Category: Merging With Siva

Restraints and Observances

When we are children, we run freely, because we have no great subconscious burdens to carry. Very little has happened to us. Of course, our parents and religious institutions try to prepare us for life’s tests. But because the conscious mind of a child doesn’t know any better, it generally does not accept the preparation without experience, and life begins the waking up to the material world, creating situations about us—magnificent opportunities for failing these tests. If we do not fail, we know that we have at some prior time learned the lesson inherent in the experience. Experience gives us a bit of wisdom when we really face ourselves and discover the meaning of failure and success. Failure is just education. But you shouldn’t fail once you know the law.

There have been many systems and principles of ethics and morality established by various world teachers down through the ages. All of these have had only one common goal—to provide for man living on the planet Earth a guidepost for his thought and action so that his consciousness, his awareness, may evolve to the realization of life’s highest goals and purposes. The ancient yoga systems provided a few simple yamas and niyamas for religious observance, defining how all people should live. The yamas, or restraints, provided a basic system of discipline for the instinctive mind. The niyamas, or positive observances, are the affirming, life-giving actions and disciplines. From the holy Vedas we have assembled here ten yamas and ten niyamas, a simple statement of the ancient and beautiful laws of life.

The Ten Yamas, Restraints for Proper Conduct from the Vedas

Noninjury, ahiṁsā: Not harming others by thought, word, or deed.
Truthfulness, satya: Refraining from lying and betraying promises.
Nonstealing, asteya: Neither stealing, nor coveting nor entering into debt.
Divine conduct, brahmacharya: Controlling lust by remaining celibate when single, leading to faithfulness in marriage.
Patience, kshamā: Restraining intolerance with people and impatience with circumstances.
Steadfastness, dhṛiti: Overcoming nonperseverance, fear, indecision and changeableness.
Compassion, dayā: Conquering callous, cruel and insensitive feelings toward all beings.
Honesty, straightforwardness, ārjava: Renouncing deception and wrongdoing.
Moderate appetite, mitāhāra: Neither eating too much nor consuming meat, fish, fowl or eggs.
Purity, śaucha: Avoiding impurity in body, mind and speech.

The Ten Niyamas, Observances For Spiritual Life from the Vedas

Remorse, hrī: Being modest and showing shame for misdeeds.
Contentment, santosha: Seeking joy and serenity in life.
Giving, dāna: Tithing and giving generously without thought of reward.
Faith, āstikya: Believing firmly in God, Gods, guru and the path to enlightenment.
Worship of the Lord, Īśvarapūjana: The cultivation of devotion through daily worship and meditation.
Scriptural listening, siddhānta śravaṇa: Studying the teachings and listening to the wise of one’s lineage.
Cognition, mati: Developing a spiritual will and intellect with the guru’s guidance.
Sacred vows, vrata: Fulfilling religious vows, rules and observances faithfully.
Recitation, japa: Chanting mantras daily.
Austerity, tapas: Performing sādhana, penance, tapas and sacrifice.

To Live a Radiant Life

It is one thing to talk; it is another thing to demonstrate what is declared. Demonstration is a result of your awareness flowing through the super­con­scious area of the mind. The super­con­scious mind is actinic or radiant force, whereas the conscious and subconscious states of mind are manifestations of odic force, or magnetism. Excessive talk arises out of confused conscious and subconscious states of mind.

Find your actinic spiritual destiny in this life. Learn to live fully each instant, completely in the eternity of the moment. Become refined by constructive, rather than abusive, practices. Become positive through the generation of good deeds, rather than those uncomplimentary experiences we react to and reenact. Yours is a new and positive destiny, one that is true, constant and free from want or dangers. Life ahead for you can only become one of fulfillment and radiance as you adjust to dharmic principles. Follow these thirty-six gentle guidelines for living and meditate regularly in the morning when you awaken and just before sleep each night. That is all that is needed by the beginner on the eternal path to those enlightened heights of super­con­sciousness to which the subtle, individual, intelligent awareness of man aspires.

