Tonight I’d like to talk a little bit about a timeless subject, and that’s meditation.

I don’t think there’s a way we can really define meditation. I think it’s easier to say what it’s not, and perhaps come at a definition that way.

• Meditation is not being caught in time.

• Meditation is not being limited to any condition of the mind, body or spirit.

• Meditation is not being fixated, even on the avoidance of fixation.

• Meditation is not the awareness of eternity, although in the process of meditation we certainly become aware of eternity.

• Meditation is not the avoidance of this world and it’s people, places and things.

• Meditation is not impractical or unrealistic, nor is it difficult to integrate with any lifestyle or any age, in that it’s timeless although it occurs in time.

So meditation, then, is something that is very hard to categorize, which is what makes it useful to us. Because we live in a world of categories, of things that are very definable, and that’s what we’re used to, and meditation offers us a doorway to a world or worlds beyond “that which we can easily define.”

There are ways we can talk about meditation, but in doing so, we should try and keep in mind that they’re only ways. The exciting thing about meditation is that we can’t pin it down.

And while there’s an innate urge in all of us, I think, to try and pin something down—that is to say, to limit it or restrict it in the sense that we want to quantify it and be able to feel, well, this is the parameters of meditation, these are the parameters—because I think we feel indigenously more comfortable with something then.

We feel it’s sort of under control. But that control sometimes usurps the very thing we’re seeking, which is awareness.

So meditation, then, is essentially something that’s indigenous to the heart.

Which makes it, I suppose, hard to talk about—but I think that’s its very point is—it’s something that we don’t necessarily need to talk about too much, other than to get a sense of the practice and the tonality that we’re dealing with. And then best leave it alone and just do it and see what happens.

Because too deep an understanding of the subject precludes the study itself. If we get too, too involved with it’s practicality, we’ll get so caught up in the rhetoric of meditation that we’ll miss the point, and the point was to go beyond rhetoric.

So I think there’s an in-between place, and that’s what we try and seek. That’s always the hardest, is to be in the middle. It’s easy to run to extremes on either end.

Meditation, for convenience sake, I think, can be divided into three sections. Intermediate, advanced, and of course, beginning meditation. The principles involved in all three aspects of meditation are really not so different regardless of the stage of meditation.

The chemistry is really the same in the sense that, I suppose, when we go to school, graduate school is essentially not so much different than first grade or high school or college. Each involves class experience, home study, things like that. While the level and intensity of the material may differ, still the experience is somewhat similar.

So I really think that there’s not all that much difference, in a way, at least in terms of approach.

Now, there are definite schools of meditation. In other words, there are people who say, “Well, there is a definitive way to meditate and this particular way or method is the best, ultimate, supremo, fantastico way.” I don’t think that’s true.

I think that there are many, many ways to meditate. Styles of meditation are like languages. I don’t feel that Italian or French or German or English—I don’t think one language is better than another. Each has its own beauty. But the point of the language is not simply the study of the language itself, but to communicate.

So with meditation, one shouldn’t become so caught up in the fine points of style—again that you miss the point—which was to become conscious of God and eternity and to be happy and aware.

Yet there are styles. And I think something can be learned from all of them.

In the beginning, when you’re starting to meditate—the beginning being maybe from the first time to the first four or five years, I suppose, it depends on the intensity of a person’s practice—simply what we’re trying to do is settle down. Settle down. And become aware of that which lies beyond thought.

In the very beginning, we’re just trying to realize that there’s some possibility of awareness on other levels.

Now, theoretically, everyone’s inner being knows everything. There’s a part of us that’s aware of all things. But that doesn’t necessarily do us a whole lot of good unless we are conscious of that.

So meditation, then, is the process of becoming conscious of the part of ourselves that knows everything.

Meditation is a bridge, between the awareness that we have now, and infinite awareness.

The problem with the awareness that we have now is it’s somewhat limited, in the sense that we’re limited by desires, doubts, fears, frustrations, happiness, concepts of the nature of existence and ourselves.

The spectrum that most people exist in—in this world, in terms of their awareness from the time of their birth until the time of their death—is not really very exciting. It’s very mundane and very unhappy. Certainly human beings are capable of experiencing great joy and happiness. But they’re also capable of experiencing quite the opposite.

