime?

3. a. How would you think/live as a saint?  What is your understanding of the word 'saint', Baba's’? 

b. Do you aspire to be such a saint? Why or why not?

4.a. How do you recognize when you are ‘in balance’ as opposed to being ‘out of balance’?  b. Has your health suffered at times when you lost balance?                  c. What does balance mean in this context? How does it compare to 'alignment?'

5. What ‘false’ beliefs explain our ‘soldier on’ or ‘sucking it up’ at times?

6.a. When you go through busy times how do you adjust your practices?

b. What are the consequences?  c. And if you let them go entirely?

d. What boundaries or self discipline is/are optimal and necessary to protect our practices, their functioning and highest value? 

7a. Can you think of times that you have been derailed, or in which you have derailed others?

b. Can you think of situations in which you have had to ‘unstick yourself’?

c. What is really happening in such situations?

d. How can the notions of ‘derailing’ yourself/ others and ‘unsticking yourself’ from limited situations support you in your journey from false identification to true identification, in your evolution of consciousness?

8. What are some of the ‘false’ beliefs you have inherited from your family/friends/culture that affect you at your work place, at home, concerning your relationships, practices, work?

9. a. Which of the Guru’s pillars of communication are the ones that are most challenging for you?                         

b. How can you refine your communication using the notions of these pillars?

10. a. How do you currently understand and experience the word ‘surrender’.    

b. Are classifications of surrender (physical, mental, subtle/transcendental) beneficial? detrimental?

c. Is surrender the flip side of control?

d. How do you feel about surrendering challenges to  Guru/Self?

11. What Reminder reminds you of important and supportive values and beliefs this week?

 

Krama   (Day 7)

1a. Have there been job/ professional situations in your life where your reputation and/or income was founded on numerical productivity? How did it feel? How did you cope with that feeling?

b. Has there been a time in your life when you realized that what you were offering in your profession was not really your highest truth?  What is the most valuable aspect of your profession? 

c. Have you undergone a situation in which your head and heart held conflicting ideas concerning how to fulfill expectations? How did you respond?

Has there been a time when what your head needed and what your heart needed came together?  How did that happen in your profession, your art form?

2a. What emotional reaction has offered you the greatest challenge/opportunity this lifetime? Have you noticed it shifting over the years? Any ideas of the cause of this purification?

b. What forms of resistance have you experienced in your life?  What lies behind them? What happens when your resistance disappears? Do you know why it took you so long?

c. Do you consider yourself a controlling person? Has this changed as you move from false to true identification? 

d. Have you learned more from the hardships in your life or the blessings? How do you recognize when things that were hard have become more easeful?

3a. What is the role of surrender, intentionality? b. How does being ‘aligned’ to your highest shift your perspective and emotional reactions?

4. Is there a situation where you realized a higher purpose to your life beyond your previously held more worldly purposes? How did it affect your life?

5a.What experience of krama/sequence have you witnessed in your life & world so far? How does it differ from my publishing and  real estate experiences? 

b. Have you had an experience in which stepped beyond your comfort zone? 

Did it change your experience of the emerging steps I am calling krama?  

c. How has your experience of krama affected your experience of trust & faith? 

d. How does this relate to your experience of false identification or true identification?

6. What is the value of recognizing a shift in your state of consciousness, for example from atma vyapti, and to divya caksus?

7a. What do Siva’s five acts offer our sadhana in daily life?

b. And how do the Five Acts relate to the distinction between duality and non duality? How does this affect you? c. How do the vama, jyestha and raudri currents relate to the Five Acts?

8a. Do you believe in miracles?  b. What do I mean by miracles in the context of this book on sadhana?

9. What Reminder do you wish to add to your personal list of reminders his week

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Truth of Relationships A   p. 190-214

1. Are there images from this chapter that feel particularly relevant to your sadhana (see Images at www.recognizing.ca for colour images, & press each image for additional discussion/ contemplation questions)?