On and on through the mind we travel daily, once awareness has become detached from the limited area of mind it has been trapped in. The journey seems endless! It is. Seek on, seek on. Look in, look in. And on that solid foundation of good character, move into that place in the mind and live there, seeing no difference between the inner and the outer states of fluctuating awareness. Be that now for which you have been striving. The search is within. Go within the mind. Go in and in and in and in and make fathomable the unfathomable depth of Being. You can do it. It has been done countless times over the past several thousand years. Give yourself the great benefit of believing in yourself and flow inward, inward—to the totality of it all.

Awakening Willpower

This is why you were born. The one and only reason why you are existing in your material body is first to unfold into your clear white light, then penetrate deeper and deeper, touch into the Self, become a knower of the Self, Sat­chid­ānanda, and then deeper still into nir­vi­kalpa samā­dhi, Self Realization, preparing for the next steps on the classical yoga path—moksha, freedom from rebirth, and viśvagrāsa, merging with Śiva. You will soon realize that you create the mind in any way that you want, that you are master of your mind. To become master of your mind, you must realize that understanding is fifty percent of control of the mind, and you have to work at it as an accountant would work to balance his books, as a musician has to work to master his instrument.

To know yourself is why you are on Earth. You were born to realize the Self. You are not here to make money, to clothe yourself or to entertain yourself. These are incidentals. You are here on this planet to realize the Self God, and the only way to experience Self Realization is to awaken within you a dynamic, indomitable, actinic will. To do this, the steps are: first, find out what and where the willpower is. Everyone has it. Willpower is that quietness within, that serenity that is likened to a light so bright that you cannot see it with the physical eyes. Second, learn to use this actinic will. Begin with little things that you do. Become satisfied with everything that you do. To you, it must be a work of art, even if it is just drying a dish, cleaning a floor or painting a picture. Your work must satisfy you, and if it does not satisfy the inner you one hundred percent, you must use your indomitable willpower and keep striving until it does.

You must become a perfectionist unto yourself, but first decide what your standard for perfection is. You must control the quality of your work. Take on no responsibility that you cannot handle. By doing this, you will find that you have much more control over the physical body and emotions than you ever thought possible. You will begin to demonstrate to yourself your powers of control over material creations, the physical body and the emotions of the instinctive area of the mind. Demonstration comes as you use your indomitable willpower.

The Art of Being Constant

There is an art which you can learn which will make all of your decisions easier. It is the art of being constant. Consistency wins. Consistency is one of the most important qualities of a devotee. It is only through consistency in your daily life that you gain the awareness which enables you to cognize the experiences of life, taking from them their real lessons. It is only through consistency that you can avoid many of the boulders that lie in your way on the classical yoga path to enlightenment. Practice the art of being constant, and you will unfold your destiny, discover what you were born to do and learn how to accomplish it in this life. For in that security you will awaken and fulfill your destiny and realize the Self. Thus having your feet planted firmly on the ground, your consciousness can dwell freely in the spirit born of Self Realization.

Study your approach to life today as you practice this exercise. Take some of the experiences from your subconscious state of mind. Add them up and see how well your life balances out. Visualize a scale before you. Put the total of the experiences understood and the lessons derived from them on one side. Put on the other side of the scale the total number of experiences that you do not fully understand and from which you can still reap lessons. See how they balance. If they balance evenly, you are well on your way to becoming steadfast and constant. If they overbalance on the reactionary side, you are on the right track because you now have the power to balance your scale—your subconscious. If they overbalance on the understanding side, you should consider dedicating your life to the service of others.

Sit quietly with your eyes closed. Look deep within and trace back to the peak experiences that have happened through your life from your earliest days. Quickly fan through the pages of your life and pinpoint each climax, and know that that climax was the sum total of many experiences, forming one great experience out of which one great lesson of life was born.

Take the experiences that you are not quite sure of—all the ones that you cannot form into a solid stone of understanding. Take those experiences and resolve to trace down each intuitively. Don’t analyze. Just look at the sum total of the experiences, and after awhile you will get your clarification in a flash of intuition. This will be of great benefit to you. The great lessons that those experiences offer will become apparent as you progress in your practice of concentration. Do this, and you will do much for yourself.

