Eternal Self: The Tantra Science of Consciousness

By Phil Nuernberger

Eternal Self is a practical explanation of the power of Tantra Yoga, an introspective, spiritual science of Consciousness, to create a life of balance, harmony and joy. This book is the product of 50 years of practice, study, and teaching the science of Tantra Yoga, both in the United States and the Himalaya Mountains in Nepal and Northern India. While religion, philosophy, and even science tells you WHAT you should do to achieve this, Tantra Yoga shows you HOW. Through simple tools, such as breathing, concentration, meditation, and other practices, we expand our normally limited awareness to the spiritual-Self, the spiritual core of Consciousness within each of us.
Eternal Self begins by exploring the mystery of Consciousness. It then shows how Tantra science shares the fundamental requirements of all science: experimentation, replication and verification. However Tantra explores reality, and in particular Consciousness, through direct introspective experience rather than analyzing material phenomenon. Yoga science understood both mind and matter as energetic structures thousands of years before modern quantum physics. Although Tantra Yoga is a spiritual science, it has more in common with modern science than with organized religion.
Eternal Self outlines how each of us participates in this creative process although in contracted, limited ways. This is accomplished through the energetic body that is the underlying reality of our physical body, including the brain. The book shows that through the chakras and subtle senses we experience the energetic quantum reality as a see/touch objective reality. Through systematic meditative practices, we become conscious of these powerful energy centers and utilize them for personal and spiritual growth.
The finest instrument we have for material and spiritual success is our mind, but it also prevents us from experiencing the spiritual-Self. Eternal Self presents a unique analysis of the mind as an energetic field consisting of thought-constructs as energy patterns. It maps the relationship of the spiritual-Self (soul) to the energetic Subtle Body involving the chakras and subtle senses, and the physical body and the objective reality. It recognizes that each individual mind is part of a greater energetic field consisting of all human thought that Carl Jung called the "Collective Unconscious." Eternal Self describes the four functions of the mind and the power of each to create knowledge.
Our single most important personal skill is the ability to focus attention, to concentrate. Eternal Self clarifies the nature of attention/concentration and its impact on the mind. It describes the power of curiosity to intensify our focus, and the great damage that fear does to all levels of the mind and the ability to focus. Tantra science provides the method of transcendence, or mystical experience, but its practical utility and value lies in its transformational power to enhance intelligence, substantially increase emotional intelligence, and lead to spiritual realization. Eternal Self speaks to the fact that all organizations (political, economic, religious, social) are only as healthy and effective as the egos that lead them. The introspective tools and methods of Tantra science gently dissolve the ego issues that are the sources of imbalance, suffering and dysfunction in ourselves, and thus in our organizations, cultures, and nations. It provides a prescription to develop spiritual humanism through education by utilizing the powerful tools of concentration, stillness, and introspection provided by Tantra and other meditative traditions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098309916

Book preview

© 2020 Phil Nuernberger

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-09830-990-9 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-09830-991-6 (ebook)

Center at Rock Ledge

1 Rock ledge Drive

Honesdale, PA 18431

Dedication

Dedicated to those who seek in stillness the very Source of us all.

I offer this book to my Gurudev, His Holiness Sri Swami Rama, who graciously and lovingly personally guided me on this spiritual journey for over 50 years. Whatever is wise and useful in this book is due to the guidance I received from him both here and in the Himalayas. Any mistakes or misunderstandings are mine alone.

The Guru that is the Creative Power,

The Guru that is the Sustaining Power,

The Guru that is the Destructive Power,

The Guru in Person, and the Eternal God;

I bow to that very One.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

The Mystery of Consciousness

Chapter Two

A Spiritual Science of Consciousness

Chapter Three

From Consciousness to Mind

Chapter Four

The Mysterious Magical Mind

Chapter Five

The Power Functions of Mind

Chapter Six

The Secret of Attention

Chapter Seven

The Methods of Tantra Science

Chapter Eight

Transformative Science

Chapter Nine

Tantra and the End of Suffering

Chapter Ten

Spiritual Humanism: Becoming Fully Human

Book List Appendix

Acknowledgements

No book is written in a vacuum. Over the years my students have taught me to be practical in my teaching. I hope that this is evident in this book. My gratitude goes to Al and Eileen DiOrio who generously provided the major funding for the publication of this book. Their kindness was both unexpected and timely.

