Meditation is the art of life. All of life is meditation. Meditation is not simply a practice. It is an experience, an awareness, a way of perceiving and also a way of life. All of life, from the personal point of view, is dependent upon our perception. When we can perceive life as it really is, then no emotional cloud or discordant melody from the world can distract us from our own original, perfect being. If we trace life back to its source, we find perfection.
Life itself, in essence, is light and consciousness.
Beyond this world and other worlds, beyond time and space and dimension, beyond what we call duality, is God.
God is not a person. God does not have a history. God does not have a future. God is beyond definition. We can say that your perception of this world is God. We can say that this world is God, that perception, this world, and you who are having the perception are all part of God.
As a matter of fact, there’s nothing that isn’t God.
When we think of God, normally we have an apprehension of a celestial being. We think of a big person who lives in heaven. God is not particularly personal. God is existence. Try to redefine the word through your experiences in meditation. Let us just say that there is a all-powerful force or energy that creates all, sustains all, and draws all back into it again. This is God. It is beyond intelligence, beyond analysis.
Now, in meditation what we do is something original. We experience God. That is to say, we experience that essence of existence from which we have come forth, which sustains us and to which we will eventually return. From the point of view of meditation, there is nothing that is not God. So, when we meditate, we are participating in a spiritual experience. We are seeing that life is not perhaps as we thought, but a little bit different—vastly different.
The results of meditation vary. It depends upon many, many different things. Have you meditated in your past lives? How hard are you trying to meditate? How long have you been meditating in this life, or are you just starting? How old are you? What condition is your psyche in? What kind of influences do you have around you? Who are the people like, that you associate with—your family, friends, acquaintances, people you work with or study with? All of these people have fields of energy and through your association with them, you touch those energy fields and they enter into you, as does your energy field touch and affect everyone in your life.
All of these things affect us. Our past affects us, our present affects us, even our future can affect us. We live in a relative world of time and space. We’re born and we die. The space in-between we call life. The space on the other side of life we call death. We’ve developed a very complex filing system for existence. We see things in terms of good or bad. We feel happiness, joy, pain, loss, guilt, remorse. And very few people are happy in this world. Most are miserable. Even in their so-called happiness, they’re unhappy because compared to what real happiness can be, the transitory happiness that most human beings experience is ephemeral; it does not last and it’s so short of complete ecstasy, of God-consciousness, of true being, that it’s almost pitiful.
You as a human being are capable of so much more than you realize. You are capable of being consciously eternal. You are not a body, or a mind, or a group of perceptions. You’re not a history or a future, or even a present. If you can look beyond the physical and the mental, you’ll see that that essence which we call God, that perfect reality which is within all things and sustains and nurtures all things and transforms all things, that essence is you.
At the moment you’re suffering from what we call maya. Maya is illusion. Maya is a Sanskrit word that suggests that we have forgotten. We’re suffering from temporary amnesia. We’ve forgotten the purpose of life, how to live life. We’ve forgotten what we are. You could be the son or the daughter of a very, very rich person, a great king, but if you were wandering in a strange land and you had amnesia, you might think yourself an impoverished beggar. If, one day, you were able to remember that you were the daughter or son of a king and if you were able to return to your land, then your poverty would fall away. You would be reinstated to your rightful place. So in life, most of us have forgotten. We’ve forgotten what our rightful place is. Our rightful place is to merge our awareness with the perfect being of existence. Anything short of that is frustration.
We live in a world of wars and war’s alarms, of famines, of oppression. While there are many wonderful people in this world, you’ll notice one curious fact about them—they all suffer, they all die. And sometimes those who are the nicest seem to suffer the most. There is an end to suffering. There is a way beyond limitation.
The way is meditation. When you meditate, you take charge of your life. You bring your conscious awareness to a new high point, where the vista, the view, is beyond any horizon. To do this you’re going to have to go through a lot of changes. We’re discussing, in other words, the fact that you are going to become perfect. Perfect awareness. And there’s a definite way to do this. There is a training program that you will go through, and it’s delightful. It’s absolutely beautiful.
When you meditate, you feel joy, harmony, peace, stillness, ecstasy, laughter, certainty, courage, strength, awareness, immortality.
In the beginning you will feel these things vaguely, a distant knocking at your castle door, but then, as time goes on, they will no longer be vague but strong and certain. In the beginning you will only feel these emotions during meditation, but as time goes on you will feel these emotions and have these perceptions constantly.
