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Instill in us a wholesome, happy mind, with goodwill
and understanding. Then shall we ever delight in your friendship like
cows who gladly rejoice in meadows green. This is my joyful message.
Rig Veda 10.25.1. VE, P. 302

Monday
LESSON 113
Living In Spirit
Stress is a consequence of the technological age,
and these days everybody is talking about stress. Stress and strains of
a fast-paced and demanding modern age affect every organ of the body. A
calm mind, a peaceful mind, is needed to encompass changing times.
Times are changing very rapidly. To cope with these changes, we have to
rely on ourselves to keep a balance of physical, mental, emotional and
spiritual life. Our religion has ways to combat stress and the diseases
it causes, ways to avoid the mental anguish which this fast-paced world
brings about. These pressures did not exist in the agricultural age.
Things were more relaxed then. All we had to do was plant our crops and
wait for the harvest. Plant and wait. Plant and wait. And in-between
there was plenty of time for religious activities.
But life in
the technological age is a life of constant work, constant activity,
all of the time. So, we tend to set religion aside just when we need it
the most. We have to rely on our religion to keep a balance in our
life. It is a proven fact that religious people can cope with stress
and strain better than nonreligious people. The answer to stress is not
to take a pill to be able to relax. The answer is not to give up the
temple, not to give up the culture, not to give up the scriptures which
put everything into perspective, not to give up the art of meditation
and the practices of yoga.
Spiritual things you must
understand with your heart, with your feeling. Feeling and thinking,
working together, give you that deep understanding that you need to
cognize the wisdom of the spirit. All you can do in living your life
every day is to make today just a little bit better than yesterday was.
You will then have confidence in yourself, so that tomorrow will be all
right, too, and you won't fear the tomorrows. Why? Because in striving
to make today the perfect day of your lifetime, you bring through your
spirit. You allow the spirit, God, to permeate through all layers of
your mind.
At our sunrise pilgrimage this morning to the top
of Mount Tamalpais we had over thirty devotees. It was a beautiful,
inspiring time. Let me explain to you just a little bit what we were
researching together on the mountaintop. Your thoughts sometimes
literally flood your body or flow through your body. Sometimes you find
your thoughts spinning and jumping from here to there. You don't know
where they come from, and they confuse you as they flow through your
body or your brain. Just as thought can flow through the body, so can
spirit, or God, flow through the intuitive, the intellectual and the
instinctive mind. When your thoughts flow through the body, your body
becomes either dejected and heavy, or light and happy, depending upon
the nature of your thinking. Affirmations can help you to improve the
patterns of your thought and feeling. You have to repeat certain
affirmations for certain lengths of time to produce a certain result.
Every word -- and the meaning of each word if you know the meaning --
has a certain vibration. As a thought goes into motion, it permeates
your nervous system and gives you a particular feeling. Just as your
thoughts and your words can make your body feel a certain way, in the
very same way the spirit, or God, flowing through the mind, can
illumine and does illumine the mind and purify it.
In facing
your past, if your past is not exactly what you would like to look at,
and you look at it and still react to it, you will create today as a
day much worse than yesterday. You will not be living the spiritual
life. But if you seek first the spirit within you each day, and make
the day a little bit better than yesterday, you flood the spiritual
being of you, the real you, through the mind. And you wipe away and
clarify much of the past and bring much understanding through your
mind.
What is responsible for negative reactions of the
subconscious mind? Simply the transgressions that you have caused
against the natural laws of the mind, that's all. If you transgress the
laws of the physical body, eat the wrong things, behave in the wrong
way, your physical body will suffer because of it. If you transgress
the natural laws of the mind, hurt another instead of help another,
discourage instead of encourage another person, then your mind will
suffer. A part of the mind goes out of control, and that is called
being emotional. The emotions are a part of the mind out of control.
They gain a momentum of their own and eventually take over the entire
mind. But when the will of the spirit comes up and controls the
emotional nature, the emotions subside for a period of time until they
gain momentum again. This goes on sometimes all through life.
Tuesday
LESSON 114
Are You Ready?
When you control your emotions, you are bringing
through your spiritual being. It is only your spiritual being, your
soul in action, bringing through the spirit, or bringing through God,
that can control the mind. When you are living in an emotional state,
you are only experiencing the mind temporarily out of control. And like
anything that gains its own momentum, even if you do not control it, it
will subside automatically after a period of time until it builds up
again. This is all caused by subtle transgressions of natural laws of
the mind, in this life and in previous lives.
