We asked that question because that is a wonderful ideal, but in consulting our history books, it seems that all the world has ever known is war, war, war! A group of people interested in peace-representatives from America, Europe, Egypt, India, and other countries got together to put the events of 6,000 years of recorded history on a computer, so they could calculate the number of years when there was peace in the world. Do you know what they found? A total of 290 years; the rest of the time there was war going on someplace. And because many conflicts haven’t survived in any historical record, I think it likely that they erred on the positive side!
Not so long ago the United Nations declared a year as the Year of Peace, and during that year five million people were killed in various wars through out the world. In the Puranas, the mythology of ancient India, we find accounts of the period even before human beings came on the scene, when the earth was inhabited by the devas, the gods, and the asuras, the demons. They fought each other constantly!
After seeing how the different animals behave with fighting and killing we asked the Master Paramahansa Yogananda why Nature would allow such terrible violence among those creatures. He said,”Well, you should see what’s going on in the ocean! Everybody is eating everybody else!” War and conflict are part of the very nature of creation. No creation is possible without duality, opposing forces— darkness and light, pleasure and pain, life and death, war and peace. So what about our ideal of peace on earth? Is it realistic? We cannot change the basic setup of creation, which is duality. But we do have the freedom to change our own consciousness, to rise above duality or wait two thousand years, yes we will have wars for that long.
This is duality. Since God needed some bricks to build his universe; he built the entire universe as light but at the same time we have cosmic darkness. Where is that light? That light is right between the eyebrows. To those who meditate do you see any light? Most of us see nothing but darkness, complete darkness and that is the Kali Yuga state. You want to meditate and you get so bored with it then you quit because you see nothing, feel nothing and hear nothing.
When God stirs the galaxy and solar systems it makes a sound, a great sound of Aum. There are two powers within that sound: attraction and repulsion. There is beautiful music like the music of Mozart and there is heavy metal and rap. One leads you to an uplifting mood and the other leads you down the drain. The whole universe is made of a positive and negative approach in everything as stated above.
Furthermore we have cosmic wisdom in order to create religions to unite all beings under one God. We have cosmic wisdom but we do not know. The role of every religion in the world is to teach union, but instead of teaching cosmic wisdom, they are teaching separateness and cosmic confusion. There are endless wars between religious people in the name of one God, and everybody is willing to kill each other and die for their religion. Suicide bombers are killing themselves and others thinking they are going to heaven by dying for their beliefs. Mankind has great knowledge but absolutely no wisdom. That is duality.
Anybody we hurt on the other side of the earth affects us all physically. It is like hitting your foot with a hammer and oh! my head hurts. Everything happening on this globe today affects our daily life in thoughts, words, feeling and actions.
We have cosmic love and cosmic hate and these forces keep every nation separated from each other with different customs, different languages and different everything that causes total confusion. We have cosmic joy and then we have cosmic sorrow. People suffer separation at death because the concept of death creates universal sorrow. The concept of death stems from the greatest ignorance of who we are. Therefore, when we lose a child, a father, or a mother, we grieve, when we experience death. We need to realize we are immortal. In the future this concept will not even exist.
There is cosmic peace and there is cosmic unrest that is not perpetual motion but perpetual commotion. There are people that the moment they enter a room they become perpetual commotion. We have unrest everywhere. Then there is cosmic beauty and cosmic ugliness in human behavior towards one another. Torturing in concentration camps and the devastation of world war two are perfect examples of cosmic ugliness, oppression, and dictatorship and so on. Then there is cosmic love and cosmic hate. Worshiping God with the mind no matter what type of yogi we are will endlessly put us through the experience of these dualities. As long as we worship God with our ego no matter how advanced our ego is we will experience duality.