We’re going to alter the structure of our beings together. We are going to not only modify but totally change what we are. This is the possibility and inevitability that meditation offers us.
The practice of meditation is an ancient practice. It’s been practiced in many lands, for many lifetimes. You may have practiced it before, but I feel it is best in the beginning to not worry about the past or the future, or even the present too much—to approach the study for the first time. You should always feel, each time you sit down to meditate, no matter how many times you’ve meditated before, that this is your first meditation. You have no idea what will happen or what won’t happen. Only by meditating will you find out.
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So how do you meditate in the beginning? What is the process? To start with, there are some very basic considerations—time, place, condition, things like that. These are easy to learn. In the beginning, it’s good to set a time for meditation. I recommend that you meditate two times a day, in the morning and in the evening.
In the morning, after you wake up, you should take a shower and then meditate. Select a corner in your room for a meditation table. Put a rug down in front of it, perhaps, to sit on while you meditate, or a chair if you prefer sitting in a chair. You need to sit up straight, though. Have a pretty table with some candles on it. Candlelight is much easier to meditate by than incandescent light. It’s nice to keep flowers on a meditation table. Flowers are beautiful. They just bring a nicer aura of energy into our awareness; they elevate our consciousness as all things of beauty do. If you can burn incense, it will add to the ambience, the flavor of the meditation. While you can certainly meditate without a special table or candles in attractive candleholders, without incense, without flowers, these things help; they aid us in our journey. They make the journey happier and they make the journey more pleasant.
Sit down to meditate. Sit up straight. If you’re an absolute beginner, have a watch or clock handy. Set a minimum time that you will sit and meditate. In the beginning I recommend 15 minutes, if you’re just starting. You’ll sit and meditate for 15 minutes regardless of what happens or does not happen, and then at the end of 15 minutes, if you’d like to sit longer, you can. Or you can run off to work or school to start your day. But certainly, always sit for at least 15 minutes. Then as time goes on, you’ll find that you’ll add time. Fifteen minutes will go by and the meditation will just be starting to be fun. And then you’ll sit for another five minutes or another 10 minutes.
After about a month of meditation, you should work up to a half an hour a day. Then after three or four months of meditation, [sit for] 45 minutes a day. When you reach 45 minutes a day per session, stop at that level for a while. If you’re sitting and meditating and you go over that time, that’s fine, but average about 45 minutes per session twice a day, after about four months of meditation. After a year or so of meditation, bring that up to an hour twice a day.
What do you do with the time when you meditate? What are you supposed to be doing as you’re sitting there? Are you just sitting there being quiet? Are you thinking of things? What’s really going on? How does this whole meditation thing work?
There are a number of approaches to meditation. We’re trying to go into a house and there are many different doors that we can pass through. Once we pass through the door and we’re in the house, we forget about the door. We can come in the front door, the back door, or the side door. It really doesn’t matter which door—whichever is handy. The following approaches, which I’m going to outline, are only doorways. They are ways in. Once you’re actually meditating, it’s not necessary to follow the ways in.
I recommend the following practice for the first year or two or three. Each meditation session, when you sit down, relax for a moment, and consider what you’re doing. As you sit, for just a moment before you start, take a deep breath and relax. Then sit up nice and straight, either in a cross-legged position on a rug, on the floor, or in a chair.
Close your eyes, and repeat AUM. AUM, spelled a-u-m, is a mantra.
Mantras are powerful sounds which, when repeated, help clear our mind and bring us into a deeper state of meditation. Whenever you chant a mantra, you should chant it lovingly and beautifully. The sound has tremendous power. It activates our psychic consciousness; it creates a response.
To begin with, chant AUM four or seven times, or as many times as you would like, but four or seven is a good figure. Always elongate the mantra. Chant AUM as follows.
Oooohhhhh mmmmmmmmmmmm … [Rama demonstrates for 10 seconds.]
Again.
Oooohhhhh mmmmmmmmmmmm … [Rama demonstrates for 10 seconds.]
When you repeat AUM, the second part of the mantra, that is to say the “mmm” should be much longer than the “Oh.”
Try and sustain the mantra for as long as you can, but don’t overdo it.
Chant the mantra a number of times. As you do, focus your full awareness upon it. This is the beginning of your meditation session.