There are many
subtle laws. For instance, if you are planning to do something for
someone and then you decide for some reason that you won't, all of the
spiritual power that you had previously brought through from your
spiritual being will be coagulated and blocked by your hesitation. Then
tomorrow will not be as good as today was. It will be worse.
To
keep your spirit flowing, always allow yourself to be in the line of
understanding. In other words, do not allow misunderstanding to arise
in your mind. Should misunderstanding arise, sit down, be quiet and do
not get up until you understand the problem. You might have to sit for
an hour. Instinctively your animal nature will not allow you to do
that, but if you use willpower and persist, tomorrow will be a perfect
day. Now, this is easy to talk about, and also easy to understand, but
it takes a very discerning mind, utilizing the power of discrimination,
to master these laws of the mind.
Train your mind to awaken
the spiritual being. This is as difficult to do as it is to train a
person to dance or to swim, or to accomplish any athletic feat
requiring a highly trained body. You have to always be the master, and
be attentive to your goals in life.
What is your goal in this
life? Is your goal to sit and wallow in the emotions? Is it to memorize
a lot of things that different people have said so you can quote from
them? Or is your goal in life to find first your Infinite Being within
yourself? If you could only once gain just a glimmer of your true Being
-- the spiritual Being flowing through the mind which you always
thought was you. Instead, you have things that you have to do that you
haven't done, things that you will do, and things that you will not do,
things that you haven't made up your mind to do as yet and things you
thought you would like to do but decided you wouldn't do. All of this
is going on as a process within yourself, and it keeps you nicely
confused.
A confused mind creates the form to which you give a
name, and you become Mr. or Mrs. Somebody from Somewhere. You go along
like that for years and years until all of a sudden you drop dead and
give up the physical body. Then what happens? What happens to this mind
that is so concerned about "What will my friends think?" All of these
various concepts that make up your personality, when you lay down your
physical body and die, just what happens to them? Are you ready for
that experience of death? You should always be ready, especially
nowadays when the opportunities are so great. Always be ready,
spiritually ready.
Are you spiritually ready? Have you done
your duty to your family? Have you done your duty to your temple? Have
you done your duty to yourself? Or do you shirk some of your
responsibilities? It's not up to your swami to know all those
things about you. Somebody once said, "Well, Gurudeva just knows
everything about me." What good does that do? It's up to you to take a
running total on yourself, daily, through feeling. You can't do it
through thought; you'll get all mixed up. Are you ready to become a
spirit, a spiritual being, an illumined mind, at the moment of death?
Or at the moment of death are you ready to become a completely
confused, congested mass of gaseous matter, which is what a confused
mind looks like? These are vital religious questions that the
individual must face and find the answers to.
Wednesday
LESSON 115
You Must Purify Yourself
Ask yourself, "Have I followed all the good advice given me?" You come to hear my upadesha.
Your coming is the asking for advice. You get advice, and many of you
ignore it and you have your own opinion. If you have your own opinion,
why come? Opinions are just of the instinctive and intellectual mind.
Most opinions are only moldy concepts! You come to have your opinions
changed. You come to have them changed from within you through your own
spiritual insight. But if you come with the armor of your opinions,
then you are very foolish. You might as well stay home and live with
your opinions, because there will be no spiritual progress or
unfoldment for you for many, many years, maybe many lives.
Ask
yourself these vital questions. What are you going to do with the past
that keeps bothering you and sometimes makes today a hell on Earth for
you? It is really easy to transcend this state of mind. Just remember
and try to understand that the spirit within you flows through you,
flows through the mind, like water flows through the Earth. If you
build barriers, then you fight your own spiritual Being flowing through
you. You develop qualities of jealousy, hatred, anger, revenge, and
malice. Negative qualities are just congested masses of mind-stuff that
are temporary and do not allow the spirit to flow through. If you have
negative qualities as boulders in your mind, the spirit cannot flow
through you; but as it tries to flow through, it will automatically set
a part of your mind out of control, and you will be emotional. You
can't help it.
So, you must purify yourself. You purify
yourself by being kind to others, being generous until it hurts, being
benevolent, being ready to serve at all times until you are strained in
serving. Put a smile on the faces of other people. Gain your happiness
and your positive states of mind by making other people happy. Negative
people are always worried about themselves. Positive people are
concerned with the happiness of others. Be strong enough to understand,
and do not allow yourself to sleep at night until you have understood
the problems of the day. If you go to sleep with problems on your mind,
you will go into a confused state of mind, and you will toss around and
later say, "That is just the dream world" or "I had a nightmare." All
you did was lose your consciousness in a troubled subconscious state.