Special thanks go to Phyllis Vargas, an accomplished practitioner who generously offered to edit the book. This was truly a gift. Special thanks also to my wife, Deborah, my partner in our spiritual journey. She patiently read and reread this book and offered invaluable advice. Thanks also to Ellen Silberlicht and Kit Wray for the drawings. Several others offered insight and support in creating this book: my daughter, Santosha, my son Samraj, and my long and treasured friends, Dr. Kay Gendron and Dick Roberts. All of whom share this tradition and journey with me. To each and everyone, I offer my most sincere Thanks and Namaste.

Introduction

You are not who you think you are. Seated within the familiar structures of mind and body is an identity, a spiritual-Self, that is free from desire, fear, habit, and material limitations. Mostly unknown, but constantly mentioned in all kinds of scriptures and sacred books, this Self is a reservoir of eternal life, intelligence, and happiness. The great tragedy of humanity is that this Self, while found in the writings of all religions, is actually experienced, and thus known, by only a fortunate few, such as the great sages, saints, shamans, and spiritual leaders of all traditions.

Over the past 50 years I have had the honor to work with a great variety of individuals, from executives to housewives, from accountants to artists, and in a number of different settings and purposes. These have been ordinary people who wanted to become free of pain, students who wanted to learn a particular discipline, and ambitious individuals who wanted to become more skillful in order to be more successful in their careers. Some were unhealthy in body or mind, but most were so-called normal individuals with a wide variety of concerns, problems, and goals. The single quality or characteristic that defined each and every single one was ignorance of the power of his or her mind and spirit. For the first 27 years of my life, I shared this ignorance. In short, the vast majorities of us are totally uneducated about our own internal resources, and have little skill in accessing and utilizing the inherent power of our body, mind, and spirit.

Fortunately, 50 years ago I met a spiritual Tantric yoga master, His Holiness Swami Rama from the Himalayas, who accepted me as a disciple and guided me on my life-long path to freedom. He compassionately trained me personally both here and in the Himalayas in India and Nepal. There was an amazing amount of grace involved, but the real drive behind my growth into skill and freedom was the powerful and practical education in Tantra science that he provided for me. It was not about having information or learning a religion or philosophy, but mastering a science involving an effective inner technology that opened access to the powerful control systems of body, mind, and spirit. I was never asked to accept anything on faith, but to experiment in a disciplined and systematic way. He called this training the Sanatana Dharma, the Eternal Path. This science was a classical form of Tantra Yoga, which required far more self-discipline than the Ph.D. degree I earned. Under his loving direction, I also included the study of Martial arts, specifically Washin Ryu Karate under Sensei Hidy Ochiai, and in later years, Shaolin Taijiquan under Master Yang, Jwing Ming.

In almost every human effort or discipline, we find a powerful desire to know, to understand and express who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. Throughout human history, we have been in a search for meaning, to understand the reality around us, literally a search for the Source of it all. This force, characterized by curiosity, is actually a drive to become more conscious, to be more aware of the reality that surrounds us, physically, mentally, and spiritually. This universal, innate drive is a spiritual drive, dealing with the most fundamental questions of all: who am I; where did I come from; and where am I going? It is the force of our spiritual-Self to reach fullness or completion or to know it all. To put it in more religious terms, it is to find God, to understand and experience Divinity. But religion is not the only expression of this spiritual drive. We find it expressed in art, music, poetry, architecture, burial customs, science, and philosophy. It is pervasive throughout humanity.

Religion, philosophy, and science are the primary ways we have relied on to find the answers we seek. But all too often, religious beliefs are frozen in concepts that are thousands of years old and no longer serve our modern knowledge and cultures. The wisdom of great spiritual leaders is too often lost in the translations by lesser minds and degenerate into dogma and rigidity, and become a source of great suffering and harm. Philosophy, even when it is insightful, simply serves as another belief system, offering solutions without the practical tools to achieve them. So we are left with a corporate science which offers only one approach, and that is to declare that the only reality is a material reality. We are told that all that we are is simply nothing more than a chance occurrence. This is not really very satisfying.

So how to explain God? Not a single word, nor any amount of words, nor any religion, philosophy, or science can either prove or disprove a spiritual reality, or that God exists or does not exist. Belief is absolutely not proof either way of God’s existence or a spiritual Reality; it is merely belief. And the word God itself does not explain anything. It is a signifier of a belief or an experience. There is a profound difference between beliefs and experience, but neither explains the term God. Arguments for or against whether or not God exists are both foolish and futile. This is simply one ego trying to outsmart another ego.

