Category: Merging With Siva

Cardinal Signposts

The young aspirant just becoming acquainted with the path to enlightenment may wonder where he is, how much he has achieved so far. There are a few cardinal signposts he may identify with to know he has touched into the inner realms of his mind. Should he ever have experienced a “here-and-now” consciousness, causing him to fight the “where and when” of the future and the “there and then” of the past afterwards, he can fully impart to himself an award of having achieved some attainment by striving even more diligently than before. The ability to see the external world as transparent, a game, a dream, encourages the aspirant to seek deeper. The moon-like light within the center of his head appears during his tries at meditation, sometimes giving him the perceptive ability to cognize the intricate workings of another’s external and subconscious states of mind, as well as his own, intimately. The ability of the ardent soul to recognize his guru and identify himself in the actinic flow from whence the master infuses knowledge by causing inner doors to open is another signpost that the aspirant has become an experiencer and is touching in on the fringe or perimeter of transcendental states of mind.

Many on the path to enlightenment will be able to identify, through their personal experience, some of these signposts and recall many happenings that occurred during their awakenings. But remember, the recall and the experience are quite different. The experience is “here and now”; the recall is “there and then.” However, by identifying the experience and relating it to a solid intellectual knowledge, the ability will be awakened to utilize and live consciously in inner states of super­con­sciousness. After acquiring this ability to consciously live super­con­sciously comes the ability to work accurately and enthusiastically in the material world while holding the intensity of the inner light, giving perceptive awareness of its mechanical structure. There also comes the ability to work out quickly in meditation experiences of the external mind or worldly happenings through finding their “innerversity” aspects rather than being drawn out into the swirl of them. In doing so, the cause-and-effect karmic experiential patterns of the aspirant’s life that tend to lower his consciousness into congested areas of the mind will clear up as, more and more, the actinic flow of super­con­sciousness is maintained as the bursts of clear white light become frequent.

Psychic Sounds

Occasionally, through his newly exercised extrasensory perception, he may hear the seven sounds he previously studied about in occult lore. The sounds of the atomic structure of his nerve system, his cells, register as voices singing, the vīṇā or sitār, tambūra, or as symphonies of music. Instruments to duplicate these sounds for the outer ears were carefully tooled by the ṛishis of classical yoga thousands of years ago, including the mṛidaṅga or tabla, and the flute. He will hear the shrill note, likened to a nightingale singing, as psychic centers in his cranium burst open, and then an inner voice indicating to his external consciousness—like a breath of air—direction, elucidation. This inner voice remains with him as a permanent yoga of the external, with the internal consciousness an ever-ready guide to the unraveling of complexities of daily life.

Occasionally, in a cross-section of the inner mind, when light merges into transcendental form, the young aspirant may view the golden actinic face of a master peering into his, kindly and all-knowing. He is looking at his own great potential. As the clear white light becomes more of a friend to his external mind than an experience or vision and can be basked in during contemplative periods of the day, the nourishment to the entirety of the nerve system, as ambrosia, bursts forth from the crown cha­kra. This is identified inadequately as “the peace that passeth understanding,” for he who reaches this state can never seem to explain it.

The highly trained classical yoga adept intensifies, through techniques imparted to him from his guru, the clear white light to the brink of God Realization, the void. His entire body is faded into a sea of blue-white light, the ākāśa, where now, past and future are recorded in the linear depths or layers, sometimes seeing himself seated or standing on a lotus flower of shimmering light in an actinodic clear, transparent, neon, plastic-like-body outline as his consciousness touches, in tune with a heart’s beat, into the Self, God Realization.

Keeping this continuity alive and not allowing the external consciousness to reign, the young aspirant lives daily in the clear white light, having occasionally more intense experiences as just described, while meeting daily chores here and now, until he attains the maturity of the nerve fiber essential to burst his consciousness beyond itself into the pure nonconscious state, nir­vi­kalpa samā­dhi, the Self. Only known and identified by him as an experience experienced, only recognized by others as he maintains his point of reference: that mind is only illusion, ever changing and perpetuating itself by mingling concepts of past and future into the present; that the only reality is the timeless, formless, causeless, spaceless Self beyond the mind. He knows that the mind, which is made from a consciousness of time, creates, maintains and defabricates form, and exists in a relative concept of space. The Self is the only reality and is an intensity far greater than that of any phase of the mind.

Capturing the Here and Now

The feeling and the realization of the here-and-now intensity of consciousness becomes intriguing to him, and he works daily on yoga techniques to strengthen psychic nerve fibers and perfect his artistry of maintaining this awareness. Many things fall away from him as he expands his consciousness through the classical practices of meditation. He loosens the odic bonds of family and former friends. Magnetic ties to possessions and places fade out until he is alone, involved with the refined realms of mind and in the actinic flow of energies. Occasionally his awareness is brought out into a habit pattern or a concept of himself as he used to be, but viewed with his new stability in his recently found inner security of being whole, this too quickly fades.

