WHY MEDITATE
YOU ARE NOT APART FROM DIVINITY
You are the soul. You are nothing but the soul. You do not possess a soul; you do not possess a mind; you do not possess a body. You are the body, you are the mind, you are the soul, and at the same time, you are Divine.
You are seeking, consciously or subconsciously, or even, according to Jungian theories, unconsciously, you are seeking happiness. You are seeking peace; you are seeking joy. Why should you seek this when you are already joy and already peace? You are not apart from Divinity. If Divinity is omnipresent, then that omnipresence exists within each cell of your body. Billions of cells in your body contain that Divine Force. You cannot lift a finger without that Force being present. But you lack recognition of the cognition that you really are.
There is no separation between you, your environment, and the real Self that exists within you. The delusion only comes when you regard yourself to be separate from that which Is. You regard yourself to be separate from reality and dwell in the field of unreality. It is a fixture of your personal imagination that tells you I am separate from the Divine. It is your imagination, your illusion, your delusion that creates the misery and unhappiness within you, and yet right behind there, somewhere you are questing, you are searching for that joy and peace. If that joy and peace did not exist within you, then there would be no search. Because of its very existence within you, you are trying to discover it.
We call our organization the International Foundation for Spiritual Unfoldment. Remember the word “unfoldment” and not spiritual “development.” You are fully spiritually developed as you are, and you only require unfolding.
YOU CAN BE NON-ELSE, BUT THE REALITY
Every person is a unique individual being. Where did this individualization come from when the entire universe exists in total wholeness? Is your individualization illusory? Is it delusion? Where I regard myself to be I, me, mine. That is where we miss the point because you are not what you regard to be you. What you regard to be you is that conditioned, patterned mind that says, I am Mary, I am John, I am James, I am Dick, I am Tom. But you are neither of those. You think you are Tom; you think that you are John, you think you are Jean. Where does this John, James or Jean come from? What is your reality? What gave you this name and form that calls you yourself John or James or Jean? Is it not but name and form superimposed upon the real Self, which is you the Divine Self?
You can be non-else but the reality, for if Divinity is omnipresent and the true reality, then what are you? A dream. A superimposition upon that which is real. To find the real you, you must get rid of the superimposition. You must get rid of the idea of me and mine. For you are neither me nor are you mine. You are non-possessed by anything. All the miseries and the sufferings begin with this idea: this is my table, this is my chair, this is my wife, this is my beloved, this is my son, my daughter. Yet, how can you possess anything else when you cannot even possess yourself?
THE INNER QUEST IS TO FIND THE TOTALITY
To come to that realization of non-possession, you have to become an integrated being. 99.999 percent of people in this world live a fragmented life. One thought pulls this way, the other thought pulls that way, and a third thought pulls somewhere else. Fragmentation. And that brings up the question of techniques, how you can integrate yourself—integration, which means that your body, mind and spirit work in total harmony, in totality.
We are not living the totality that we are, which is the cause of all our sufferings and miseries, and the inner quest is to find the totality. When you cannot find the totality, what happens to you?
Dissatisfaction. You are not satisfied with anything. The search becomes so external all the time. You have a five-room house, so you want a ten-room house. You have a Cadillac, so you want a Rolls Royce. You have five million in the bank, so you want ten million, so erroneously you think that this is going to bring you that joy and happiness. Possessions – me and mine – superimposed upon the reality that you are.
The idea of that little self, that little egocentric self, that little ego self makes you think that the whole universe revolves around you; you think you are so important. How do we get away from the idea of the ego-self? That is where spiritual techniques come into play. Spiritual techniques do not destroy your ego. The ego cannot be destroyed. There is nothing in Heaven or Earth that is destructible. Every atom is eternal and immortal. Even when you discard this little body, the body only disintegrates to flow back into its original elements: air to air, ether to ether, dust to dust. By dying, you are doing a great favour to all the insects in the ground where you get buried. So, even in death, you are serving a purpose.
THE EGO-SELF CAN BE REFINED
The ego-self comes between you and your real Self, the small “s” standing in the path of the large universal “S,” which you are. What shall we do with this damn ego? You cannot destroy it, and it is there all the time. But one thing can be done; the ego-self can be refined. The ego-self of man is like a piece of rubber: very opaque, and the Light cannot shine through. By refinement of the ego, we stretch that rubber, so it becomes transparent, and the inner Light, the Kingdom of Heaven within, shines in its fullest glory through the various layers of your mind and to your body.
When there is no destruction at all in this world or this universe, how could you destroy anything? Creation is creation. There is no destruction but a dissolution, where elements return to their original form. It gets dissolved but not destroyed. The ego-self of man is never destroyed, but its energies can be sent back to where it belongs. Whatever is negative will be sent back to negativity, and positive can be sent back to positivity. Thereby you develop neutrality, and this neutrality is the cleansing of oneself, where the opaqueness is lost, and transparency is there for that inner lights to shine through.