2 .In terms of your sadhana, have you had a dark corner that you have avoided or resisted facing and purifying/transforming  eg. work, family, addiction, relationships, the world? What characteristics/patterns typify/define your dark corner?

3. Do you see different stages in your journey with your dark corner? Are these stages related to time, place (setting), characters, themes plot/action (literary classifications seem useful here)?

4. What was going on in the rest of your life that contributed (or didn’t) to the dark corner’s samskaric imprinting? Did your parents beliefs and reactions affect yours?

5a. As a consequence of the challenges you faced in your dark corner, what false beliefs and emotional reactions and loops showed up in your life?

b. What happened that helped you become conscious of these patterns?

c. How did your increased consciousness of your false beliefs and reactions affect/ transform your dark corner over time?

6. Have you had a time of your life in which a particular emotional reaction like attachment, abandonment, judgement, comparison, criticism wreaked havoc in your purification?

7. What kinds of stories do you tell yourself in your life?  Why do you tell yourself stories? What are the consequences of your storytelling?

8. Do different potential lifetimes or messengers from them play a role in the enactment, manifestation and purification of your challenging patterns/loops? Are there repeating patterns of different sorts? What have/are you learned/ing from them?

9. What kinds of issues do the Words from my Beloved raise? Do any of them resonate with you in your life?

10. What Reminder and mini Practice would you like to work with this week?

 

The Truth of Relationships B p. 215-249

1. Are there images from this chapter that feel particularly relevant to your sadhana?

2. Do you have intentions: sthula and more subtle, concerning your relationship?

3. How have you learned to differentiate the voice of your limited manas mind from the unlimited voice of your highest wisdom/Self/Guru?

4. How is your understanding of the malas evolving?  What is the relationship between the malas and the a. Five Acts of Shiva, b. the vignas/thieves, c. negative belief systems and their emotional reactions?

5a. What vignas, negative mental reactive tendencies and communicative patterns challenge you this lifetime? How are you purifying these limitations?

b. How often have you chosen to be right rather than happy? Why? How can you signal this to yourself as it comes out of your mouth, so  you can choose again?

6a. Why do I emphasize the Self is not a mental idea but an experience (p. 219)?

b. What do I mean when  I say, from the 'highest' perspective?

7a. What is the value and what is the danger of your manas mind? b. How does your samskaric 'baggage' affect your life? c. How do you differentiate between manas, buddhi, and ahamcarya?

8. Do you have a relationship in which you have had the opportunity to rebalance and refine your life, supporting each other's evolution in consciousness?

9a. Do you recognize how you have evolved in consciousness over the years? 

b. How your experience of the Self has changed; your understanding of knowledge/ignorance, desire, bliss?

10.  How do the three currents work in our body/mind?

11. What upaya do you resonate with at this point of your life? Why?

12. How do you draw distinctions between karma and destiny?

13. How does the notion of nonduality currently support your evolution?

14. What Reminder and mini Practice would you like to work with this week?

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My Guru’s Sandals

1. How do you experience the Words of my Beloved in this book, especially in this chapter?

2. Does knowledge play the role of stabilizing Siva in your life and experience the role of enlivening Sakti?

3. How do you experience the difference between your own inner wisdom Self and the outer mentors you have drawn into your life?

4. Over the years of sadhana, do you see how your Self trust and faith have evolved, increased?

5. Are there people and places in your current world who/where you can count on to see your Highest?

6. Have you experienced times when time and space vanished, leaving you in a new ….?

7. How do you honour your inner Guru/Self/Beloved in your daily life?

8. Have you experienced how certain words in language can become alive and mean so much more than originally thought?

9. Have you experienced the inner voice I am calling pasyanti vac? How do you distinguish it from the voice of your mind, madhyama vac?

10. How do you experience the Five Acts in your  life?

11. How do the notions of evolution and involution support your sadhana/journey?

12. Do you recognize this book as a spiritual memoir, an introduction to yoga theory and philosophy or a romance: a love story between Highest Inner Self and  worldly self?     (I’ll have to tell my publisher).