But if you practice yoga, and you sit and master each problem
before falling asleep, even if it takes you several hours, you will
gain enough rest for the next day, for you will have made this day a
perfect day.
If you refuse to do what you should do when you
have the chance to do it, what hope is there for anybody else who does
not even know what he should do? If you resist a spiritual life,
possibly the responsibility for others falls on your shoulders, because
everything starts with the one and multiplies into the many. It
behooves you to understand very acutely and discriminatingly these
basic principles and immediately put them into action in your life.
Seize every spiritual opportunity you have to advance your soul,
because when you do, the reaction is glorious on you. But when you
resent and when you fight within yourself, the reaction is disastrous
unto yourself, because you lose the battle when you begin to fight your
own inner Self. You win the battle when you begin to express yourself
spiritually, when you begin to live with Siva.
Thursday
LESSON 116
Daily Mental Maintenance
Shall we all close our eyes for just a moment and
think and feel what living with Siva really means? When you are tired
of playing in the emotions, that will indicate that your soul is ready
to take over and control the lower states of mind. Siva is always
within you, always there. Through silence, quieting your mind, you can
become That which you truly are and shine out through that which you
thought you were. Your experience will have a healing effect upon the
mind and burn away the past. Intensify the spirit within you and heal
any wounds that the mind may have. As Mother Nature heals the body, so
does Siva, the Self, heal the mind. Give yourself in to the real you.
Turn your mind inward. Turn your will inward and live that glorious
spiritual life and be ready as a spiritual being to meet the experience
of death.
Morning pujas are excellent opportunities
for you to practice self-discipline, to offer yourself opportunities to
change, to alter the habit patterns that have been built into your mind
during the year. In these early morning meditations, you may learn to
cease criticizing yourself and begin having a greater understanding of
yourself. When you learn to stop criticizing yourself, you are able to
appreciate the many experiences that you have been through during the
year, rather than regretting them. Regret possibly is an experience
more harmful than the experience you have been regretting. Some people
actually live by a righteous code of ethics which offers a
justification for constantly hurting themselves through regret, guilt
or related emotions. Through your meditation you will appreciate your
experiences for what they are -- good or difficult. Simply make a
resolution not to repeat the difficult ones and have faith enough to
correct what your experiences have caused in the world as a result of
your going through them. The first step in learning to rejuvenate your
mind is being able to look objectively at your experiences. You will
find this difficult to do, because you are so closely associated and
identified with your mind. The mind claims you, and therefore you think
that your experiences are the real you, but they are not.
After your morning puja,
take five minutes to write down on a piece of paper those things which
disturb you. Write concisely and honestly, without reason or
justification, what is burdening your subconscious mind. In doing so,
you will release yourself from the reactions to those experiences. Burn
the paper in a fireplace or garbage can (not in your shrine room), and
realize that the experience is complete, finished, except for the
wisdom which you have now derived from it. You will find that this
practice, known in Sanskrit as vasana daha tantra, does much to
make your subconscious transparent and give you a greater power and
control over your mind. Making the subconscious mind transparent is a
basic religious practice. Only when this is first done is it possible
to make progress in seeking God. Try now to find Siva within you, the
permanent Reality that never changes.
Sri Ramakrishna, the
great Indian saint, compared the mind's turning inward, seeking to
connect itself to God, with the image of a little boy holding on to a
rope tied to a post. The little boy swings on the rope and it winds him
around and around the post. Then he swings the other way, still holding
on to the rope, and the rope wraps him around the post again. The
little boy represents man simply having fun and enjoying the
experiences of life. He is perfectly safe as long as he holds on to the
rope and the rope is connected to the post, for the post is God, and
That doesn't move. The little boy we would call mind. The rope
connecting mind to God is the soul, the indomitable will. And so, Sri
Ramakrishna went on to say, if man turns his mind inward and keeps his
mind looking within, he will see the reality of Spirit and the
transient nature of all of the mind's activity. He may live in and
enjoy the activity of the mind and never be hurt or harmed so long as
he holds on to that rope, maintains his inward vision constantly and
holds himself connected to the permanence of his own Being.