Now, after you’ve chanted AUM, let’s say seven times, open your eyes. And now it’s necessary to practice concentration for several minutes. This is a very, very important step in your meditation session each day.
I recommend that you concentrate on a yantra. A yantra is a visual design which has been specially formulated to aid you in meditation. Yantras are available in metaphysical bookstores or you can order them from Lakshmi. If you place one in a clear frame and keep it on your meditation table, it will help you in your concentration practice. If you don’t have a yantra, you can use a candle flame, but I recommend a yantra.
Focus your attention on the central dot in the yantra. Look at the geometric design, which is the yantra, but now focus on the central point, the dot in the center, or the triangle in the center. Just for a minute or two, focus your attention on it very intensely. Look at nothing else, think of nothing else. It’s not necessary to think thoughts about the dot, or about the yantra or the triangle, simply observe it, but do so with intensity. When thoughts come in and out of your mind, ignore them. Focus all your awareness on the dot or triangle in the center of the yantra.
Then, after doing this for just two or three minutes, when your mind begins to get a little bit tired, look at the entire yantra without focusing on any one part. As you look at the geometric design of the yantra, you’ll notice that it will appear to move. The lines will appear to merge and change. When this occurs, it’s not simply eye fatigue, but rather you’re beginning to see into another plane of awareness.
Begin your meditation session sitting down, chanting AUM a number of times, sitting up nice and straight, then for a minute or two focusing on the dot in the center of the yantra or the triangle, holding your attention on it. Then after doing that for a minute or two, looking at the entire geometric design of the yantra, and in a more relaxed fashion just gazing at it. Now close your eyes again and listen, listen to the stillness of eternity.
The wind of existence is blowing all around you. All you have to do is listen to hear. The truths of eternity are ready to be revealed to you, truths that will free you from unhappiness, that will bring joy and beauty into your life, and completion, but you have to listen to them. The truths of eternity speak very, very softly and can only be heard when your mind becomes calm and quiet and still. Meditation is a practice of detaching and then stopping ourselves from thinking; our thoughts are interruptions in the flow of awareness. Think of a lake without any ripples. Now a lot of rocks are thrown into it, and there are waves and ripples everywhere. Consciousness, in its highest aspect—awareness—is perfect and formless, but thought and perception create lots of waves and waveforms in awareness itself.
What you will be doing in meditation is learning to stop thought. This is done in a number of stages. The first stage is simply to ignore thought, to become conscious as you’re sitting there meditating, that there is something beyond thought. To feel yourself as being separate, in other words, to sit and think and perceive that you are not your thoughts, that you are rather the person who is listening to the thoughts. Your thoughts are like birds. Birds come into the sky and we see them. Then they fly by and they’re gone. But the sky, which is the element through which they travel, remains the same. The sky was there before the birds came; it was there while they passed through and while they left.
We want to know what our self is. We are the sky. Our thoughts are the birds that come and go. You can enjoy the birds and their beauty, but it is the sky that endures, that lasts. If the birds squawk and make too much noise, we can’t hear the stillness of the sky, the sound of the wind. If the birds are angry and attack us, we have a terrible problem.
We’re learning for a while to perceive existence in separate phases. One phase is to see that we are not our thoughts. As you sit with your eyes closed in meditation, try and feel what is beyond thought and sense that you’re separate from thought.
Then, the second stage, after you’ve become somewhat accomplished, after meditating for several months, is to begin to eliminate negative thoughts. You’ve learned to practice detachment—now you can pay no attention to your thoughts, even though they whirl by, but now you want to actually change thought. In meditation, when you have happy thoughts, creative thoughts, thoughts of good things you can do or be or become, let them come. But when you have unhappy thoughts, frustrating thoughts, anger, fears, jealousies, things like that, just don’t let those thoughts inside you. The angry birds are flying around your house—you’re simply going to close the door and not let those critters in. If a beautiful, happy bird comes, then you can let the bird inside and play with it, but you must practice discrimination.
Discrimination means keeping the negative and unhappy thoughts away and allowing the pretty thoughts to come inside you. Then a day comes when we don’t worry about whether the birds are nice or ferocious. We leave the house behind. We go up into the sky ourselves, like the birds. We fly among them and then we fly beyond them, into space and into eternity. We leave them all behind. Eventually in meditation, you’ll learn to go beyond thought. You’ll leave the body and mind and this world behind. You’ll go beyond time, space, and all relative conditions and you’ll fly through eternity, perfectly free. You’ll merge with God, that basic awareness of existence—total joy, total happiness and total completion.