Whenever darkness comes into the material world, this centered man is light. He sees light within his head and body as clearly as he did in former states of materialistic consciousness when looking at a glowing light bulb. While involved in innersearching some hidden laws of existence or unraveling the solution to a problem of the outer mind, he sits viewing the inner light, and the light shines through the knitted law of existence, clearly showing it in all its ramifications, as well as shining out upon the snarled problem, burning it back into proportionate component parts.

Thus becoming adept in using his newly found faculties, he begins to study the findings of others and compare them to his own. This educational play-back process elucidates to his still-doubting intellect the “all-rightness” of the happenings that occur within him. He finds that for six thousand years men have, from time to time, walked the classical yoga path and attained enlightenment, and he begins to see that he has yet far to go, as his light often is dimmed by the pulling he experiences of the past, by the exuberance he shares with the future and by the yet fawn-like instability of the “here-and-now eternity” he has most recently experienced.

Now, in the dawn of a new age, when many men are being drawn within, it is eminently easier to attain and maintain clarity of perception through the actinic light within the body. Through the classical yoga techniques, perfecting the conscious use of the actinic willpower, the energies can be drawn inward from the outer mind, and the awareness can bask in the actinic light, coming into the outer mind only at will, and positively.

Occasionally young aspirants burst into inner experience indicating a balance of intense light at a still-higher rate of vibration of here-and-now awareness than their almost daily experience of a moon-glow inner light: the dynamic vision of seeing the head, and at times the body, filled with a brilliant clear white light. When this intensity can be attained at will, more than often man will identify himself as actinic force flowing through the odic externalities of the outer mind and identify it as a force of life more real and infinitely more permanent than the external mind itself.

Beyond Past And Future

Whenever man comes to the point in his evolution where he has sufficient mastery in the mind to produce “things,” he suffers for the lack of peace, for in his activity on the mental spheres in conceiving, planning, gathering the forces together and finally viewing the outcome as a physical manifestation, he has exercised an intricate control over the nerve fibers of his mind. Thus caught in this pattern, he must go on producing to insure his mental security, for should he stop for a moment, the whiplash upon his senses as the generative functions ceased to be active would cause paranoiac depressions, at times almost beyond repair.

The man looking into the “where and when” of the future, blending his energies with those who are also striving to evolve into a more ramified state of mind, can suffer well if he keeps going, producing, acquiring and believing that materiality is reality. Evolution of the species takes its toll, for as man’s mind evolves, he is no longer content projecting into the “where and when” of the material consciousness, and as he seeks some reward of peace for his efforts, he begins to look into the past for solutions, the “there and then” of it all. Thus, finding himself born into a cross-section of awareness between past and future, having experienced both of these tendencies of the mind, causes him to reflect. Philosophy holds few answers for him. Its congested mass of “shoulds” and “don’ts” he knows has proved more to the philosopher who cleared his mind on paper than to the reader who has yet to complement with inner knowing its indicated depths.

Occultism is intriguing to him, for it shows that there are possibilities of expression beyond the senses he has become well accustomed to using. But again, evolution rounding his vision causes him to discard the occult symbolism, laws and practices as another look into the past or future of the mind’s depths.

The idea of yoga, union through perceptive control of the flow of thought, and of the generative processes of a perceptive idea before thought is formed, is most satisfying. The cognition of the actinic process of life currents intrigues him, and he looks further into the practice of yoga techniques and finds that peace is gained through a conscious government first of the life currents through the body and second of the realm of ideas as they flow into thought. And while remaining the observer of it all in the eternity of the here and now, the seeker fully realizes that time, space and causation are only indicated through holding an off-balanced consciousness of past and future.

Gaining Self-Control

Perhaps the biggest battle in the beginning stages of practicing attention and concentration is the control of breath. The beginner will not want to sit long enough, or not be able to become quiet enough to have a deep, controlled flow of breath. After five minutes, the physical elements of the subconscious mind will become restless. He will want to squirm about. He will sit down to concentrate on the flower and begin thinking of many other things that he should be doing instead: “I should have done my washing first.” “I may be staying here for a half an hour. What if I get hungry? Perhaps I should have eaten first.” The telephone may ring, and he will wonder who is calling. “Maybe I should get up and answer it,” he thinks and then mentally says, “Let it ring. I’m here to concentrate on the flower.” If he does not succeed immediately, he will rationalize, “How important can breathing rhythmically be, anyway? I’m breathing all right. This is far too simple to be very important.” He will go through all of this within himself, for this is how he has been accustomed to living in the conscious mind, jumping from one thing to the next.

