Category: Merging With Siva

Love Conquers Selfishness

Love may also be thought of as the full expression of the intuitive mind, a continuing flow from the source of Being. Most people would not be able to withstand the reaction to this force were it to be fully released within them. To suddenly relieve a person of all tension would be like making a poor man rich overnight. The instinctive mind feels lost and insecure under the impact of any sudden change in evolution. As the soul, the superconscious mind, or the light of God, begins to shine through the rest of the mind, the mind will either become reactionary or cooperative. Some people have a terrible fight within themselves as the soul begins to shine forth, and yet their only lasting satisfaction in life is in the outpouring of their individual soul qualities.

Sometimes students of Inner Being are able to control their actions or their speech when they become disturbed, but the thought force projected by their suppressed sulking is just as negatively effective. Seeking to understand the condition that has upset you will give control of the negative force and eventually lift you into the state of love which conquers all things.

Of course, the practice of understanding must begin at home. You must train yourself to know where you are in consciousness at all times. When you can become fully aware of the states of consciousness through which you pass, there will be no one whom you cannot understand, no one with whom you could not communicate through the medium of love. Until you learn the operation of this law as the sum of all laws, you will continue to harbor contention, to prefer argument and to walk the path of difference. Through bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, the combative mind becomes erased, absorbed into the consciousness of the One Self, the Being permeating all beings.

With the help of devotion, you can soar within. You cannot only pull away detachedly from unwholesome areas of the mind, but it is possible to keep yourself in an inward state of expanded consciousness.

What Is Pure Love?

Love is the sum of all the spiritual laws. We may say that love is the heart of the mind. Anything that comes before you in life can be conquered through universal love, a force which is a demonstration of the soul. Universal love has nothing to do with emotional infatuation, attachment or lust. It flows freely through the person whose mind is unclouded by resentment, malice, greed and anger. But in persons whose minds are partially out of control and under the control of another, the force of the soul ends up as infatuation or attachment.

Pure love is a state of Being. Whereas everyone is running around trying to get love, it is found in giving. When a person begins to lose the idea of his own personality through concern for others, he will attract a like response to himself. The outgoing force of the soul in action brings freedom to the lower states of mind. The instinctive person is ordinarily so preoccupied with his own self, so wrapped up in his own shell, that he cannot give a thought to the welfare of another. He cannot give anything of himself. Such a person usually feels sorry for himself and finds other people unloving and unresponsive. He is still far from any realization of the Self within.

The unfortunate person who is burdened by resentment, for instance, feels that the world owes him more kindness than he is receiving. When he loses his resentment for the world simply by becoming interested in people, the world will once again reflect back the expression of this soul force, known as universal love. You may visualize this pure state of love as a force of light flooding out from the center of your Being. If you place sheets of paper too close to a light source, you temporarily block the light and scorch the paper. People are always scorching themselves by holding up against their own “inner-light paper” qualities such as resentment, malice and greed. Spontaneous acts of benevolence and selflessness, prompted by a will to perfection, lift the striving soul in feeling and begin slowly to remove the coverings from the light which is the soul. You can’t expect immediate action, of course, because you may still carry the seeds of destructive qualities within you, and it is these seeds which continue to hold man in lower states of consciousness.

The action and reaction of the self-centered state of mind creates tension and discord in mind and body. Often, when the diaphragm is tight, the muscles are tense, breathing is difficult and your whole disposition is on edge. A person attains relaxation and peace through a benevolent act in which he loses himself in another’s happiness. The cycles of tension and release, tension and release—which are constantly given birth to in the instinctive and intellectual state of mind—are only broken as the unfolding soul expresses itself in devotion, breaking up the crust of personal concern and hurt feelings.

Finding the Eternal Now

Before beginning a new project, meditate. Collect up the ramified forces flowing through and around your body and bring them all to one point by regulating the energies through the control of breath, prāṇāyāma. Thus arriving at the now, if only for an instant, begins the auspiciousness of the moment, after which the project should be begun. By thus meditating and through this practice, inner results infiltrate worldly undertakings, and the opposing forces succumb to the clarity of your perceptions derived through initially being aware in the now, if only for a few seconds.

When you are experiencing the totality of the moment, you are not aware of the past, nor are you aware of the future or anything within the externalities of the mind. You are aware of the ākāśa, the primal substance of the superconsciousness of the mind. You are able to have a continuity of intuitive findings within it and gain much knowledge from within yourself. For the beginner on the path, the concept of the eternity of the moment is refreshing, and he does touch into it occasionally when he tries to meditate. This is encouraging to him, and he gains a new impetus to pursue his inner life more courageously than before.

It is impossible to intellectually try to experience the here-and-now state of consciousness, as it is impossible to describe the feeling one would have standing on the top of a tall mountain. Only through experience can these transcendental states be known. Therefore, become perfect in yoga. Your rewards will be great and your future sublime.

As the first attempt in finding the infinite reality of the eternity of the moment, sit quietly, draw all of your faculties into the center of your head and try to see the glowing white light there. When this light is seen, a high-pitched sound might also be heard, and you are then in the eternity of the moment. Bringing oneself to the repetition of this practice successfully and systematically, day after day, month after month, year after year is the yoga to be practiced to merge awareness deeper and deeper into superconsciousness.

Now, you can think and you can feel, and feeling is more convincing. When your mind is disturbed, your feeling is personality-centered. When your mind is quiet, your subtle feeling is superconscious, spiritually aware. Feel that you are the complete master of your body, of your mind and of your emotions. Can you really feel that? Feel the life within you. Feel your will dominating your mind. Your will is your soul in action. You may think about your will as being your soul in action, but you must feel the real you, the real “I am.” Tell your subconscious mind twenty-four hours a day that this is true: that you are the master of body, mind, and emotions. For in one instant of realizing this, knowing this, feeling this to be true, you will find that you are all right, right now, in this instant, and you will find yourself entirely free from fear, worry and doubt. Live completely, regardless of your circumstances, then the circumstances in which you divide yourself will adjust themselves to become as beautiful as the beauty of your soul.