How the heck do you keep those nasty birds away? Well, consider it this way, as “a” way. There are many. One of the things that you can do is practice meditating on the heart chakra. There are many, many ways to meditate. This is only one of them, but it’s one of my favorites and it’s quite good for the first few years of your meditative practice.
We have a body, but we also have a subtle body, a body of energy that looks like our physical body, if you could see it. The subtle physical body, which is approximately the same size as our physical body, is made up of energy, of light, a light that vibrates at a very, very high rate so that the human physical eyes can’t see it. When you develop your psychic vision after some meditation, you will be able to see the subtle physical of others, or perhaps of yourself. At first you’ll see it as an aura, a light that seems to appear around someone, but eventually you can see the whole subtle physical.
Just as your physical body is composed of tissue, organs, bones and different parts, so your subtle physical body has many different parts. There are seven primary centers—junctions—within the subtle physical body. They run from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. These are called the seven chakras. When you meditate and focus your attention on any one of the chakras, it will open a doorway into a specific world, another dimensional plane. Each chakra leads to a different floor in the building.
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For the first few years, it’s most beneficial to meditate on the heart chakra. The heart chakra—called the anahata chakra in Sanskrit—is located in the center of the chest, dead center. It’s not in the exact location of the physical heart but rather more to the center. If you focus your attention on the center of your chest while you’re meditating for the first few minutes, you’ll feel a warm and tingling sensation. The heart chakra takes you into the plane of beauty, humility, purity, and love. As you focus your attention on this area, you’ll begin to feel your thoughts slowing down. You’ll begin to feel your mind becoming calm and quiet. Even if there are lots of birds flying around, even if you have lots of thoughts, they’ll become distant. They won’t bother you. You’ll hear the birds flying above you, screaming and cawing in the distance; you’ll be down at the beach, sitting and meditating, but they won’t affect you. You’ll go so deep within yourself that you won’t even notice them.
While you’re meditating, after you’ve focused on the yantra, then focus your attention on the center of the chest and gently begin to meditate. Pay no attention to your thoughts, let those birds come and go. Don’t try and stop them, if you’re a beginner, but rather just focus your awareness on the center of the chest. Relax, sit up straight, and let go. Meditation is letting go. Not letting go to your thoughts—they’re in the distance—but letting go to something deep within you, releasing your deeper self, which will actually meditate for you.
Focus your awareness on the heart chakra. As you do, you’ll feel your consciousness shifting. You may feel different perceptions of energy in different parts of your body. Pay no attention to them. Let them come and go, like our friends the thought birds. Just keep focusing on the center of the chest, not too hard, not too aggressively, but gently.
As you begin to meditate, as you sit there and the thoughts become quieter, you’ll begin to become conscious. Don’t think about it, those are just more birds you’re inviting in to scree and caw and create more problems for you. If you do start to think about your experiences while meditating, don’t become upset. Again, just ignore thought. Sit there very passively but happily. Feeling! Meditation is feeling. You’re trying to feel what lies beyond the doorway of existence. You may not be able to see it or touch it yet, but with your heart, with your love, you can feel it.
As you sit there and meditate on the heart center, feel love, feel joy. You can actually create these emotions in many, many different ways. Just meditating on the heart center, focusing your attention in the area of the center of the chest will help this process. You have to help yourself to your higher emotions. Consciously begin to feel love. Start by feeling love for a friend, or an experience, anything that you like—love for God, love for yourself—and let that love circulate. Let that emotion pass through you. Focus on it for a while. Then you’ll find your thoughts will become more quiet. You can let go of that emotion. You can even stop focusing on the center of the chest once the meditation begins to go.
You’re in the river. If you’re in the current of the river, you don’t have to do a thing. The current of the river will take you where you want to go, but if you’re on the banks of the river, there’s no movement, no motion. Focusing on the heart center, feeling love, thinking beautiful thoughts gets you into the river. Then, as you meditate, you’ll find that consciousness itself will move you beyond time, space, and condition into a larger, vaster, more beautiful state of awareness. Once you enter into that state of awareness, you’ll start to know things. Knowledge will come to you of this life and that which is beyond this life. This knowledge comes from God. You’re accessing eternity. You’re plugging yourself into that source which is all light, all beauty, and all perfection.
