Category: Merging With Siva

What Is Meditation?

Many seekers work or even struggle regularly with their meditations, especially those who are just beginning. “How does one know if he is really meditating or not?” That’s a question that a lot of people who meditate ask themselves. When you begin to know, having left the process of thinking, you are meditating at that point. When you sit down and think, you are beginning the process of meditation. For instance, if you read a metaphysical book, a deep book, and then sit quietly, breathe and start pondering what you have been reading, well, you’re not quite meditating. You’re in a state called concentration. You’re organizing the subject matter. When you begin to realize the interrelated aspects of what you have read, when you say to yourself, “That’s right. That’s right,” when you get these inner flashes, the process of meditation has just begun. If you sustain this intensity, insights and knowledge will come from the inside of you. You begin to connect all of the inner flashes together like a string of beads. You become just one big inner flash. You know all of these new inner things, and one insight develops into another, into another, into another. Then you move into a deeper state, called contemplation, where you feel these beautiful, blissful energies flow through the body as a result of your meditation. With disciplined control of awareness, you can go deeper and deeper into that. So, basically, meditation begins when you move out of the process of thinking.

I look at the mind as a traveler looks at the world. Himalayan Academy students have traveled with me all over the world, in hundreds of cities, in dozens of countries, as we’ve set up āśramas here and there on our Innersearch Travel-Study programs. Together we have gone in and in and in and in amid different types of environments, but the inside is always the same wherever we are. So, look at the mind as the traveler looks at the world.

Just as you travel around the world, when you’re in meditation you travel in the mind. We have the big city called thought. We have another big city called emotion. There’s yet another big city called fear, and another one nearby called worry. But we are not those cities. We’re just the traveler. When we’re in San Francisco, we are not San Francisco. When we’re aware of worry, we are not worry. We are just the inner traveler who has become aware of the different areas of the mind.

Of course, when we are aware in the thought area, we are not meditating. We’re in the intellectual area of the mind. We have to breathe more deeply, control the breath more and move awareness out of the thought area of the mind, into that next inner area, where we begin to know. Such an experience supersedes thinking, and that is when meditation starts. I’m sure that you have experienced that many, many times.

Many people use meditation to become quieter, relaxed, or more concentrated. For them, that is the goal, and if that is the goal, that is what is attained, and it’s attained quite easily. However, for the deeper philosophical student the goal is different. It’s the realization of the Self in this life. Meditation is the conveyance of man’s individual awareness toward that realization. Each one, according to his evolution, has his own particular goal. If he works at it, he fulfills that goal. For example, a musician playing the piano might be satisfied with being able to play simple, easy tunes to entertain himself and his friends. Yet, another musician more ambitious in the fine arts might want to play Bach and Beethoven. He would really have to work hard at it. He would have to be that much more dedicated, give up that much of his emotional life, intellectual life and put that much more time into it. So it is in meditation.

Categories Of Karma

We are born. Birth is like going on an Innersearch Travel-Study Program. In preparing for our journey, we pack certain belongings. We don’t bring everything that we own, which we could liken to our sañchita karmas. We might try to, but we don’t. We bring only two suitcases, which we can manage quite easily, one in each hand, with wheels on them. Our other suitcases and things in our closet we leave at home. These are like the karmas that we don’t bring with us when we are born. We bring just a certain portion of our karmas to live through in this life, called prārabdha karmas. Karmas left to be worked out in another life are in seed stage, inactive—hanging in the closet.

So, here we are, with our two suitcases of karma, and the idea is to go through life and come out the other end without the suitcases. Unless we have dharma, which we are committed to and live fully, which has the restraints, we would fill up the suitcases again, buying knick-knacks, as you all have been doing, so that when you get off the boat, your suitcases are full again. That becomes karma, kriyamāna karma. We have choices to not make new karma, especially the ones we don’t want to face in the future. That is the cycle of life. It works like that until all the suitcases are empty.

The swāmīs who renounce the world and do tapas are trying to burn the seeds of the karmas that they did not bring with them in this life. They set fire to the whole house. They renounce the world and put restrictions upon themselves that others don’t, especially those who are going through their purushārtha karmas. You also have to do your karma. Understanding all this, we can see the need for daily discipline.

What do we mean, exactly, by the terms good karma and bad karma? There is good karma as well as bad, though we say there is no good nor bad—only experience. Still, some karmas are more difficult to bear, experience and reexperience than others. This is where it is extremely important to inhibit the tendencies to let loose the forces that externalize awareness, while at the same time performing the sādhana of realizing the Source through internalizing awareness. It is this constant pull between the inner and the outer, or individual awareness soaring back and forth between the externalities and internalities, that keeps churning the fiery forces of karma into the smoldering coals of dharma. Good karma is denoted by good merit, since every cause has its due effect. Therefore, so-called bad karma brings injury, pain, misunderstanding and anguish, which when suffered through completes the cycle.

