For those on the spiritual path do not think you have amnesty because you are in this world and seeking God is a vocation for monks and nuns and you don’t have to abide by the laws which the monks and nuns have to live by. Guess again. The masters have come here to tell you the truth and a truth which is not easily accepted. Sri Daya Mata has been a nun for sixty years and has attained that cosmic awareness and she endlessly spoke of one mind quality that must be developed. Ninety five percent of spiritual attainment consists of the proper understanding and the right attitude toward life and five percent is practice. You cannot attain liberation and avoid reincarnation until you have the proper understanding. It is something that must be taken very seriously.
Are you having difficulties meditating? Then know this. Our human emotional reaction towards life itself is ceaselessly imposing the savory of human consciousness on us. This every changing condition produces distractions; this is why we are unable to focus in our meditation. If anyone of us could focus at the point between the eyebrows immediately we would see a vast ocean of light right in front of us which is just behind the screen of our thoughts and feelings springing from the subconscious mind.
O Krishna! What happens to a person unsuccessful in yoga— one who has devotedly tried to meditate but who has been unable to control himself because his mind kept running away during yoga practice? Does a yogi perish like a sundered cloud if he finds not the way to Brahma (Spirit) – being thus unsheltered in Him and steeped in delusion, sidetracked from both paths—the one of God-union and the one of right activities? Remove forever all my doubts, O Krishna! For none save Thee may banish my uncertainties.
SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION
The discouraged devotee in deepest prayer resorts to God as the mighty Cosmic Physician who alone is able to cure the deep-seated disease of material doubts.
The blessed Lord said:
O Arjuna, My son! A performer of good actions never meets destruc-tion. Whether in this world or in the beyond – he falls not into evil plight!
SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION
Arjuna here receives a wonderful reply from the Divine Preceptor. This stanza of the Bhagavad Gita stands as a monument of inspiration to all sincere yogis who have failed to unite their souls with God because of obstructions arising from prenatal and post-natal actions.
The fallen Yogi who, has occasionally succeeded in experiencing the superior bliss of his soul cannot forget it; he well knows there is no comparison between ever-new divine joy and the gross pleasures of the senses. The yogi tries to sublimate the unnatural hunger for sense pleasure into the natural hunger for the soul’s joy. Even a fallen yogi is far superior to the materialist. The former is on the threshold of awakening from sense delusions; the latter is still asleep in ignorance.
God gives encouragement in this stanza to all devotees to seek their natural divine inheritance. The imperfect yogi, in spite of failures, tries to regain his memory of divinity. Once the devotee has tasted the superior soul-bliss, his heart becomes convinced of the inferiority of sense joys. No matter how many times a sincere yogi falls down in the path of yoga, he struggles again toward his Goal.
The devotee who performs meritorious actions develops divine memory and good karma that impel him to seek liberation in this life or in the beyond. The memory of the divine bliss of yoga practice remains lodged in his subconscious mind. If he is not able to find full liberation in one life, in his next incarnation the hidden memory of his past experiences of yoga sprouts forth in spiritual inclinations.
The master says there are three main things for your liberation; the depth of your meditation, the help of your guru and the grace of God. There is no other way you can achieve it. It is pretty hard though when you only have twenty five percent of your freewill to work with. Can you imagine when you try to meditate and you realize you have an automatic mind and you can’t even control it or you have a car and can’t even stop it. You have to stay in that car and cannot move out of it for seventy years, it constantly goes and goes and you can’t control where it is going, that’s why the body is the vehicle and the lunatic behind the wheel is the mind and you and me are the souls, each time dead end, and each life dead end. We never reach where we want to go because the lunatic mind won’t listen, the mind won’t listen, sorry I’m programmed, I have my own programming but I don’t want to go there, sorry I’m programmed that way.
The master explained very clearly that the principle of yoga meditation can be achieved through a steadfast process of purification to liberate ourselves from all human characteristics created by the subconscious mind and that we must learn to attune our consciousness with a higher mind or intuitive all-knowing super consciousness of the soul. In other words when you automatically become good you establish your consciousness in the soul where all the qualities are already there. You don’t have to polish your ego you have to step more and more into your super consciousness through steadfast meditation.
The laws of attraction and repulsion are nothing but the laws of magnetism that regulate the entire universe with its billions of galaxies and solar systems. This attraction and repulsion binds our consciousness down to the lower level of consciousness because it is only in this level that it can have free play. It is the fundamental laws of life that we find ourselves sooner or later meeting our conscious or subconscious desires looking to be satisfied known as the laws of cause and effect or karma. Since these attractions and repulsions are really the breeders of desires leading to the lower life, it naturally keeps us tied down to the lower world where consciousness is under the greatest limitations.
The attraction which one feels towards any person or aspect of material consciousness is when any kind of pleasure or happiness is derived from a person or an object. It is natural for us to get attracted in this manner because the soul in bondage having lost the direct source of ananda or bliss within gropes after bliss in the external world and anything which can provide even a shadow of this in the form of ordinary happiness or pleasure becomes dear to it. Everything we are trying to grab outside is because of what we have lost within our self, either through drugs, alcohol, sex, money, power or position trying to regain that bliss we have lost but we can’t. This is an ephemeral world where the pendulum is endlessly changing its rhythm; you can’t get hold of anything here, it disappears it’s a mirage.