But as you meander down the river of consciousness, at times you’ll get stuck on the bank. You’ll find that you’re thinking a lot of thoughts, the birds are becoming annoying again; they’re screeching and cawing and you’ve forgotten that you should be meditating. You’re so busy thinking about what you’re going to do tomorrow or what you did yesterday, or you’ll be worrying that you don’t have enough money to pay your bills or that someone doesn’t love you or just something’s not right, that you’ll become upset and you’ll stop meditating. Everyone does this again and again, don’t be disturbed by this, but thinking about the things of this world is not going to help you. The world is always in a state of transition, and thinking about it isn’t going to solve any problems. Instead, forgetting about everything for a while and looking at something that is perfect will help you deal with the world better.
You need to regain your perspective on life. You’re down in the valley and the valley is filled with smog. You can’t see too well, but if you go up on top of a very high mountain, you have a point of view, you have a vision, you can see. Then when you go back into the valley, you can remember that vision and it will help you. When we meditate, we’re going beyond the smog to the top of the mountain, to a point of clarity. Clarity is stillness. You need to stop all those thoughts. All the birds must become silent eventually. As you meditate more and more deeply, this will happen automatically, by itself.
After you’ve meditated for 15 or 20 minutes or half an hour, or an hour—whatever the time limit you’ve set for yourself—at the end of the meditation, chant AUM again. Repeat the mantra seven times, or as many as you like. Chanting a mantra at the beginning of your meditation helps you to clear the mind and takes you deep within the self. Chanting the mantra at the end of meditation helps you seal the meditation. It helps you bring the awareness of the meditation down into your daily life.
After meditation, it’s important to offer the meditation to eternity. It’s a good idea to bow and offer your meditation to God, to that stillness and perfection that is existence, and just feel that you’re giving your meditation away. Then sit quietly, for just a minute or two. Very often you won’t be aware of how good a meditation you did and how much benefit you’ve received from it until several minutes after the meditation. While you’re meditating it seems that you’re working away and not much is happening sometimes. You don’t realize how high you’ve gone until afterwards, but there’s a period of time right after your meditation session in which you have to be a little bit careful. If you start to think a lot of thoughts and become very active, you can prevent some of the meditative awareness that you have worked so hard to receive, from coming into your mind.
For a few minutes, sit quietly, or if you need to do something, do so, but remain meditative. If it’s the morning and you’ve just finished your morning meditation, then take a couple of minutes to just walk around the house, do a few dishes, organize things, but keep the mind quiet. Stay in a happy state. You might like to read a meditation book or a spiritual book of some type. Something written by myself or Ramakrishna, something about Buddha, something about Christ, about Yogananda, about any spiritual teacher or written by them—something that will elevate you. If you give yourself a few minutes, you’ll find that you’ll absorb the meditation. Then suddenly the mind becomes clear. The world is shiny and luminous; you’re seeing correctly.
It’s a good idea to avoid eating for an hour or two before you meditate. If you try and meditate on a full stomach, you’ll find that it’s difficult to meditate because you’re just too heavy. You feel your body too much. Try to wear clean, comfortable clothing, and always be physically clean before you meditate. Try to take a shower or a bath. If you can’t, if it’s an evening meditation and you don’t have time, at least wash your hands and face. You need to bring a sense of purity and cleanliness to your meditative practice.
There are some other things you can do during meditation to help facilitate the practice. There are many methods or ways of meditating. Now we’re moving more from basic meditation, which I’ve just described, to more of an intermediate meditation level.
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In intermediate meditation you have a number of choices. At this point you should be used to meditating twice a day. In the morning, before you start your day, this is your most important meditation. The morning meditation clears the mind. While you may be a little bit sleepy after you’ve just gotten up, the mind is not yet filled with impressions. After you’ve started your day and you’ve been out in the world, it’s harder to meditate. When you first wake up, all the birds are quiet and they’ve been sleeping. They’re not too active yet and they may make a few sounds, but once they’ve been up for a while, they’re chirping away and active, and it’s harder to quiet them down. So in the beginning of the day, meditate.
It doesn’t really matter what time you get up, but whenever you do get up, set aside enough time before you have to leave the house to have a good meditation, and then remain for a few minutes and just enjoy the feelings afterwards. Doing this will clear your mind and put you into a very sharp and aware state of consciousness so that you’ll do a good job and have a good day. Then, around the end of the day when you come home, you’ll be tired and you will have picked up a lot of different energies from the world. It’s a good time to relax for a while, and before dinner have another meditation.