So meditation is the study of fields of attention, fields of awareness. Not simply to relax a little and overcome stress and tension, but to become conscious of our own immortality. Possibly in a religious sense, possibly not, it depends on the individual.

In the beginning what’s necessary, of course, is to feel—if you’re just starting the process—that there’s something worthwhile to be attained. Because otherwise we won’t do it. And this awareness comes to people in a lot of different ways.

Very often it comes through meeting someone who meditates, and you sense something from them that’s appealing. They seem to be having a good time with their life, perhaps, they’re more at ease, or whatever it may be. There’s just a subtle energy sometimes that comes from them. And we feel that and part of us is in consonance with that. We resonate. We’re drawn to that.

As opposed to most of the people we meet, who are just so caught up in their lives that they don’t understand their lives or even see their lives before they’re gone.

People who meditate, depending of course on their level of awareness and so on, seem to have a better time with their existence.

Some people are drawn to meditation without knowing why.

Their inner being just demands it. They reach a certain point where it’s not up to them anymore. Their inner being realizes that they’ve totally fouled up their life so far, and now it’s just going to drag them to the local meditation hall and make them sit there. [Laughter.]

It’s kind of like detention. After school, I remember, in high school sometimes of course you’d get detention because you were out walking around in the halls, or doing things you weren’t supposed to be doing, when you were supposed to be sitting in class being bored.

So sometimes you’d get detention and afterwards you’d just have to sit there and contemplate your life.

So I think for some people that’s what meditation is. It works out happily.

But they’ve kind of burned the candle at both ends—if not a little bit in the middle—and their being finally says, “OK, you’ve had your chance. I tried to tell you, I tried to warn you, now it doesn’t matter, I’m taking over.”

And so they find themselves approaching a meditation class or a teacher, reading books on the subject. And it doesn’t make much sense—it doesn’t necessarily fit in with the person they’ve been thus far—which is exactly the point. It’s time to become a new person, because this one has exhausted their resources, or just reached the point where it’s gotten ridiculous to continue.

I don’t really think it matters why you start to meditate, the point is that you do. And then suddenly one is barraged with ways, means and methods.

When I started to meditate about 15 years ago, there wasn’t a whole lot of information about meditation in the West. You could walk into the local book store and maybe there were four, five or six books on the subject and that was about it. Today to walk into a New Age book store, there’s hundreds and hundreds of books, and I wouldn’t know where to start.

It was easier back then. All there was—there was Alan Watts, and there was Paramahamsa Yogananda and that was about it. And Suzuki. That was it.

So we meditate to become conscious, and in the beginning it’s simply a question of realizing that if we meditate we’ll change—our awareness will change—and we’ll become happier, and just more aware of the moments of our lives.

And isn’t that the purpose of life itself, to be aware?

To be awareness, eventually.

So we then are faced with how to meditate. Tonight I’m not going to really go into how to meditate, per se, in terms of explanation of techniques, I’ve already done that on tapes and books and places like that. I think we can use your time in a more valuable way, in a more experiential way.

But simply, when a person is learning to meditate, essentially what they’re trying to do in the beginning is to settle down and for fifteen minutes or half an hour or forty five minutes, just sit and try and still their mind.

This is usually done through a focus, initially, of some type. The idea being that if you just sit there, thoughts will just cascade through your mind and you won’t have much success. So for the beginning student it’s best to have a focus, and the focus allows them to at least—even if they can’t stop thought in the beginning—to direct thought. And then once one has mastered directing thought, it’s easier to stop thought and move into other levels of attention.

So initially the student in some traditions is given a mantra, a particular word of power to focus on. So while the thoughts are cascading through your mind during meditation, you should be absorbed in the repetition of a mantra.

In other styles of meditation they use yantras, which are visual mantras, I suppose you might say. They’re specific designs that have a great deal of power in them—as do the mantras which are words of power—these are designs of power that tap into other levels of attention. They remind us of things in other worlds.

And so we set the little yantra up in front of us on a meditation table, on a little table and we sit there and we focus on it. And instead of being fully absorbed in our thoughts, we focus on the yantra, or we repeat the mantra, or sometimes a combination of both. You might repeat a mantra for a while, then focus on a yantra. Then a time should come when you do neither.