Ancient yogīs, in psychically studying the timeline of cause and effect, assigned three categories to karma. The first is sañchita, the sum total of past karma yet to be resolved. The second category is prārabdha, that portion of sañchita karma being experienced in the present life. Kriyamāna, the third type, is karma you are presently creating. However, it must be understood that your past negative karma can be altered into a smoother, easier state through the loving, heart-chakra nature, through dharma and sādhana. That is the key of karmic wisdom. Live religiously well and you will create positive karma for the future and soften negative karma of the past.

Right knowledge, right decision and right action imperceptibly straighten out, unkink and unwind ignorantly devised or contrived past actions. The key word is reform. Re-form, re-make, re-cast. To put into a molten state and be reformed is what happens to our karma when we enter dharma. Adharma is creating karma, good, not so good, terrible, mixed and confused. Dharma reforms all of this—reshapes and molds, allowing the devotee to do good and think good, to be clearly perceptive. Putting all the karma in a molten state is bhakti. Happy karma, sad karma, bad karma, when consciously or unconsciously wanted to be held on to, inhibits bhakti. Bhakti brings grace, and the sustaining grace melts and blends the karmas in the heart. In the heart chakra the karmas are in a molten state. The throat chakra molds the karmas through sādhana, regular religious practices. The third-eye chakra sees the karmas, past, present and future, as a singular oneness. And the crown chakra absorbs, burns clean, enough of the karmas to open the gate, the door of Brahman, revealing the straight path to merging with Śiva.

The Role of The Satguru

Responsibly resolving karma is among the most important reasons that a satguru is necessary in a sincere seeker’s life. The guru helps the devotee to hold his mind in focus, to become pointedly conscious of thought, word and deed, and to cognize the lessons of each experience. Without the guidance and grace of the guru, the devotee’s mind will be divided between instinctive and intellectual forces, making it very difficult to resolve karma. And only when karma is wisely harnessed can the mind become still enough to experience its own superconscious depths.

The guru guides and also shares a bit of the heavier burdens, if one is fortunate enough to be dedicated enough to have a guru who will lend his powers in this way. But each aspect of the karma, the outgrowth of the dharma, must be passed through by the disciple, creating as little as possible of a similar karma on this tenuous path of the repetition of the cycles of life.

The guru is able, because of his enlightenment or tapas, or as his tapas, to take upon himself the karma of another. Just what exactly does this mean? You have already found such persons at the moment of your birth—your mother and your father, who, perhaps unknowingly, took the full impact of your dharma, and continue to take the impact of the karma you create, deeply within their nerve systems. If your karma is of a heavy nature, it could disrupt the entire home, and they could suffer because of it. On the other hand, if your dharma is devonic, full of merit accrued by generosity, good deeds and graciousness in your former life, your presence in their home is a blessing, and the force of your arrival may mitigate influences in their minds of an uncomely nature, bringing peace, harmony and forbearance into the home. The guru may take unto himself, into his nerve system, some of the heavier areas of your karma in the same way your parents performed this function for you perhaps unknowingly.

Planetary changes activate new karmas and close off some of the karmas previously activated. These karmas then wait in abeyance, accumulating new energy from current actions, to be reactivated at some later time. These karmic packets become more refined, life after life, through sādhana. All of this is summed up by one word, evolution.

The planets do not cause the events or the vibrations that individuals react to either positively or negatively. The magnetic pulls of light or the absence of light release that which is already there within the individual. If not much is there, not much can be released. The magnetic pulls and the lack of magnetism are what jyotisha (Vedic astrology) is telling us is happening at every point in time. Two things—magnetism and its absence. On and off. Light and dark. With and without. Action and no action. Therefore, these keys release within the individual what was created when other keys were releasing other karmas. It is our reaction to karmas through lack of understanding that creates most karmas we shall experience at a future time. The sum total of all karmas, including the journey through consciousness required to resolve them, is called saṁsāra.

Dharma is like a box, made of restraints and observances. The box contains karma. It allows an individual to work through his birth karmas and prevent unseemly new karmas from being created to be worked out in the next life. Without the guidance of dharma, the individual is free to make all kinds of new karma.

The State Of Resolve

When you hear the high-pitched sound “eee” in your head, your karma and your dharma are at that moment well balanced in this life. This is reassuring to know, as is the fact that if you persist in this state for an exceedingly long period of time, you would come into the realization of the experience of God. However, as you doubtless have already experienced, distractions you have set into motion teasingly bring awareness into another area, and almost without your knowing it, the high-pitched “eee” sound has faded and a thought has taken its place.