Friday
LESSON 117
To Realize the Spirit Within
When you have nothing in your subconscious that
particularly bothers you, it is easy to turn the mind inward. But if
you are bothered or disturbed, the subconscious acts as a barrier and
makes it difficult to turn within. When you try to do so, up from the
subconscious come all the remnants of the experiences which you hold on
to through regret. If this is the case, you will have one more
experience to go through before your mind does turn within. You will
have to experience the understanding of all your experiences -- not
through analysis, not through, reason (although the "whys" may come to
you intuitively), but through the higher experience of pure
understanding. You will find it is possible to have an understanding of
yourself without going through the process of analysis.
A
disturbed mind which is not permeated with Sivaness is strong in a
negative sense, strong in that it will keep you from the realization of
God. When the mind is disturbed, it is outwardly strong. The mind that
is not disturbed is inwardly strong. Your inner strength is always more
dependable than your outward display of strength. When you have gained
your inner strength, you will be able to sit in meditation for at least
a half hour every day and practice being the guardian of every thought
and the ruler of every feeling within your body. If you do this, you
will realize That which is the center of your Being. You will be
uplifted, elevated, through the purification that you have brought to
your mind.
Hold your consciousness high, keep your mind alive
and alert so that your soul is alive and alert. You have heard me say
many times, "Observation is the first awakening of the soul." If your
observation is intense and accurate, your mind is not bothered and you
are not regretting things that have happened to you in the past. But
people who have poor observation often do hold on to their regrets, and
they rationalize most of what happens to them, putting the blame for
their own experiences on someone else. It is so much easier to close
the door on these reactions and live more like on a spring day rather
than in the dead of winter. Life is meant to be lived joyously. The
awakened soul is a joyous soul with a positive mind. The practice of
observation will bring you closer and closer to this state of
consciousness.
If you feel that your observation is not keen,
begin observing things more closely. Observe the different colors in a
store window. Study the shadows and the shades of color in one tree.
Listen to the sounds of the city. How many can you distinguish? What do
they mean to you? If your observation is already good, you can
participate more fully in life and find yourself living above the
dreary happenings of the day.
Recognizing that all experience
is but a fading dream, you are closer to the permanence within you that
never changes. You can sense it. It is God. It is Siva. It has never
changed. It will never change. You have all felt this permanence at one
time or another, but then perhaps you find that you lose this feeling,
this consciousness, and you drift out into the mind and find yourself
thinking again that the mind is real. But then, maybe tomorrow, you
will face it again. And as soon as you have found it, you leave it
again, for the mind cannot bear the intensity of God, and you forget
all about it. But then, a little later, you face that permanence within
you yet again. And little by little you find that you are turning
inward, opening up the inner channels more and more each day, making a
greater and greater contact with God by turning within, drawing
yourself ever closer to the pole at the center, the core of your Being.
You will go through many different tests to prove your own realization
to yourself. Face each test graciously. Welcome each test, and welcome
each temptation that shows you the strength of your will over the
chaotic senses. You have only to quiet all things of the mind to
realize your identity with the eternity of God Siva, the spirit, the
Eternal Self within you.
Saturday
LESSON 118
Overlapping Reactions
When you die, you are freed from your senses. While
you are living, you are caught up in your senses and reacting to
memories of things you wish you had or had not done. Many people live
in a constant state of overlapping reactions. They try to find peace of
mind on the outside, externally. Reactions are caused by what we have
placed in the subconscious mind that we have not fully understood.
Reactions are packed away in the subconscious mind, influencing our
everyday life, attracting our successes and failures to us. We keep
meeting blocks because of our reactions in the subconscious mind that
we set up in the past. Overcome these reactions, and opportunities will
open up and we will begin to succeed. Reaction is a natural thing,
either positive or negative. If we are reacting in a negative way, that
is because of lack of understanding; if in a positive way, that gives
us more understanding, and we become our own teacher or psychologist.
If
you do not understand your reaction to something, wait until it
subsides emotionally, so you will not be upset, then try to understand
it by writing about it in a quiet moment. Then burn the paper in an
inauspicious fire, such as in a garbage can. This vasana daha tantric
process releases or detaches the emotion from the memory. This means
that the memory of the experience no longer harbors the emotion that
was previously attached to it and vibrating twenty-four hours a day.
You will still have the memory, but without a reaction or emotional
charge attached to it.