After a while in your practice, in an individual meditation session, you might start by chanting a mantra maybe a dozen times, then focus on a yantra for ten minutes or so, or fifteen minutes, then one closes the eyes and does neither. Because to continue to focus on the mantra or the yantra throughout the period of meditation will hold us down to a very specific format. We won’t go beyond it.

While it’s an important way to start a meditation and to develop our ability to meditate, ultimately at least half of the meditation, and one day all of it, will be spent in silence trying to stop thought or go beyond thought.

Now, there are schools of thought—if I can underline that word—that suggest that the way to meditate is not to tamper with your thinking processes, but just to allow your thoughts to go hither and yon, wherever they will. And that what you should do is simply be detached from your thoughts.

I think this is a fine way to start meditating, but advanced meditation definitely involves the cessation of all thought. No thought, no image, no picture in the mind whatsoever.

But I personally have found that people have more success with a focal point. The other method is a little more sophisticated and doesn’t work that well for most people, just letting your thoughts run all over the place.

So what I suggest normally is that a person focus on a yantra. I think mantras are more difficult to hold onto.

People who do a lot of mantra repetition, I find, don’t meditate very well. Because what happens is, as they’re meditating and they’re repeating the mantra over and over and over, after a while the mantra doesn’t mean anything.

That is to say, they just get lost in their thoughts, and the mantra’s going on somewhere in the background, you see. You’ve got it going, and it’s going in your mind, or you’re saying it out loud, but at the same time, it’s sort of like walking and chewing bubblegum at the same time. You can be repeating the mantra and at the same time completely absorbed in all the different thoughts that are passing through you. And this, in my estimation, is not a higher level of meditation.

Whereas I find that when you involve the visual senses, when you’re focusing on a yantra, it’s easier to curtail thought. I think mantras have an important place in meditation. But the idea has become somewhat prevalent in the West, and in the East to some extent, that the simple repetition of a mantra will eventually cause enlightenment to take place, and that’s usually not the case. The mantra is a very preliminary exercise for the student to begin to just grasp a sense of focus.

Mantras also do have their advanced side. When they’re used by persons who have reached very high levels of attention, they can open up doorways to other worlds. But for most people the repetition of those mantras would be useless, in that you have to have a requisite amount of personal power to make them work.

So essentially, I think the … I prefer the yantra method. I’ve just seen—after teaching meditation for quite a while—that people do better with it.

I think it’s a good idea to start a meditation session by repeating a mantra, perhaps “Aum” which is the most powerful of all mantras, or you may have been given a personal mantra or something like that. And then after repeating the mantra perhaps a dozen times—nice and slowly to start your meditation session, with the eyes closed—then to focus on a yantra.

There are a number of different yantras, and each one has its own subtle qualities. It creates a slightly different type of meditation.

So then perhaps for ten or fifteen minutes, to focus on the yantra—usually starting with the dot in the center of the yantra—quite intensely for a minute or two. And then looking at the whole yantra without focusing, more just a gentle gaze. You’ll notice that the yantra, this visual design, will begin to appear to move. The lines will move and stuff like that.

And not to become too absorbed in that, but just to observe it and to try and ignore thought.

That’s introductory meditation, Stage One. Not to stop it, necessarily, but simply to ignore it.

And even though the radio is going on in the next room, not to be upset by it, but rather to be focusing on the yantra, which divides your consciousness in a way. It doesn’t necessarily stop the thought, but it detaches us from it.

Normally we’re so absorbed in our thoughts that every thought that comes through is a reality. That is our world. So we have to just start to detach ourselves from thought a little bit, and become aware that there are things beyond thought.

But then after focusing on the yantra for a while, to close your eyes and simply let go.

Now at this point, some people like to focus on a chakra.

Of course, there are seven primary chakras and lots of other ones, and the chakras are locations in the subtle physical body—that have corresponding locations in the physical body—that are energy centers.

And when you focus on a chakra, it’s very easy to bring subtle physical energies into your consciousness.

So some people focus on the third eye, or the crown chakra, or the throat chakra, the heart chakra, the naval chakra, the chakra at the spleen or the very base of the spine.

There are also chakras in the hands. You’ve seen me use those quite frequently when I meditate. I project the shakti—the kundalini—through the chakras in the hands, to people I meditate with. And there are chakras in the toes, and all kinds of places. Quite a few of them in the feet actually.