Sunset is a good time. At sunset a doorway between the worlds opens up. It’s a very powerful and easy time to meditate. You may meditate again for another half an hour. Clear the day away and return to a very beautiful and clear state of awareness.
As you meditate day after day, twice a day or three times, if you like, you’ll find that the awareness of meditation will begin to creep into your daily life. You’ll be sitting at the office or talking with a friend, exercising, going to the movies, or having some type of experience, but you’ll notice that you’re high, your mind is clear, you’re at peace with yourself. You’re feeling joy for no apparent reason, simply because joy is and you are.
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But now it’s time, now that you’ve gotten this practice a little bit together, to start to work on refining your meditative level. To do this you need to intensify the practice. Try some of the following methods.
When you’re meditating, after you’ve started to meditate and you’ve meditated on the yantra or a candle flame, instead of meditating on the heart center, now instead, simply try feeling gratitude. Sit and feel grateful to existence or to eternity or to life because you are, because your life is good, because you’re meditating and if you’re meditating, that means that your life is going to continue to become more beautiful, you’ll become happier and clearer and more aware. Feel grateful for the people you love, for the beauty of the day or evening. If you can’t feel grateful, if you’re discouraged or depressed, then think of the fact that things could be a lot worse than they are, and you should be grateful that things are not worse because believe me, no matter how bad things may seem, they can always get a lot worse.
Just start gratitude. Create it. Gratitude is a bird that soars very, very high, and you can get on its back and fly with it, way above the clouds. Gratitude is a good method.
Try will power. When your thoughts come and you’re trying to stop them, simply say “No.” Learn the mantra, “No.” N-O. Every time a thought comes in your mind, say “No!” Just repeat the thought, ‘No.’ This is the method endorsed, in a sense, by Sri Ramakrishna, the great spiritual teacher from many years ago. He said that when you have a thorn stuck in your foot, you can take another thorn to help you get the first one out, and then throw both away.
In this case, as you sit there and you’re trying to make your thoughts quiet, you’re using one thought to negate another. Every time a thought comes, whether it’s beautiful or not so beautiful, just think ‘No.’ Don’t let it happen, push it away. Then once you’ve done that, push the thought of no thought away.
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The inner cry is a very good way to meditate. As you’re sitting there in meditation, just cry inwardly to God, to that source, to your spiritual teacher if you have one, to a particular god or goddess, a celestial being in a higher plane that you’re drawn to. As you sit and meditate, reach with your whole being. Cry like a child, not with tears or unhappiness, but just reach. For example, if you were meditating with your whole being on Lakshmi, the goddess of light and beauty, you might repeat her name. You might, with your whole being, just say, “Lakshmi, Lakshmi, Lakshmi” silently inside yourself. If you do this with great intensity just for a few minutes, it will bring your heart out, and the power of your love will attract a higher reality to you.
Try the inner cry. Cry to God, cry to your spiritual teacher, if you have one. Cry to a favorite god or goddess or whatever you consider to be noble and divine. If you do that just for a couple of minutes with your whole being, just like a child who so badly wants a cookie is going to say, “Oh, Mom, pleeeease can I have a cookie? Pleeease?” The child wants that cookie more than anything else. If you feel that you want eternity and light more than anything else in your meditation—just for a few minutes, you don’t have to go on and on—you’ll break through the barrier of the mind. You’ll go beyond it. Then just sit quietly and feel, and you’ll see that light will enter your consciousness and fill your meditation.
These, then, are a few ways that you can progress a little further. Practice them at different times—
Try to be creative in your meditation. Don’t get hung up or stuck. Try meditating outside on a nice day. Meditate with your friends if you like, but try and have at least your morning meditation to yourself. Don’t meditate with anyone else. Because when you meditate with others, there will be lots of different energies around, and you’re trying to center in on the stillness of existence. You have enough birds flying through your own mental sky creating a disturbance without picking up those of others.
There are many different mantras that you can use when you meditate. I have several favorites. I like Aum, of course, which is the most powerful of all mantras, but I also like Lakshmi’s mantra. Lakshmi is a celestial being who lives in a higher plane of existence, another world. Her mantra is “Sring.” S-R-I-N-G. When you chant it, it brings beauty and light into your consciousness. Someday you might try starting your meditation with Sring instead of Aum. Chant Sring as follows—(Rama demonstrates chanting Sring). Try chanting Sring for five minutes and see what happens. You’ll find that your whole consciousness will fill with light.