On the other hand, words and logic used to explain one’s experience can be both inspiring and useful. We find this in the teachings of the great sages of all major religions and spiritual traditions. The wisdom is perennial even though the expression is determined by, and appropriate to, the time and culture in which they were spoken or recorded. The task for all of us is not to simply believe what the great sages have passed on to us, but to understand the pathways that they so courageously followed to their own insights and wisdom. We must use our intelligence to probe beneath the time- and culture-limited expression of these wise men and women to find the practical ways of their wisdom experience that they compassionately shared. This doesn’t require belief, but engaging the actual processes by which these great sages acquired their incredible insight and experience of the Infinite.

The greatest instrument we have for this is not some scientific model, sophisticated electronics, or artificial intelligence. The greatest instrument is our own mind. It is also our greatest barrier. So why talk about God if this book is about the mind? Quite simply, unless we have at least some idea of what supports mind, what it is that makes mind seem intelligent (or not), we won’t understand the full capability of this marvelous instrument. And let me be clear from the outset. When I speak of the mind, I am definitely not referring to the brain. The materialist argument that all there is to being human is this small hunk of matter we call the brain is both tedious and uninformed. Nor is it particularly helpful in understanding the mind simply by studying brain chemistry, neuro-synaptic activity, or looking at CAT scans, MRI’s, and all the other technical and biochemical ways we have of studying brain activity.

Yes, these have their useful place, but tell us little about the powerful capacities of the mind, such as instinct, self-confidence, concentration or focus, even emotional processes. Rather, we need a framework, a map, so to speak, of the territory we wish to explore. But far more important is the inner technology or methodology that provides a systematic way to explore all the dimensions, levels, and grades of our being. We need a system that provides the tools to utilize not only more of the inherent power within the mind, but gives access to the unlimited Power that lies behind the veil of the mind. That Power is called Consciousness. There is a difference between being aware or conscious of something, such as an object, a thought, a sensation, or whatever, and Pure Consciousness itself. Consciousness (with a capital C) is how the human mind experiences the Infinite One. Many call this God. I prefer the terms the Infinite One or the Ancient One. You call it whatever you like, the terms are only signifiers for what cannot be explained anyway. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be experienced or understood, as we shall see in the following chapters.

Everyday we are told what to do, but we are never shown how. For example, we are told that we should control our emotions, but no one shows us how. We tell our children to pay attention, to become more focused, but we can’t show them how because we ourselves were never taught. We are told that we should have greater emotional intelligence, but how does one achieve that? We are supposed to be wise, content, and find life joyful, but again, no one shows us how.

Unfortunately, like many things in the materialist culture of modern America, much of what is written about Tantra Yoga has little to do with the traditional discipline. Hopefully the brief overview in this book will provide you with a greater understanding of this powerful inner discipline. My wish is to inspire your curiosity to explore in greater depth a spiritual discipline that focuses on introspective and meditational practices. This is not about some religious program that asks you to believe. True spiritual disciplines never ask you to believe in some dogma, but to systematically experiment and discover for yourself the reality of your own mind and spirit. In my experience, Tantra science is absolutely the most practical, effective tool for enhanced performance in every aspect of life and work. The practices are not difficult, but mastery demands commitment, consistency, and probably most of all, patience. The outcome is an increasing depth of self-awareness, direct experience of the subtle and powerful inner resources of the mind, and the unlimited power of our spiritual-Self.

Ignorance is not bliss. It cheats us out of the joy of life and prevents us from utilizing our true potential for success in all aspects of life. We think we know ourselves because we are familiar with our thoughts. But our thoughts and the way we think are our greatest limitation. Few of us ever learn how to break out of the self-limiting beliefs that we develop over our lifetime. Firmly stuck in the habits of mind and body, we repeat the same thoughts and emotions throughout life, locking ourselves into the patterns that are mostly developed by the time we are seven to eight years old.