Be a Friend To Yourself

In the process of spiritual unfoldment, which brings you closer and closer to merging into the eternal now, you have to become accustomed to a new you. Become acquainted with yourself, become an old friend to yourself, and you will find living in the moment, in the inspiration of now, becoming second nature to the new you. Remember, it takes time to become an old friend to yourself, the same amount of time it would take to acquire a mature friendship with someone else.

In our beginning meditations on the Śaivite path of enlightenment, we must establish firmly in our intellect the basic truth of “the now.” Now and its seeming counterparts, “then and when,” are only ambiguous to us when the instinctive energies are scattered and unrelated and when there is absolutely no self-discipline of the vital forces which, when accomplished, harnesses man’s individual awareness in such a way that he becomes, over long periods of time, actually aware that he is aware, as well as being aware that his awareness is entangled in the externalities of mind due to an eventful scattering of instinctive forces. Furthermore, his awareness persists in the intuitive know-how and ability to disentangle itself from that external state as it becomes yanked back, deep within its natural state, the eternity of the moment. This ability is acquired through regular and regulated practice of yoga, diaphragmatic breathing and simple, yet profound, inner, mental, intuitive practices performed daily at the same time.

Having preceded the practice of yoga by firmly establishing in the subconscious realm of the mind the inevitability of the permanency of the moment, called now, through all areas of thought, there is one dispelling power, and that is man’s personal ability to withdraw his awareness from past and future and, from that static state, view out upon all areas of thought rather than wallow in them. We transgress our heritage on this planet through spending inordinate amounts of time in past and future and the mixture of the two. The penance is misery, confusion and sorrow, as we stumble over the furniture in a darkened room. Turn on the light, claim your heritage and live in the moment. Center awareness deep within the head. Sit in the center of the room. Enjoy the artifacts, rest in the center of the mind and view the panorama. Only by experiencing and acquiring the ability to reexperience, through the practice of yoga, the eternity of the moment can the aspirant allow deeper and deeper access to the fullness of his being.

The Quest For Security

You have at one time or another watched yourself pick up a new idea: “I shall do this and this and this!” Then, because you had a reaction over something, your enthusiasm died; you forgot the idea and bounded off onto something else. This is the way the mind works. You forget when you reach a part of your mind that has no inclination to understand. That is a part of the instinctive mind. If you run up against a habit pattern that is too strong for your will, it is like going along in a straight line and suddenly ricocheting off in another direction. But while this happens for a long time, after a lot of study and constant self-discipline—without which the study does not do too much good—the principles of the spiritual life finally become permeated through your entire being, and you become close to your soul in the eternal now.

This week, when you think about it, you will say to yourself, “I’m all right, right now,” and you will feel uplifted in knowing that this is so. But next week you will forget to do it. It makes you feel too complete, too secure. And being too secure is like being insecure, isn’t that true?

I met a family from the South recently that was having quite a time trying to adjust to the security of success! The husband has been a salesman all of his life, only just meeting the more or less routine needs of his family, three girls and one boy. He and his wife had always nurtured a desire for a lot of money so that the family could live in complete security, and every month for years they had put away just a little savings, with an eye to making the type of investment, at the right time, which would satisfy their dream.

Not long ago they found themselves able to buy into land with “remote possibilities of oil.” By spending the last of their savings to initiate drilling, by remote chance they did strike oil, bringing them almost immediate affluence through a chain of circumstances that has changed the entire pattern of their life. Now they feel more insecure than ever. When their money finally came in abundance, they found they really did not know what to do with it. They were worried because they had no experience in handling it. They felt totally transplanted, totally insecure in their apparent security.

After several conversations, they began to see that they had found their security in the desire for money; feeling that they did not have enough had become an integral part of the family’s subconscious. Because they were not able to live in the eternal now, they could not catch up with their new condition of life. Many people who find security in material desires are not able to become accustomed to something they are not already acquainted with.

Progress Takes Persistence

When you find yourself with your mind calmed, your future automatically works itself out. I have had so many people ask me questions, seeking advice. I very seldom give advice, because very few people really want it. The majority have already made up their own minds, and what they are looking for is permission to go ahead and do what they have already decided upon. But if a person asks a question three, four, five times, then you know they are seeking advice. It is a rare person, however, who can take that advice.

Often enough, some people may bring to you their problems. They tell you all their troubles, and you tell them how to work them out, because you can see a little bit farther than they can, due to the fact their minds are confused and yours is calm. But they end up by taking their problems right back again, and instead of working them out, they only add to the confusion. That is like going to a university, sitting in on a class, skipping the rest of the classes and expecting to pass the final exam when you have had only one lesson. It does not work there, and it doesn’t work in spiritual life either.

There are those who run from one teacher to another, staying with each one only long enough to find enough fault with him or his organization to be able to avoid the teaching and to run on to another teacher. These people are far from the stability of living in the eternal now, for as soon as they find fault with themselves and face overcoming their problems, they have to blame it all on someone else and run away.

Spiritual unfoldment is not unlike a university in this sense: you have to go through with all it has to offer for a number of years. If you skip from one university to another and back again and expect to graduate, you find that you are always being set back before you can go ahead! It just does not work.

It takes the average person some time before he can bring his entire mind and all his actions into the focus of the eternal now. Just hearing about it is not going to give you a birth into that state of consciousness. You will have to struggle and strive to hold the eternal now. It will take constant practice of spiritual principles to permeate the grosser layers of the mind with the clarity of the eternal now.