There is a certain kind of yoga meditation devoid of these dualities and that is cosmic bliss. If one can make the effort to anchor oneself in that which is changeless one may obtain that cosmic bliss which is nothing else but one’s own soul divine nature. You could be looking half of your lifetime for happiness excepting to find some external circumstances to bring you peace, joy and bliss. For the spiritually uninformed, pursuing to acquire useless desires instead of your real needs is not the way. Happiness does not work that way; it springs forth from the base of the spine and trickles upward to the brain when you are in tune. Yoga meditation (Kriya Yoga) is the road to that bliss. The reason so many people take drugs is to regain the lost joy buried deeply in the subconscious mind and instead bring upon themselves ill health and misery.
We can experience all these states of God without duality. To seek God, put your mind (ego) aside, shut-off the five senses and look at the door of the infinite at the point between the eyebrows. There is this hidden stairway that will take you up there where God can be perceived without duality known as the spiritual eye.
Why are we meditating? What are we trying to achieve when the great sages and spiritual masters from India say there are two kinds of people in the world? There are those who meditate and seek God and those who don’t. Those who meditate, have a clear advantage over those who do not meditate. In meditation the conscious mind is used as an instrument through which the soul transmits knowledge to our physical brain. This instrument then gradually establishes a close relationship with the soul until they become literally one and knowledge merges into wisdom. Visualization is not meditation or a form of it. Meditation is not thoughts; it is focusing your attention on the object of meditation. For example, if you want to know what a lake is, you can jump into the lake, swim into the lake and absorb into the lake.
Likewise, meditation is absorbing oneself into the object of meditation. True meditation is absorption in God and it has absolutely nothing in common with the unscientific techniques of breathing taught by a host of ill-advised zealots. During meditation you must break the connection between the body and the mind. As long as you are conscious of your body you cannot go deep into meditation. You have to have complete forgetfulness of your body and that means a “state of absolute immovability.” As long as you move even once, like to scratch yourself, you have broken that magnetic field and you have to start over again at that point to gain depth in meditation.
Desires constantly agitates the meditator and wisdom can only be perceived when one stops moving. Intuition comes the moment you are still to guide you. That is why some people quit meditating; they cannot go deep enough to gain any results therefore they lose interest. Some have what is called the yo-yo syndrome; this alternating condition is when two tendencies over power each other than alternately like two lovers who sometimes become angry affect alternately with deep enthusiasm for meditation and then sudden dryness and indifference, then in one moment they get very interested and drop everything else.
It is impossible to resist the temptation of this world unless we have something better given to us through the practice of meditation. Meditation is the cultivation of concentration upon the spiritual eye. The moment your eyes go down you fall asleep and lean forward like many do when concentration is not locked up at the point between the eyebrows. You cannot enter into these higher states of consciousness until the ego becomes relaxed. The western mind is so intellectually uptight that it has to rationalize everything; that is why it takes a long time before we can feel anything. We must go beyond the ego self to be able to relax and to experience real feelings. No wonder we are unable to love one another!
When this universe was created by God there were two aspects revealed, one was the fatherly/masculine aspect and the other was the motherly/feminine aspect. With closed eyes you visualize the illimitable vast space where you notice nothing but pure wisdom wherein this infinite sphere there is zero creation, no planets or stars but only the Father aspect of God. This is what is called the Absolute beyond creation which is unreachable by human thought. However in permeating all atoms of this universal structure expressing Himself in Nature and in man we find Him approachable and near in every creature.
Now with open eyes you peer into the heavens and see Her which we behold as nature, her dazzling stars, the sky, the Milky Way, flowers, clouds, birds mountains and the limitless beauties of Divine Mother or the Mother aspect of God. In Her nature you find Her full of kindness, gentleness, beauty and tenderness. In looking upon all Her good in nature we experience within us a feeling of gentleness and love. Now you can understand why many devotees pray to the forgiving motherly aspect of God then the fatherly aspect which many feel to be stricter with His laws.
When Divine Mother is going to outstretch Her hand to caress you the gloom you feel is just the shadow of Her hand before it reaches you. So when the first sign of trouble appears don’t think you are being punished. Her overshadowing hand will hold blessings as it reaches out in bringing you closer to Her. She never forsakes anyone. When praying to Divine Mother in Her aspect there is no retort.