There are many individuals who get
their security from their reactions, who make themselves disappointed
and keep themselves in a constant state of emotional vibration. Peace
of mind is not a blank state. It is not having emotion attached to the
memory patterns within the subconscious. These memory patterns, once
freed from emotion, remain at peace, and then pure contentment resides
through the entire mind. A negative reaction can be likened to a fog
over the city. You cannot see clearly because of the fog.
When
we react to something, how long does it take before it subsides? How
can we guide our lives so as to have only positive reactions? We have
to awaken a certain control over our nature. We have to anticipate what
is going to happen to us. Whether we admit it or not, we attract
everything that happens to us. What we react to, and what we have
reacted to in the past, we will create in our future. If we face
experience with understanding, we will free ourselves from recreating
past unpleasant experiences. Experience is man's greatest chain. It
holds him in a certain pattern. The chains of experience get stronger
and stronger until man enters spiritual life through the realms of
understanding. Every man must decide whether he wants to be caged in by
experience or be freed by understanding the cause of the experience.
A
negative reaction may have been set up in the mind many years ago. How
long does it take to subside? In a person with some understanding, the
initial reaction will subside in a few hours, but it takes five to
seven days before it subsides enough for him to get a complete
understanding. The average man reacts to something every day. That's
what makes him average. A reaction today, another one tomorrow, another
one the day after tomorrow, then those reactions are overlapping. To
stop these overlapping reactions, we have to sit down and face
everything that we have created for ourselves in the past and control
our circumstances until the reaction subsides.
Be on your
guard. Control your circumstances and your life. Guard your weak points
with understanding, and don't allow yourself to be put into a position
where you will react. Then you can become fully conscious of what is
within you and within your fellow man.
Sunday
LESSON 119
How to Face Yourself
Life must become positive. In reactions, man is not
his best friend. He is seeking outside for something to quiet his
nature. He is carrying his reactions with him, keeping old habit
patterns going. For a person to renovate his subconscious mind, he must
be willing to move out for awhile, redesign, rebuild, redecorate, then
move back in. This is a form of spiritual discipline. Overlapping
reactions are dangerous. Living in overlapping reactions and
understanding nothing of how to get along without them, because of no
discrimination, makes man give up.
Overcoming reaction is
easy. You can wipe it out of your life and realize the benefit of
having done so. Sit down and think. Look at your life. Look at the
tendencies within your nature which created your habit patterns and
which formed your subconscious mind and gave it the foundation for many
more of the same old situations. The tendencies will be greater in each
succeeding situation unless you apply the brakes of understanding. If
you sit down and realize the law of cause and effect and live according
to the basic laws of life, you will overcome the reactions within you.
You will be able to overcome old reactions by understanding them. More
realization will burst forth from within you, and you will live a more
spiritual life. You can either walk through a city full of fog, or
climb above it.
Thinking and believing clearly are only
possible when a man knows that he knows. When you realize something,
you only know of your realization after you have realized it, not
before. Realization is your teacher. Realize something every day, or
something will block the subconscious mind. The reactionary nature must
subside. Its death gives birth to a greater understanding. If you can
live for three weeks without reacting to anything, you will attain a
realization.
If you simply remember this without practicing
it, you will not be helping yourself or anyone else. But if you take
the law and put it into practice, you will be doing something for
yourself and your fellow man, because you will realize a greater
spiritual power, a greater humility, and be the person you should be.
Then don't react again. Discriminate as to each move you make, each
word you say, and decide whether there will be a reaction. If you can
see ahead that you will not react, proceed. Dictate to yourself, face
yourself, face your mistakes and don't make them again. Breaking
spiritual laws creates reactions in the subconscious, and man loses
spiritual power. We can find actual peace of mind in a certain place,
right here and now, within ourselves, when we overcome reactions.
Let
us look within and see if we are reacting to anything right now,
holding any resentment, holding any fear. Let us know that that is just
a gauge of experience of the instinctive nature. Loosen it and let it
go. Mentally look ahead to the future and know that everything we do
and say will have a reaction. Let us give birth to good, positive,
controlled reactions, and be sure that if they overlap, they are
transparent -- that they create a light growing brighter. Overlapping
negative reactions bring darkness, depression, and make man nervous.
We
have been delving into our consciousness. If you have understood all
this about your reactions, your subconscious mind has been impressed.
Look into your mirror. Your reflection is your subconscious mind
objectified. Find out what is holding you back. Face yourself and find
out what is keeping you from expressing the great things which are
within you here and now. After all, life is meant to be lived joyously.
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