When you are in a state of resolve—and resolve is the key word here; this means you have resolved the major karmas of conflict—good fortune and all the emotions arise, both generated through understanding the awakened philosophies by the practice of yoga and the results obtained. Then the karmas of the head chakras begin to unfold, resulting in these sublime feelings. These karmas are only experienced after many Paraśiva experiences, but they are felt before as a blissful impending future. It is from these karmas the word bliss derives. Only beyond the beyond the beyond—within the vastness within the heart and core of the universes, when space turns to spacelessness, time stops and māyā’s endless cycles are no more—are there no more karmas. Māyā’s endless cycle of creation, preservation and dissolution are karmas in the manifold creations of this process.

The Effect of Self Realization

“I am the master of my fate.” This is how you become the master of your fate and the ruler of your own destiny. Through meditation you can bring everything to the now. “What happens when all the karma of all my past lives is worked out and I finally bring myself up to the now? Then what happens?” you might ask. You would truly be an artisan, an absolute expert at working out karma in the mental and spiritual spheres, and could begin to help working out karma for other people. Karma is transferable. One can take on some of the karma of other people, work it out for them and make their burden a little easier for them.

After the realization of the Self, Paraśiva, the forces of dharma and previous karma still exist, but through the force of the realization of God, much of the impending impact of karma has dwindled, and it is faced differently, treated differently. Prior to the experience of realization, karmas were dealt with in individual increments. After realization, the sum total is seen. The spiritual destiny is realized. The karma and dharma and the future manufacturing of karma are viewed from within out, as a totality.

One does not have the experience of realizing the Self until all of his karma is in a state of resolve. This means that the action-and-reaction patterns were balanced out, one against the other, through his ability to be steadfast in his yoga, brahmacharya and previous superconscious insights which have revealed the true nature of himself. When this begins to occur in him, he actually sees that man is not man, man is the Self, God, for his karma and the forces of his dharma have begun to become transparent to him.

Through the power of his realization, the karma is created and simultaneously dissolved. This occurs for the one who lives in the timeless state of consciousness. If one were to realize the Self each day, he would live his life like writing his karma on the surface of water. The intensity of the Self is so strong that action and reaction dissolve, just as the water’s surface clears immediately when you remove your finger from having written or made designs upon it.

Working It Out On the Inside

A third way that past actions are re-enacted is through the actual intense reactionary experience and working with yourself, conquering inner desires and emotions. When something happens to you that you put into motion in a past life or earlier in this life, sit down and think it over. Do not strike out. Do not react. Work it out inside yourself. Take the experience within, into the pure energies of the spine and transmute that energy back into its primal source. In doing so, what happens? You change its consistency. It no longer has magnetic power, and awareness flows away from that memory pattern forever. You could remember the experience, but your perspective would be totally detached and objective. This is the most common way karma is resolved, in day-to-day experiences. By living an inner life, you stop creating uncomplimentary karma and can therefore consciously face the reactions of the past without the confusion of additional day-to-day reactions.

Everyone lives an inner life. When you are thinking over that film that you saw last week, that is inner life. When you are deeply involved in a reactionary area because of something that has happened or is happening to someone else, you are living inwardly the same experience that you think he is going through.

In your life, someone you love has gone through an experience, and you have shared it with him. You felt his suffering and began to live it through dramatically. Actually, that same experience under a different set of conditions would have been happening to you, but it was happening to you in an indirect way through observation. You were able to vicariously work through this karma.

Perhaps your friend is destined to lose his leg in this life because he caused someone else to lose a leg in a past life. If he is living as an instinctive being, with all the energies flowing through the first two chakras, memory and reason, and through the passive physical forces, that experience will come to him in full force. However, perhaps he has his energies flowing through aggressive intellectual forces. Even if he is not consciously on the path of enlightenment, but is kindly and subdues his instinctive reactions by his intellect, that karma would still come back to him, but he would experience it in a different way.

One morning he may pick up the newspaper and read about an automobile accident in which someone has lost a leg. This news jars him. His solar plexus tightens. His reaction is so severe that he cannot eat his breakfast that morning. He does not know why, but all day he lives and relives every experience the article describes. He wonders, “What if this had happened to me? What would I do? How would I face it? How would I adjust my consciousness to it?” At work he imagines himself going through life with one leg—the therapy, the family concern, the emotional adjustment. It may take him three or four days to work his awareness out of that reaction. He does not know why that particular article in the newspaper impressed him so much. It seems foolish to him to think so much about the event and he tries to forget it. Soon thereafter, while hiking in the mountains, he stumbles and falls, cutting his thigh on the jagged rocks, tearing a few ligaments. The full force of the karmic experience comes, but because of his present goodness and previous blessings earned through control of his intellect, he receives the experience as a minor wound and an emotional reaction to another’s losing his leg. This seed karma is worked through within himself in this way. He does not have to lose a leg, as he would if he were living in the instinctive mind of fear, anger and jealousy.