Whether you focus on a chakra or not, once you’ve closed your eyes, and you’re meditating, let’s say for the second half of your individual meditation session, that’s up to you. But even if you’re focusing on the chakra, you don’t want to do that really for the whole period of meditation, there should come a point where you let go.

And now we’re moving into a deeper stratum of meditation.

The rest is just to kind of get us to settle down, to get off the train of thought for a while. And now we just want to look around, now that we’re off the train. We’ve been so obsessed on this train ride that we’ve just seen a limited aspect of life, but now we want to finally get off the train and look around. That’s meditation. It’s just looking around. Being observant.

So we get off the train of thought, and we just sit.

Now, at that point, of course, a person who hasn’t meditated is a little confused.

• “Well, what am I supposed to do? Am I just supposed to sit here? Isn’t that going to get a little boring?”

And that’s why it’s important to meditate with a teacher of meditation—at least once in your life. That is to say, someone who moves into higher levels of attention.

Because what you’re supposed to be doing during that period cannot be expressed in words.

When you meditate with someone who traverses the superconscious, who is a very powerful meditator, you will experience levels of awareness that cannot be described in a book, cannot be told. They can only be shown to you by a person who has entered into them.

Some people do stumble across them on their own. If your intensity is great, and if you meditate with your whole being, and if you’re fairly spiritually evolved, then it is possible to move into some of the higher levels of attention without a teacher. They’re available, but it takes quite a bit of willpower. Nothing else can matter, essentially.

But for most people, it’s easier to meditate with someone who’s enlightened or at least close. And simply to meditate with such a person, if you’re at all sensitive, you will become aware that your level of attention is changing radically. You’ll feel what it’s like, which is the important thing in meditation.

Then when you sit and meditate on your own, when you reach that part of the meditation session—let’s say the second half where we’re not using mantras or yantras or chakras—we’re just going to let go.

We’re not just going to let go, what we’re going to do is go back into that field of energy that we felt when we sat with the teacher.

And it’s much easier to do it. It’s like going swimming. It’s very hard to understand it until you’ve been in the water. One can have a theoretical approach, but once we’ve been in and moved a little bit, it has a much greater meaning to us.

Now, the serious student of meditation naturally will, of course, want to meditate as frequently as possible with someone who is enlightened or in the higher fields of attention because there will be a progression in their meditation.

As you meditate from day to day and week to week, you’ll progress. And the level of awareness that you are capable of receiving or feeling initially when you meditated with someone who is more advanced, you’ll become successful at that.

And then when you go and meditate with them again—because you’ve become more receptive—you’ll feel more of what they’re doing, or they can take you higher or however you’d like to express it.

And at that point, when you come back again, as you progress, you’ll be more conscious and then you’ll have something new to focus on. So there’s a hierarchy, in a sense, at least in the beginning.

ॐ

So beginning meditation, then, is a process of unhooking ourselves from thought, of being motivated to meditate. And naturally it’s very exciting in the beginning, because we see the tremendous jumps we make in awareness. We find we are happier, our mind is clearer, we’re inspired, our creative talents flourish.

An awful lot begins to happen in that first year, or first four or five years of meditative practice, if we stick with it.

And particularly, of course, if you meditate with someone who’s a powerful meditator and learn from them. Usually the ascension is more rapid.

ॐ

The second phase of meditation is very different.

It’s hard to say when this takes place. It depends on the individual, but I would say around four or five years in—of serious meditation—particularly with an advanced teacher.

We could say that it begins when you can successfully stop thought for long periods of time.

At this point you begin to move beyond the awareness of this world.

Now, in the beginning, even when you start to meditate you’ll begin to feel different sensations and feelings—you may see colored lights of different types—there’ll be a lot of phenomena associated with the practice. For some people there’s more, for some there’s less.

The phenomena is not necessarily a measurement of how well you’re doing. You always know you’re doing well if you sit and meditate every day a couple of times a day, that’s the sign.

One learns not to judge one’s level of progress or assess it. It’s best to leave it alone and just do it, and you’ll find you’ll progress very nicely then.

But when you can successfully stop thought for longer periods of time, you do move into other worlds.