We Create Our Mind Each Instant

I always try to keep the approach to the study of life and the un­fold­ment of the inner Self very simple by giving examples of the flower that begins as the little seed and grows into a stem forming a bud. We know nothing of the blossom until the bud opens, and we know little of the bud after it has become a blossom. However, each process within that growth to maturity is an experience for the plant. The seed contains within itself its basic laws of growth. The stem will tell its own story as it grows. The bud contains many experiences and has contained within it a complete story of its own. As the blossom unfolds, it tells a radiant autobiography of beauty.

In the philosophies of the Orient, the inner mind is often depicted as the lotus flower. That is what the mind would look like if you could see the mind. We can look at things on the material plane. The ugly things tell us how ugly the mind can become. When we look at the beautiful creations of nature, we see how lovely the mind can be.

It is up to us to choose how we want to create the mind, conscious and subconscious. I say “how we want to create the mind” because we are creating our mind each instant. There is no past! That dream as it passes before our vision is right now. We call it the past because we say we remember, but as we are remembering, we are recreating what we are remembering in the present. There is no future! That is also a dream or a vision, just like the past, because when we think of the so-called future we are recreating it before our vision right now. Therefore, there is no past; there is no future. Now is the only apparent reality! Now is the only apparent reality, and it is up to us to decide how we want to create our mind, because we do create our mind each instant.

We can make basic decisions. “I would like to be nice to a certain friend of mine. That is the one who has not been too friendly to me lately.” This is a basic decision. Go out today, and if someone does harm to you, or your friend is not kind to you, show your love by doing something kind for him. It is up to us to decide how to face life, be it “love your neighbor,” or “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” It is up to us to fathom the reaction we are going to cause in ourselves and others by each of our decisions. Since each decision will bring its own reward, it is up to us to determine whether we want to suffer through a reaction as a result of an action that we have not duly considered in the light of dharmic principles.

Life is a series of decisions. Each instant, as we create the instant, we are creating the decision. We are facing the reaction we caused to come before us, and in facing it with the power of principle we are building the so-called future. So, a man has two paths, and every moment is a moment of judgment. Good judgment comes from concentration—directing the flow of thought. It does not always have to be difficult to choose.

Experience Is A Classroom

Each experience is a classroom. When the subconscious mind has been fully reconciled to everything that has happened, when you have fully realized that everything you have gone through is nothing more and nothing less than an experience, and that each experience is really a classroom, you will receive from yourself your innerversity personal evaluation report, and it will be covered with the highest grades, denoting excellent cognition.

Each of these higher grades is important, for when you put them together they will unfold a consciousness of understanding, making you eligible for your graduation certificate of visually seeing the clear white light within your head while sitting in a darkened room. Yet, if you have failed a class, or several classes, not only will the marks show, but it will also take you longer to graduate. If you haven’t taken from each experience its sum of understanding, subconsciously you remain in the classroom reacting to the lesson you are learning, even though the experience may have occurred fifteen or twenty years ago.

So, we have to end each of these experiences in understanding. We have to be promoted to the next deeper grade of awareness so that, with the universal love born of understanding, we can close the classroom doors behind us and receive our diploma. When we receive this first diploma of the clear white light, we are given the greater knowledge and wisdom of what this great experience of life is all about. How do we realize what life is all about? By having lived it fully we fully realize that the past is nothing more and nothing less than a dream, and a dream is comprised of pleasant experiences and nightmares. Both are just experiences, neither good nor bad, right nor wrong.

But you must remember that even the greatest souls have had nightmares, confusions, heartbreaks, disappointments, losses, desires that have been unfulfilled and experiences that they have not been able to cognize. And then they have come to a point in their lives when their inner being started pushing forward to the conscious plane. In other words, they have had just about all the experience necessary to graduate out of the instinctive-intellectual world, or consciousness. The great, intuitive super­con­scious nature begins pushing forward to the conscious plane, stirring up within the subconscious the remnants of the past. As those remnants come up, they have to be faced and cognized through meditation, thus creating the foundation for understanding the basic laws and principles of life. Then comes the dawn of the clear white light.