THOUGHTS AND MEDITATION
THE IMPERSONAL VERSUS THE PERSONAL GOD
The God we pray to is the Personal God, the entire manifestation or the emanation of the Universe, and beyond the Personal God, we have the Impersonal God, that energy. Everything radiates or emanates something; the flower emanates fragrance, and everything emanates something. You are emanating something all the time. A city will be emanating, a country will be emanating, the entire world, the whole Universe is emanating, and the totality of that emanation is what we call the Personal God with attributes. But the Impersonal God, the source of the Personal God, is attributeless.
The Impersonal God is the finest of the finest energy, sub, sub, sub, sub, a million times sub-atomic energy and that Impersonal God has not created this world, but it was its very nature; it manifested the Personal God. Like the flower does not create fragrance, it is nature to give it. The sun does not produce heat; it is the nature of the sun to provide light and heat. That is how the Personal God, or the Universal Mind, was manifested from the Impersonal,
I rather like to use the words the Manifestor and manifestation. So, the Impersonal God is the Manifestor, and the Personal God or the Universal Mind is the manifestation. So that was the primal universal mind which, through various factors, I could explain to you scientifically, diversified and many of those minute atoms joined together and multiplied, and they were replicated and duplicated. That is how the world and man as we know man today came about through a long process of evolution over millions of years.
THE MEANING OF ETERNITY
The world works in cycles, the Universe works in cycles, as the human being does, as the soul uses the body for a while and drops the body, but the soul within remains eternal to assume another body. From the point of the Big Bang of the incredible explosion, the next cycle began, and the evolution started, which again will be drawn into what we call the black hole. And yet there will be fine vibrations in the Black Hole, which will build up and up and up, a form of combustion that will explode and bring forth another universe. That is the meaning of eternity because it is an eternal process, and the totality of the process is the Personal God with attributes.
ATMAN, THE INDIVIDUAL SOUL, IS BUT ONE WITH BRAHMAN, THE UNIVERSAL ENTITY
We reach the finest relative, the superconscious level, through meditation and spiritual practices, and then we reach the Personal God. You feel Him, experience Him, and then you just melt away into the impersonal energy. So, who are we praising? We are praising the Personal God. We praise the Personal God because, being the primal manifestation, we are part and parcel of Him.
There is something, and Christianity, for example, always teaches of love, peace and hope. Everyone will find that salvation, but that process can be expedited, and of course, when you pray to an object outside you, you lose consciousness of yourself and project it to something outside. In that way, you gradually become free from bondage. Everyone thinks that they are the centre of the world and the whole world revolves around them, which, of course, it does not. So, prayers are necessary in the proper systematic way. Meditation is essential, and the spiritual practices that lead you within are required. Once you can be within, that which is within and that which is outside becoming one becomes unified, and then you can say, “I am Thee.” “Thou art me.” “We art but one.” No separation.
Separation stems from creating boundaries, and we are the ones who misuse the mind; we make the boundaries. We have got to go beyond that. Certain people at certain stages need that; ninety-nine-point nine percent of the world’s population needs a Personal God, who we can worship as Krishna or Buddha or Ishvara, Allah, Christ, whatever way. But it remains the same consciousness. So, by worshipping and having that devotion to the Personal God, we reach that stage of consciousness, which can be described as Christ Consciousness. And once we get to that stage, then after that, very automatically we go to the stage of Brahman, as the Sanskritists would put it, the Impersonal God, and then when you reach there, you realise that the Atman or the individual soul is but one with the Brahman, the universal entity.
THOUGHTS ARE A NATURAL PART OF MEDITATION
As you are embodied, the mind will always be related to the body, for there is no separation between body, mind and Spirit. It is just a matter of gradation from the grossest level of the physical body to the subtlest level of the Superconsciousness. In meditation, some schools of thought tell you your mind must become blank, but that is impossible unless you become unconscious. That is easy to do. You do not need to meditate; just ask your husband to bop you in the head with a hammer. We do not want to become unconscious, but through its transmission to the lower level, we want to appreciate the joy and ecstasy within us at the higher level of the mind.
So, in meditation, the mind should not be blank; it is not meditation. It is not Dhyana. If you are on mantra meditation, you will find that as your mantra recedes away, a thought will come up, and a thought is like a story; it has a beginning, a middle and an end. And when it reaches the end, you very gently pick up your mantra again, and then you dive deep within with the mantra – and you cannot stay underwater all the time, you will drown – you cannot breathe, so you come to the surface level again. Meditation is a rhythmic procedure, thought, mantra, thought, mantra, thought, mantra. And every time you dive down, you bring up something of the calmness of the depth to the surface level where thoughts become conscious.
SAVIKALPA SAMADHI, MEDITATION WITH FORM
It is necessary to have thoughts. In Sanskrit, we would call this Savikalpa Samadhi, which means meditation with form because thought is also a form. So, it is normal and natural. You just do not force the thought; you do not analyse the thought or force the mantra. As I just said, a thought is like a story: beginning, middle and end. So, if it comes, the higher Self of you, the subtler level of your mind, watch the conscious level of the mind; you watch the thought that is in the conscious level objectively, like if you are watching a cinema screen. When you go to a cinema and watch a film, you cannot change anything in the film. You just watch, and you just observe the story that is happening.
OBSERVE THE THOUGHTS WITHOUT BECOMING A PARTICIPANT
That is what we learn to do with our thoughts. We become the observers of thought and not participants of the thought. When you are not a participant of the thought but an observer of the thought, then that very thought does not leave an impression upon the subconscious areas of your mind. In our search to find that “Kingdom of Heaven within,” in meditation, we are removing all those impressions and samskaras and clearing away those veils. The best way to clear away the veils is to observe the thoughts when they come up, like on the screen, without becoming participants.
For example, say an angry thought comes up in your mind, then you watch the anger and let it play out its game there as anger, but you do not become emotionally involved in the anger. And if you have to be angry, as I have said many times before, be angry with anger. That is how it works. So when thoughts come, let them come and let them go, dive down, come to the surface, dive in, come to the surface.
NIRVIKALPA SAMADHI, MEDITATION WITHOUT FORM
The other form of meditation beyond that is Nirvikalpa Samadhi, Samadhi without form, thought, or Kalpa, Nirvikalpa. Then you are in the area of the Impersonal God. You cannot remain in that area. For example, Ramakrishna, an incredible Sage who died at the turn of the 18th century, said that if you stay in Nirvikalpa Samadhi for twenty-one days, your entire body will disintegrate.
Through meditation, we dive deep down and draw from that energy, and it helps us live a more harmonious life because, like all energies, it also requires some kind of expression. So, if you bring forth that pure, powerful energy, then all your actions become pure and potent; because it is harmony, you become more and more harmonious. And when you are in harmony within yourself, everything around you automatically becomes harmonious, too.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang UK 1983 – 14