This can also happen in the very beginning if a person meditates with someone who’s very advanced, on the verge of enlightenment or enlightened. Because when you meditate with an enlightened person, their field of attention is so strong that you get a free ride.

When I was in college years ago, when I was an undergraduate I used to have a typical undergraduate car, at least at the time. This was back in the 1960s, and I had a Volkswagen, a little VW bug. This was before the advent of the Super Beetle, the old little one.

And when I used to ride on the freeway with it, when you hit a hill it was a problem, to be honest. And while it was a great little car in the straightaway, it would lose it on the hill. But I learned—I used to commute a long distance sometimes to school—that if you could get behind a very large truck [laughter] the truck had a slipstream and you could get behind it and you’d actually be pulled along a little bit by it.

Now the trick of course was to be careful, because the trucks tend to have very good brakes. And so you had to be a little bit wary. If he put on his brakes fast you would be in another world quickly [laughter]. If you weren’t real attentive. So it involved a little risk, also saved gas. But that wasn’t such a problem back in those days.

So when you meditate with someone who meditates extremely well, its kind of like entering into a slipstream or a jetstream. You move into a level of attention that you might not have been able to attain for years and years and years—or lifetimes—which is the value of a teacher.

And it’s possible to meditate with an advanced person and perhaps there’ll be no thought for a half an hour. You see whereas on your own when you try it, you might be able to stop your thought for 20 or 30 seconds. And as you do that, the more you’re able to do that, the faster you progress in your meditation.

But it’s also important to practice on your own and develop your own ability.

Sometimes there are people who would only meditate with a teacher let’s say, and they ride the teacher’s energy, and they don’t really learn how to meditate. They learn how to ride the energy.

So it’s important to have both if both are available to you.

So intermediate meditation then, begins when thought stops for longer periods of time, and when thought stops of course the world goes away. Time goes away and space goes away.

Yet there’s still a sense of self. As we’re sitting there and there’s no thought, there’s an awareness of self. It’s not quite as manifest but there is a sense of being light.

Let’s say suddenly you dissolve and you become infinite light. But there is this sense of being light. Even though the mind is not thinking it, one feels it, which indicates that one is still there. At least half of one is.

So at this point the study changes. And also the changes in one’s personal life become accelerated. You begin to live in other levels of attention all the time, whether you’re at work or driving or running on the beach or whatever it is.

You begin to be in a more meditative state all the time, and you find that it fits rather well with everything that you do. Your work improves, your life improves. Everything gets better because simply, you have the ability to be more focused, and at the same time you can stand back from things that used to drain your power and monopolize your attention.

In other words you begin to get more of a handle on life. You also become more sensitive, which is a double-edged sword in this world. But it’s well worth it ultimately.

ॐ

The second stage could last for the rest of one’s life. One could never move beyond that—or for many lifetimes. But eventually a time does come—or it could happen in a particular lifetime, perhaps the one that you’re in—where you move into the third stage which is the advanced practice, which is samadhi.

Samadhi is a stateless state of awareness. There are different thoughts about how many levels of samadhi there are, Patanjali ¹⁰ classifies a certain number, you know different people have their systems. As far as I’m concerned there’s really only two and the rest are so close together that it doesn’t matter. One can differentiate, but I think that’s about the same.

There’s salvikalpa and nirvikalpa samadhi.

Salvikalpa samadhi would be absorption in eternity to the point where there’s no real concept of self but there’s still a karmic chain. Nirvikalpa samadhi is synonymous with nirvana, absorption in nirvana. Different words to express the same thing in my opinion.

And then this world and all worlds and the concept of worlds and self and non-self and all these things go away completely. That’s enlightenment.

If a person sets out to practice meditation in this lifetime and they have a little bit of spiritual evolution behind them and they’re quite dedicated, it really is not at all an impossible task to enter into salvikalpa samadhi in this particular lifetime.

Which is of course complete ecstasy, complete rapture, knowledge of God, of eternity, all the things that there are no words for.

Nirvikalpa samadhi is another matter. That’s not something—I don’t feel—that’s really up to us. That happens at a certain time when our being has gone through countless changes and refinements. Selves have come and gone and shuffled through existence. And at that point we become—there are words for it, but I don’t think they’re really succinct—God-realized, enlightened, liberated. All that words do is point in a directionless direction.

