OUR DIVINE PATH
You are on the divine path. You do not need to find the divine path, for any path you take is only to the Divine. Where else can you go? There is nowhere else to go but to Divinity, so whatever path you choose is a path to Divinity.
It will take longer if a path is chosen with twists and turns. It will take many, many, many lifetimes, and in these lifetimes, the lessons we have to learn may not be so pleasant.
What is the direct path where lessons to be learned could become pleasant and could be compacted instead of being stretched out?
Where does Divinity reside? That is the question. We usually say Divinity is everywhere, omnipresent, so in whichever direction you look, you will find Divinity, but the most straightforward direction to look is to look within, for you would know yourself better than anyone else, and that makes the path much more accessible, quicker, by looking within is the process.
OMNISCIENT, OMNIPRESENT & OMNIPOTENT
We say that Divinity is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. Being omnipresent, it is everywhere. Divinity is in the chair, the table, the flowers, and you—everywhere. Still, if one starts searching for that Divinity in all the various objects in our perception, it will take millions and billions of years to uncover it.
The outward search is not always successful unless you are a bhakti yogi, where there is total devotion to a particular object in total devotion and complete surrender! By projecting your mind outward to the object of devotion, one only mirrors oneself. Again you are brought to yourself, so the path of Divinity lies within.
THE PATH LEADS ON WITHIN
We have been teaching how to tread this path within. Meditation and spiritual practices are the path that leads one within. In these meditational processes, what obstacles do we encounter? What are the hurdles? The peaks and the valleys—they all have to be gone through. What do we do apart from just meditation—and what is meditation? When you stop meditating, then you are in meditation. This sounds paradoxical, so it requires an explanation.
I am feeling lazy today, so I am not going to meditate. That does not mean you have reached anywhere, but when you reach the totality of meditation, sitting down to meditate would not even be necessary. Life becomes like the river ever flowing on, and then that very flow of life becomes a meditation. That comes at a later stage where every action, every breath one takes, is a meditation, but at the beginning, where we start on the path, techniques are necessary to reach the goal, and then you even discard the techniques.
THE PATH OF YOGA
Yoga is a path, and by yoga, I do not mean hatha yoga. Yoga as a whole is only the start on the path of meditation. Patanjali talks of yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dhyana, dharana and samadhi. You reach Samadhi or total meditation after going through all these various limbs, but these limbs are not steps; they can be acted upon simultaneously.
Yama and niyama means restraints and observances. That is very easy, and anybody could work it out for himself. Right living, right thinking, putting in some effort to better ourselves, restraining ourselves from things which we should not do to preserve purity or things that we should do to preserve purity, those are observances and restraints.
Then we have the process of asanas—that is where hatha yoga comes in—to keep the body healthy, supple, and pliable so that you can sit and meditate without feeling tired, and the inner organs are massaged.
Pranayama regulates oneself. It regulates the rhythm in the body, for prana is not the breath you take in – most of you who have read “Raja Yoga” (Vivekananda) will know this – but it is a vital force contained within the breath. It is contained in the food that we eat. That vital force is included in everything, and pranayama is a method of capturing that vital force within ourselves to gain that energy. When one sits down in meditation, that vital energy captured within us helps the meditation. It helps dharana, which is remembrance. It helps dhyana, which is a form of meditation as well.
All these are preparations for total meditation. Reaching total meditation means one has reached the goal. The process is nothing but preparation, and this is what yoga teaches. You develop concentration, and we do that without concentrating through our Tratak practices (a visual form of meditation), followed by remembrance and contemplation.
Contemplation should be an unbroken contemplation. You try out one experiment, look at your watch, and see if you can be focused for three seconds. You try that out, and you will see how difficult it is. It sounds so easy that all your attention can be focused for three seconds. No! Within those three seconds, your mind will wander so much, so it has to be brought to a state where the mind does not wander and becomes one-pointed. Try it out for three seconds and see. If you can fully concentrate on a particular object for three seconds, you know you have reached somewhere in concentration.
By having the proper concentration, your thoughts become powerful. They become like laser beams. Then, when you sit down to meditate on the mantra with a concentrated mind, which does not require effort. Tratak teaches you that concentration without even concentrating and it brings all the mental forces together.
MEDITATION
In our meditations, all the prescribed practices are interlinked, and this is the process – they are all interlinked. You develop concentration and one-pointedness, which in turn helps your mantra meditation. You become so at one with your mantra that you automatically practice pratyahara, which means withdrawal of the senses and no distraction.