In this brief book, I will share the Tantric perspective, principles, and practices that provided me with increasing freedom from fear and other emotional disturbance, and opened up levels of joyfulness, clarity, and vision that I never dreamed were even possible. Of course I have a belief system, but one now based on my direct experience, and not what I was taught as a child. I was never asked to believe anything by the extraordinary teachers that graced my life, only to experiment for myself with the powerful inner technologies and science they taught. This experimental introspective science allows anyone who is committed to personal growth to discover the powerful spiritual, mental, and physical resources that define what it means to be truly human.¹

I am not asking you to believe, but simply experiment and experience for yourself the often hidden power of your mind for balance, clarity, and insight. I invite you to undertake your own inner journey, to establish your own self-discipline, and actually begin to experience the Satchidananda – the Existence (Sat), Consciousness (Chit), and Bliss (Ananda) of your own spiritual-Self, and realize the full power of your own mind. ²

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¹ The basic foundational practices of Tantra Yoga are found in my book Strong and Fearless, Yes International Publishers, 1996, 2003

² I used an English spelling of important Sanskrit terms, which are printed in italics.

Chapter One

The Mystery of Consciousness

There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio,

then are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Mooji, a spiritual teacher from the Caribbean, offered this little lesson. Let’s pretend that a very powerful and magical genie suddenly appeared before you and offered you everything you wanted – fame, fortune, loving friends and family, security, even eternal life. The only catch was that you would have to give up your consciousness. What would you do? Notice he did not say, give up your soul, which would be a more typical approach. Rather, the price would be your consciousness.

Think about the ramifications of this. If you weren’t conscious, what would be the benefit of anything? If you aren’t conscious, then for you, nothing exists, so the offer would have no value whatsoever. It’s not difficult to get a sense of how central consciousness is to life. Over the years, everything in your life seems to have changed – your body, your thoughts, friends, diet, even the things you do for entertainment. Change is a true constant of life. But there is one thing that has not changed at all. It is your consciousness, or awareness, of all these things. This awareness may have expanded or contracted, but even as it changes in degree, it is the same awareness or consciousness. We know the subtleties of the material reality only because, and to the degree that, we become conscious of them. The entire history of science, for example, is one of expanding our awareness, becoming conscious of more and more subtle realities.

Consciousness, the most obvious of realities, is also the most mysterious. It is something we all experience, and yet we experience times when it seems to disappear. We seldom think about it, and when we do, it’s usually because we are concerned about not having it or it seems unnecessarily diminished. Scientists try to ignore it, but quantum physics, the most sophisticated science of all, has run headlong into it, and does not know what to do with it.

Definitions from a dictionary don’t really shed any light on what consciousness actually is. We all know, of course, that we are either conscious or not, so what is the mystery? But with a few moments of thought, the mystery of consciousness unfolds in numberless ways. For instance:

When we fall asleep, most people lose awareness, or consciousness. But on waking, we are aware that we did dream. Many people are aware of their dreams as they occur. In fact, we can be fully conscious while we are dreaming, change them with ease, or stop them completely, and do so without waking up. This is called Lucid Dreaming and easily learned with a bit of practice. Not only can we consciously direct the content of our dreams, it is possible to actually project our awareness to other physical locations. In other words, we can travel with our conscious awareness and be aware of what is happening while we are sleeping. Those who study and practice lucid dreaming say that this ability can be developed through lucid dreaming practices.

As a young boy, a personal friend was consistently able to be conscious of the roof of his home while sleeping. He felt himself move out of his body and move above the roof. During this time, he was able to accurately see which tiles on the roof were loose, and report these tiles to his father the next day. His father would check, and would replace the exact tiles that his son reported. Another individual, a contractor in Minneapolis and friend of my father-in-law, was able to travel with his awareness while he was dreaming. He would regularly visit close family in California, and was accurately knowledgeable about their activities. This ability did not seem at all strange to him. While most scientists may disregard these events, many of us have had similar experiences or know of others who have had similar experiences. So the concept that consciousness is only a quality of the waking state is already patently false.

During deep sleep, again, we are supposedly unconscious. But how is it that we know we had deep sleep? Somehow, there must be some awareness of this deep sleep or we would not recall having it at all. If something occurs halfway around the world, we normally wouldn’t claim to be aware that it happened. Yet we do this with deep sleep all the time. It is also quite possible to be fully conscious while in deep sleep, as research at the Menninger Clinic with the yoga master Swami Rama proved back in the late 1960’s. While in deep sleep, producing delta waves and even snoring gently, Swami Rama was fully conscious of everything going on in the room, as well as in other parts of the building. In yoga science, this is called yoga nidra, being fully conscious while the mind and body are experiencing deep sleep. Again, this is something that can be learned if one is willing to do the practice.

There is evidence that we can be conscious of events that happen in distant time and space in our waking state as well. In the above example, Swami Rama was fully aware of what was happening in other rooms