Another time you might try Kali’s mantra. Kali, of course, is another celestial being. She offers very fast spiritual progress through intensity. Her mantra is “Kring.” K-R-I-N-G. When you chant Kring, chant it very intensely and sharply. (Rama demonstrates chanting Kring.) When you chant Kring, you’ll feel power entering your being. Only chant Kring, though, when you’re in a high meditation. While you can chant Aum and Sring and most other mantras at the beginning of your meditation, or any time you like, Kring will only really work when you’re already in a meditative state. You would chant Kring towards the end of your meditation a few times very intensely and then sit and meditate for a few more minutes.
These are a few different mantras that you can use. Experiment—see how they feel.
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An advanced way to meditate, of course, is to focus on your teacher. If you have a spiritual teacher and you focus on them during meditation, then you access the light that flows through them. For example, I am a liberated teacher. After many lifetimes of meditation, I’ve reached a point where I can no longer be separated from meditation. I’m always in the state of meditation, or you could say I am meditation itself.
A person who meditates with me—even though they may be thousands of miles away—focuses their attention on me. If they think of me, if they chant my name a few times or just in some way focus on me, then they’ll connect inwardly, psychically, with me. Well, “me” is light, to be honest with you. That’s about all there is inside me anymore. When you focus on me that light will be drawn into you. You’re not taking anything away from me. It’s not my light to begin with, in a sense; it’s the light of God and the light of eternity. Take all you want. This is how real spiritual teaching takes place.
You can focus on myself or on any spiritual teacher. Spiritual teachers who have left the body, who are no longer on Earth can help you too. I’m on Earth now, but I won’t always be here. When I leave the body someday, I can help people just as effectively if they focus upon me.
You can focus on Jesus or Buddha or Krishna, Ramakrishna, Lao Tsu, Yukteswar, Yogananda, Vivekenanda, any of the great spiritual teachers who have lived, or on a living teacher, and draw light from them, energy from them. This is a more advanced way. You see, what we really have to teach you in meditation can’t be expressed in words. These instructions will to help you get started, but to be honest, deeper meditation can only be learned from a teacher.
When I sit with my students and meditate with them, I channel the kundalini, the energy, directly into them. I bring them to plane after plane of consciousness. What they would do in 100 years of meditation, I can do in an hour with them. This is how meditation is learned in its advanced stages. Regardless of whether you’re working with a teacher or not, everyone must meditate each day on their own and do their daily meditations.
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As you do your daily meditations, your life will change. A new power and energy will enter your life. Most people change between age zero and four. Then around age four or five the personality begins to become structured and our growth slows down. The older we get, the less we change. When we meditate we become perpetually young. We make the personality structure more pliant.
Each time you meditate you hold the possibility of completely changing your life in one meditation. If you meditate with your whole heart and your whole soul, with your whole being, then you will become light itself. You will not only see and feel God, existence, eternity, nirvana, samadhi, but you will become quite happy, very humble, and pure, and yet you’ll deal with the world very effectively. Your mind will become razor sharp. Your memory and retention will be superb. New talents and abilities will develop. Your artistic nature will begin to unfold. In other words, you’ll start to grow again. You’ll become younger each day yet wiser. You’ll develop a good sense of humor so that you can laugh at yourself, which you need to do in this world. You’ll be able to look at both the beauties and the horrors of life and accept them with an equal mind. You’ll love more and be kinder to those around you.
Meditation is existence. When we meditate, all we’re simply doing is letting go and allowing ourselves to dissolve back into that which we really are. Our amnesia is fading away and we’re consciously becoming the source again. We’re merging with life and light. When you meditate deeply, you’ll see beyond life and death. You’ll see that you can’t die and you can’t be reborn. You are existence itself.
Learn to meditate, practice. Don’t get frustrated! It will take you years to learn to meditate perfectly but every time you try, you’re growing. It’s not as if you have to learn to meditate perfectly to make progress. Even your first, most basic attempt will bring you something. In the beginning your experiences may be sporadic. Nothing will seem to be happening. It is! But you must be patient.