If we are attracted to a person or object we shall always find on scrutiny that the attraction is due to some kind of pleasure, physical, emotional or mental. We may become addicted to a particular kind of food because we find it pleasant; we become attached to a person because we derive from him some kind of pleasure physical or emotional. We may be devoted to a particular pursuit that gives us intellectual satisfaction. Our consciousness experiences pleasure through the mind as all sensations are in the brain not in the body, it becomes a double consciousness called the Siamese Twins which means all human experiences go through a pendulum known as the dual scale of maya which balance every pleasure with a pain. We must deal with health, disease, joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, success and failure therefore, how do you get out of here? By gradually ascending through the spine, you begin to move higher and higher until you are locked up at the point between the eyebrows. At this point the whole universal pendulum starts swinging at you and it is the state where you are no longer affected by the dual scale. This centered state is Kriya Yoga.
This is you and me; the story of your life and mine and we reincarnate until we have finally understood what we are being told. As long as you want to keep creating desires such as I like this, I don’t like that, you are stuck. Repulsion binds us as much as attraction does and as I said before hate is stronger than love in this planet. In the sixteenth century through 1965 a professor at Columbia University found out we have only known two hundred and sixty five years of peace in three thousand years.
The breath with its two fold currents of positive attractive and negative repulsive currents are totally responsible for the enslavement of our consciousness. The moment you are born when you come out of your mother and you take your first breath this is what happens to you; the influx of the innumerable cosmic currents into by way of the breath causes the restlessness in the mind, that means the moment we are born the mind takes control, the breath takes over and completely blindfolds us. It is the human breath which knots the soul to the body.
It is not evident that exhalation and inhalation resulting from the two battling spinal currents give men the perception of the external world. The duel breath is the storm which creates rebellious waves of sensations in the lake of the mind. This sensation also produces body consciousness and duality and obliterates the unified soul consciousness. There is no substitute either you lead a worldly life and you don’t care about meditation or you may lead a very worldly life and still meditate. There lies the choice if you still meditate and you are deeply involved with the world, ultimately God will come to your rescue. When you say “Lord I have trapped myself in countless desires which now I have to fulfill, help me to get rid of them as fast as I can.”
There is no other path which requires so much intensity than the path of yoga because you need a colossal acuity of awareness to focus into the darkness of the subconscious mind. If you take marijuana it will take you a hundred years before you can have any of that kind of acuity. Some think that taking drugs several times a week is perfectly harmless, wrong; this is what is called false reasoning for that is enough for you to alter your genetic-code and affect your astral-blueprints. If you take any drugs or drink anything which begins to desensitize your cells or anesthetize them the mind becomes corrupted. As drugs definitely affect the brain, by abusing your body, by transgressing health laws and indulging in smoking marijuana or taking drugs, you could suffer from mental illness or other birth defects by altering the DNA code of your physical body affecting your astral-blueprints in future incarnations.
There is what we call the great control, to begin to drink less and less, smoke less and less, eat less and less meat, touch less and less of all the poisonous substances of this world. Start to purify your body and that is quite a job on this planet. Take a look in any mental hospital and see all the sick people who have no idea of why they are there.
The master tells us the breath links him with the fleeting phenomenal world to escape from the sorrows of transitoryness and to enter the blissful realm of reality the yogi learns to quite the breath by scientific meditation, however meditation alone is not enough, the depth of meditation is intimately related with the attitude of the minds emotional attachments and now it comes to the core your likes and dislikes in life, towards people, situations, and food. Those are the great magnetic mine fields which draw to you everything you like and dislike and when the yogi becomes completely neutral. What kind of a state is that? It is a very beautiful state.
If you want to climb the Eiger the highest and most deadly mountain in Switzerland you are not going to take two hundred pounds on your back, you have to lighten up. You have to make room for God and mind you, you say “well in this lifetime I have too many responsibilities.” That’s correct, you say to yourself “I have too many desires” don’t say “I can’t do it, say I won’t do it.” Therefore every one of us sooner or later comes to the conclusion we have to follow the instructions, that is don’t come to me and say “I don’t want to reincarnate again” because I am going to tell you again; if you don’t want to reincarnate this is what you will have to follow. You will have to conquer death through pranayama and pratyahara before you leave the body because that exalted state of meditation requires you to be in the breathless state which means when you begin to meditate you no longer breathe for periods of time.
Now don’t forget you are not fighting alone, when you make the slightest effort God comes to your rescue but you have to be willing to be steady and not say “I have a terrible meditation, I don’t get any results, I feel nothing, I hear nothing, I see nothing.” You can say that for a hundred years. You have to quit saying that. You say “I surrender myself to God,” then you don’t worry what is going to be given to you. If you have to wait fifty years in meditation with no results you keep going just the same to prove to God that you want Him and Him alone.
First you must learn this: Do you know when love is going to succeed in this planet? In a higher age in Treta Yuga in Setya Yuga in about two to four thousand years when the savages and barbarians are all gone, when they are not allowed to be reborn in such a planet because the vibrations are too high. In the meantime, the good, the bad and the ugly will all be here with you. Did Jesus succeed with his infinite love to convert the Romans, did Mahatma Gandhi convert the Muslims and Hindus not to kill each other, did Martin Luther succeed with his love? The master tells us there will be at least two thousand more years of wars on this earth.
I am going to challenge your spiritual intelligence. How much do you truly know about Self-Realization? Try to follow and if you don’t understand anything that means you really have to study the teachings of the masters. I’m especially addressing those who have received Kriya Yoga, the technique for burning off karma for those who have taken a vow and received a technique which was hidden in the temples throughout the millenniums in various civilizations and given only to he who vows to sacrifice all in the quest of the divine who is fit to unravel the final mysteries of life through the science of meditation. From the talks of Turiyananda, see his other articles.