When you sit at attention, view all of the distractions that come as you endeavor to concentrate on one single object, such as a flower. This will show you exactly how the conscious and subconscious mind operate. All of the same distractions come in everyday life. If you are a disciplined person, you handle them systematically through the day. If you are undisciplined, you are sporadic in your approach and allow your awareness to become distracted by them haphazardly instead of concentrating on one at a time. Such concerns have been there life after life, year after year. The habit of becoming constantly distracted makes it impossible for you to truly concentrate the mind or to realize anything other than distractions and the desires of the conscious mind itself.

Even the poor subconscious has a time keeping up with the new programming flowing into it from the experiences our awareness goes through as it travels quickly through the conscious mind in an undisciplined way. When the subconscious mind becomes overloaded in recording all that goes into it from the conscious mind, we experience frustration, anxiety, nervousness, insecurity and neuroses. These are some of the subconscious ailments that are so widespread in the world today.

There comes a time in man’s life when he has to put an end to it all. He sits down. He begins to breathe, to ponder and be aware of only one pleasant thing. As he does this, he becomes dynamic and his will becomes strong. His concentration continues on that flower. As his breath becomes more and more regulated, his body becomes quiet and the one great faculty of the soul becomes predominant—observation, the first faculty of the unfoldment of the soul.

We as the soul see out through the physical eyes. As we look through the physical eyes at the flower and meditate deeply upon the flower, we tune into the soul’s vast well of knowing and begin to observe previously unknown facts about the flower. We see where it came from. We see how one little flower has enough memory locked up within its tiny seed to come up again and again in the very same way. A rose does not forget and come up as a tulip. Nor does a tulip forget and come up as a lily. Nor does a lily forget and come up as a peach tree. There is enough memory resident in the genes of the seeds of each that they come up as the same species every season. As we observe this single law and pierce into the inner realms of the mind, we see the flower as large as a house, or as small as the point of a pin, because the eyes of the superconscious mind, the spiritual body, can magnify or diminish any object in order to study it and understand it. To know this, to experience this, is to develop willpower to transform oneself into the knower of what is to be known. Yes, willpower is the key, the must, the most needed faculty for spiritual unfoldment on this path. Work hard, strive to accomplish, strengthen the will by using the will. But remember, “With love in the will, the spirit is free.” This means that willpower can be used wrongly without the binding softening of love, simple love. Say in your mind to everyone you meet, “I like you. You like me, I really do like you. I love you. I truly love you.”

Don’t Get Sidetracked

The mystic seeks to gain the conscious control of his own willpower, to awaken knowledge of the primal force through the direct experience of it and to claim conscious control of his own individual awareness. In the beginning stages on the path, you will surely experience your mind wandering—when awareness is totally identified with everything that it is aware of. This gives us the sense, the feeling, that we are the mind or that we are the emotion or the body. And when sitting in meditation, myriad thoughts bounce through the brain and it becomes difficult to even concentrate upon what is supposed to be meditated upon, in some cases even to remember what it was. That is why the sādhana of the practices of yoga given in these lessons must be mastered to some extent in order to gain enough control over the willpower and sense organs to cause the meditation to become introverted rather than extroverted. The grace of the guru can cause this to happen, because he stabilizes the willpower, the awareness, within his devotees as a harmonious father and mother stabilize the home for their offspring. If one has no guru or has one and is only a part-time devotee, then he must struggle in his efforts as an orphan in the institution of external life, for the world is your guru. His name is Śrī Śrī Viśvaguru Mahā Mahārāj, the most august universal teacher, grand master and sovereign.

Even before we sit down to meditate, one of the first steps is to acquire a conscious mastery of awareness in the conscious mind itself. Learn attention and concentration. Apply them in everything that you do. As soon as we bring awareness to attention and train awareness in the art of concentration, the great power of observation comes to us naturally. We find that we are in a state of observation all the time. All awakened souls have keen observation. They do not miss very much that happens around them on the physical plane or on the inner planes. They are constantly in a state of observation.

For instance, we take a flower and begin to think only about the flower. We put it in front of us and look at it. This flower can now represent the conscious mind. Our physical eyes are also of the conscious mind. Examine the flower, become aware of the flower and cease being aware of all other things and thoughts. It is just the flower now and our awareness. The practice now is: each time we forget about the flower and become aware of something else, we use the power of our will to bring awareness right back to that little flower and think about it. Each time we become aware of any other thoughts, we excuse awareness from those thoughts. Gently, on the in-breath, we pull awareness back to the world of the flower. This is an initial step in unraveling awareness from the bondages of the conscious mind.