The ideal experience is that you forget the mind and the body, and nothing else remains but that vibration of your mantra. You become the mantra, for the mantra is you. For example, if we had a mechanical device that could take a person’s mind, body, and Spirit and bring it down to sound value, your mantra would be that sound. So, here you are, just the mantra – you are no more John, Jack, or Jill – you are none else but your mantra; you are the vibration.
As you progress further, the mantra becomes finer and finer, subtler and subtler, until it reaches the stage where it is neither audible nor speakable anymore – just a subtle vibration exists. Because of the previous training in concentration and contemplation, you are qualified to exist solely in that subtle vibration. And taken at its subtlest level, your vibration becomes one with the universal vibrations. Your subtle vibrations interpenetrate, permeate, and pervade every other vibration in the universe. Then you feel at onement with the entire universe.
That is not enough in the process. After feeling a total at-one-ment with the universe, you still go further where the very cognition of the universe disappears. The universe disappears, and you disappear. You become non-existent, and then you are in the Superconscious state where you have that cognition, that alertness of neither the universe nor of yourself but of the Superconscious state itself. Here, the Superconscious state experiences itself – and when it experiences itself, which is the totality of the emanation of this entire universe – you become the universe. That is the process.
NO-MIND
This is according to yoga, but that is not the end. Patanjali’s yoga sutras do not reach totality. It has its value in preparing you, and then we proceed further where even the Superconscious state disappears, and there is no cognition left. You reach a stage of no-mind.
The mind is composed of three levels: conscious, subconscious, and superconscious. Even the superconscious disappears—it dissolves away into its original elements. So, no mind is left, and when no mind is left, no universe is there, and you are not there—it is just the infinite, eternal Spirit. Do you see this long journey?
People would say, “Why must I reach into nothingness? Why the nothingness? I am enjoying things so much here. Why must I reach into nothingness where there is no experience?” No experience and no one to experience and if there is no one to experience anything, then there cannot be any experience because the experiencer is not there anymore. That is the no-mind state in this process.
FURTHER STAGE
That is still not enough. There is a stage further than that, where just Spirit remains without any form or shape, just a vast expanse that does not experience anything whatsoever but just burns unto itself for the sake of burning. The Light exists for the sake of Light. You become that luminous entity.
That is halfway through the circle. That is still not the end of the process, but in this process, you have known Divinity – you have understood what is Divine. You have gone through all the processes of how Divinity, the Unmanifest, has become manifest. From manifestation, you have now reached that which is unmanifest. But it is useless. God is useless. What do I mean by that? Is He useless? If God is not put into use, then It is futile.
THE REAL JOURNEY
Then, the real journey begins. Ahh! There is the fun! Having reached that stage, you start climbing down again along the same road that you took to reach that stage.
Here, the light is climbing down and recapturing all the experiences we have described until you become a man again—becoming a man again, but in a totally different form because that stage is beyond bliss. It is beyond knowledge—it is beyond existence, but we want knowledge, we want bliss, we want existence, so we come back. All this happens within ourselves without losing the body.
When we come back, everything assumes a different dimension. Then this table, this chair, becomes totally different. The entire chair is so luminous—the table is so luminous, shining with that all-pervading Light, and that is how the cognition occurs that Divinity is omnipresent. Otherwise, it is just a thought—it is not an experience.
Having had that experience, we come back via the Superconscious to the subconscious and then the conscious, and we start enjoying the joy we brought. Then, you have completed the full circle where that bliss is experienced—a bliss that knows no opposites. It is not pleasure because pleasure will have pain. It is a bliss that knows neither pleasure nor pain.
That is the stage man aspires to and will reach! If one can do it, everyone can, and this is quite observable with people who have eyes. It is experienceable, experiential, and yet it remains indescribable. The quality changes; the quantity remains the same, but the quality changes, and then life assumes a totally different quality.
YOU CAN DO IT HERE AND NOW
This does not require a trip to the mountains, forests, or Himalayas. It can be done here and now.
It has sounded like such a long process of going on this journey and returning home, but it is not so long because the mind and the thoughts can traverse time, millions of years, in a flicker of a moment. After all, it is already there. It is nothing that one must discover as it is only a re-discovery of what is there—discovered from the very moment it was born- forever existent!
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang US 1980 – 40