WHY MEDITATE
In our techniques, we use the conscious level of the mind, the left hemisphere of the brain, the analytical section of our minds, the rationalizing section of the brain. Through spiritual practices, we take the left hemisphere of the brain and combine it to the right hemisphere of the brain, where there is a far greater synaptic control. Where those neurons buzz and form a unified brain.
The left hemisphere is the analytical one, the rationalising one, which tells you, I like this, and I do not like that, and this is good and bad. But the right hemisphere is the intuitional side of your brain, directly connected to your mind’s superconscious level.
You have the conscious mind. Then you have the subconscious mind, which is a repository of all your memories since this universe began, and you draw from these memories. Going into the cubbyholes of the subconscious mind is always stimulated by your environment. You say this is a flower. How do you know this is a flower? Because you have experienced a flower, and using the energies of the conscious mind, you go back into the subconscious and draw out the file, the dossier. Ah, this is a flower. That is how recognition takes place. You know the flower. Knowing the flower is cognition, but comparing it again when seeing another flower is a recognition of what you have already cognised.
But that is not the end of the story. That is not where it ends. There is a deeper level within yourself which I term the Superconscious Mind. The unstained, untainted, clear mind in yourself. Where like a windowpane, so clean that when the Light within shines through it, then the windowpane is not noticed, only the Light is noticed, and yet the windowpane exists. The powerful Light of your Spiritual Self shines through, and your entire being becomes permeated when that shines through. The subconscious mind, the conscious mind, the physical body, everything is permeated by that Light, which can be achieved through spiritual practices. You just have to dive deep within yourself. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven within, and all else shall be added unto thee.” But what we do is that we try to add all else to us first, and then when we are in trouble, we try to find the Kingdom of Heaven within. We are idiots, are we not?
By a systematic, scientific process of spiritual practices, you reach deep within yourself. You go through all the layers of the analytical brain. You go through all the layers of the subconscious mind, which is nothing else but a storehouse of memories, all thought forms since the present cycle of the universe began, and you get a direct line, a hotline to the Superconscious level of yourself which is at the subtlest form of relative life. And that is as far as you can go.
THERE IS ONLY ONE MIND
Once you reach the subtlest level of yourself, of your individual self, you will find that you are not an individual anymore. You are individual, yet you are universal at the same time, for there is only one mind. There is only one mind, and the manifestation of the Manifestor manifested this one mind. The vast resources you are endowed with! You have the entire universe in the palm of your hand. William Blake says you can find eternity in an hour. I disagree with him. You find eternity within a second. An hour is too long. For it is all here and now and nowhere else.
By tapping the inner resources of yourself, through a systematic, scientific way, you are in touch with your Universal Self, and when you are in touch with your Universal Self, you will find the individual self merging with the Universal Self. And yet, you preserve the individual self. The little salt doll mixes in the ocean and becomes one with the salt of the entire ocean. What more do you want?
In this lifetime, man can preserve his individuality and yet enjoy and experience his universality at the same time. This sounds paradoxical, but it is not paradoxical if you study it carefully. Individualization is only patternings of your mind, and when you merge the patternings of your mind into the vast pattern of universalism, then that individual patterning does not disappear but becomes a part, it merges into that universalism, and then you can truly say, “I and my Father are one.”
When your little individual self is intermixed, integrated into the Universal Self, then you can also honestly say, “love thy neighbour as thyself.” Once you merge this little I into the large I which you are, then you will find that no separation exists in anything. There is no separation. I am my brother’s keeper. Because the essence of me is the same essence within you and the same essence in the tiny ant that crawls on the floor, it is the same Force, the same life. There is only one life; there is only one way, there is only one truth.
YOU JUST NEED TO BE UNFOLDED, AND ALL JOY IS THERE
These techniques take you from fragmentation into integration, where you function in totality. We are not functioning in totality, and I could give you many examples of this. You people do not even know how to make love. You only produce children, that is all, which is a biological function. And when you do not want children, you use all kinds of other things. So, an external circumstance that your senses perceive draws you within yourself into that memory box of the subconscious mind. The outer attraction stimulates the subconscious mind, and you compare some kind of pleasurable experience. And by digging out from that cubbyhole, that pleasurable feeling or sensation, you associate it to the object of your senses, and through the mind, the body gets stimulated. That is how you make love. Is that complete love? No. You are only using the conscious analytical mind, which draws you back to the cubbyholes of the subconscious mind, and you find this stimulation, and you go to bed.
If you are an integrated person through spiritual practices, and you could combine the body, the mind and the Spiritual Self, yours, in the very act of copulation, then what happens? You disappear, the object of your love disappears, and this vast orgasm remains. You are lost. That is called lovemaking, and not lust making. Do you see the difference?
We lack in life because we refuse to recognize the factors of life, and the main factor of life is that you are an integrated being; you just need to be unfolded, and all joy is there.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang US 1982 – 33