ॐ

So those are really the stages of meditation. Now naturally there’s a lot more to it. There’s thousands and thousands of aspects to the meditative practice. There are different pathways that one follows—be it Zen or Tantra, Karma Yoga, Jnana Yoga. Different ways that have been devised to do the same thing, essentially, for different types of people according to their temperament.

Some people are more emotionally inclined, some more intellectually inclined, some are work oriented. Some are mystically oriented and they are interested in the study of power. So there are many different ways to do the same thing. There are many different ways that we can climb the mountain. But the result is the same.

Yet each has its own history, stories, language and culture. I don’t feel one form is better than another. I myself teach nine different paths. Because I think that it’s necessary not so much to be a proponent of one, but to find the pathway that works well for each individual that they’ll do best at. It’s not a competitive situation in my estimation—at least it shouldn’t be.

So meditation then comes down—essentially—to stopping thought. Detaching one’s self from thought, and eventually even going beyond stopping thought, and all such relative concepts.

The result is freedom.

Freedom not just in the sense of a happy or better life, but freedom in the sense that one is aware that you’re not the body, you’re not the mind, you’re not even spirit.

That you’re eternity itself.

You go beyond the process of rebirth, which doesn’t mean that one doesn’t take incarnation. But let’s say that you are no longer bound by anything. Except your love of eternity.

So it’s a delightful process, definitely not for everyone. There are those who want to revolutionize the world with meditation, and I really don’t think that that’s necessary. I think the world is already revolutionized. All too much.

It’s a very quiet study. It’s for people who are completely out of their mind [laughter] or if they’re not, they want to be. And at the same time, in my estimation, it’s something that does not have to take you away from your life.

Unfortunately we’ve seen meditation insulted in a sense with the image of ritual. That you have to dress a certain way, act a certain way, follow a certain type of lifestyle. All that sort of thing. Very culty. And that, of course, has nothing to do with the practice whatsoever. Those are just pseudo forms that people added for their own reasons.

The practice is a very pure study. And you can do with it as you will.

There are those who feel that meditation of course is unrealistic, or takes them out of the world. And if that was your experience with meditation, you weren’t meditating.

If you meditate, you’ll find it’s easier to blend, easier to understand people because you can see in them, you become psychic, easier to do just about everything. Your mind becomes sharp and efficient, you become conscious. You lose your emotions—eventually over a period of time—that are destructive. Jealousies, fears, angers, hate. Eventually all those things go away, you just never feel them.

And your higher emotional tonal range opens up dramatically, your ability to love and give and care. To be concerned with the welfare of others, becomes one’s major occupation. Without any sense of self-importance that one is better because one meditates or leads a certain type of life. Real meditation engenders humility and purity. Always.

And yet I don’t really think it demands any kind of lifestyle. I think the best thing to do is to meditate and see what you do. Certainly, different teachers make different recommendations that will help a person with the practice.

But ultimately you’re the filter. The recommendations are only good if they make sense to you inside. You should never do what anyone says, unless it touches your heart, and you know it’s true. No matter how charismatic they may be or powerful. What they say may be true, but if it doesn’t have application for you, it’s not necessarily something you should try to do.

A lot of people have this live-or-die attitude with meditation. It has to be all or nothing. And I don’t think it should be. It’s a study that you follow for the rest of your life. And it’s something that you get better at, and it adds meaning and color to being. And eventually to non-being, and beyond both.

But I don’t think it has to be this overwrought emotional business that people make it into. I think all they do is sidestep the actual issues. Which are leading a disciplined, clear happy life and becoming aware of others, and seeing what you can do for them, in whatever way that you choose.

At the same time it’s necessary to respect, I feel, all other ways and other teachings on the subject. Because even though they may not make a lot of sense to us, they might to someone else, and it may be exactly the thing that that person needs at this stage of their development. Who are we to say?

But ultimately, I think cosmopolitan spirituality is the best. Where we go beyond, “My teacher’s better than yours,” or “My meditation form is better than yours,” or whatever it may be. And we see that that’s not the purpose of the entire thing. It’s not Ford vs. Chevy exactly.

But it’s rather the transition of our limited awareness into eternity.

Just to be able to smile sometimes, when things aren’t going well. And maybe realize when they aren’t going well, they are.

There’s a lot to the study.