Try to find a teacher of meditation and meditate at least once a week in a group with people who meditate a little better than you do. It’s good to meditate in a group every week. It will inspire you to keep meditating and if you have a teacher, even if the teacher isn’t really advanced but even just a little more advanced than you, then you’ll grow, develop, and learn. Also, meditation is sharing. You learn to share your experiences with others. As you develop more and more, you’ll learn a new language that other people who meditate speak.
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There are a few things that you can do that will help you in your meditation. If you become a vegetarian it will make it easier to meditate. Eating meat, fish, and birds, things like that, makes it harder to meditate. The consciousness of animals is very restless, very aggressive. You are affected by the food that you eat. Everything has a vibration, and the flesh of animals has a very unruly vibration. It makes it harder to stop thought. If you give up meat, fish, birds, and things like that, you’ll find that it’s much easier to meditate. It’s also much healthier and less expensive. Human beings were not always carnivores. Originally they were vegetarians until the Ice Age. You can eat eggs—they have a good pure consciousness—for protein. Dairy products are fine, vegetables, pastas, all kinds of things, there’s lots of worlds to explore in vegetarian cuisine. That will help.
It’s important not to move while you meditate. Sometimes when you’re sitting there meditating you may find yourself swaying. As the prana current and the kundalini and different energies begin to move through you, you’ll feel yourself moving and rocking. Keep the body still at all times, otherwise that energy will be lost as it expresses itself through the physical. Whereas if you keep very, very still you’ll find that that energy will just take you higher in meditation.
Never expect anything from a particular meditation. Don’t try and meditate a certain way. Once you’ve gotten started, once you’ve chanted the mantra a few times and practiced concentration on the yantra or a candle flame and meditated maybe for a few minutes on your heart center, or tried gratitude or willpower, all these different methods just to get you into the stream, then just let go and let the meditation take you wherever it would like to. Be free in your awareness and free in your love. Relax and let it happen. Remember you have lots of help. God is meditating in you and through you. The beneficent forces of existence are glad to help you. You can focus on me or any spiritual teacher. We’re glad to help you. You’ve got lots of help. All you need.
Try to read books about meditation, but not so many that they get confusing. You know, there are so many different viewpoints and ways to meditate that you can begin to wonder which is best. There is no best way. It’s just what works for you at the time. Ultimately you won’t use any techniques. One day you’ll stop using the yantras and the mantras. You’ll just be able to sit and instantly stop thought. As soon as you do, the curtain of reality parts and you are lost in the immortal rapture of existence. You will see perfection in everything. You will see that there is no time, there is no space. All there is—is light. Death is no threat. Life is no threat. All there is—is perpetual joy, perpetual existence, perpetual oneness with the source. You’ll see this not only in your meditation but also in your work, in your service to others, your lifestyle, your play, and everything that you do.
Don’t try to be someone. Be yourself. This is what meditation should teach you. Oh, you’ll learn the great truths of eternity and infinity. You’ll learn to be perfect. You’ll overcome your jealousies, your depressions, and your fears. Don’t try and force it, these things will happen gradually, on their own.
Just meditate each day in the morning and the evening and maybe for a few minutes at noon—that’s a nice time, or whenever you like. Be free and be open, and trust. Trust that life is guiding you and showing you every step that is necessary to learn to be perfect. Have faith in yourself. You’ll come through OK. Have faith in existence.
Try to find a spiritual teacher who can teach you the more advanced things. Practice what I’ve told you every day and your life will be beautiful. You will see beauty in all things. You’ll learn to accept the transitory nature of existence of the body and the mind happily because you’ll see eternity in everything—both in this world, in the other worlds and beyond the worlds, in the void and nirvana. Meditate with feeling and with love and then take your realizations from meditation and give them to others.
Don’t preach about meditation, but as you change and grow, as you love more, as you become kinder and more sensitive, help people. Help the world in any way that you want to. Do something with all that good energy and you’ll find, as I have found, that the more light you give and spread, the more you share, the more you will evolve, the closer to God you will be, until one day you’ll be like I am, you can’t tell yourself from God. There is no difference anymore. You become existence. You’ve merged with the source. You’ve gone back. Yet you’ll still be a person with eternity expressing itself through you as a person, or in its absolute form, you will be dissolved into the ecstasy of nirvana. You’ll go back and forth as long as you’re in this world and then some day, of course, you’ll go beyond this and all other worlds.
So good luck, do well. You will.