Category: Merging With Siva

Hold Awareness Firmly

Now, what do you do if during meditation the power becomes very strong and carries you into refined but unanticipated areas of superconsciousness? It is not unusual for a good meditator to go in a different direction when the inner forces or energies become so intense that awareness itself becomes all energy. That’s fine. That’s what you want. That’s also part of your meditation. Go right in and become aware of being aware and enjoy that intensity of inner power. Hold it steady. It won’t sidetrack you or disturb your meditation in the least, but you have to come right back when that power begins to wane to the original meditation that you intended to work with. Work with it in a very positive way. Stay with it and don’t get sidetracked in another area, no matter how interesting it is.

Only in this way are you going to really go on past the point of being able to meditate only adequately well. Only in this way, once you are unfolded spiritually to a certain degree, can you go on with your unfoldment. This is a difficult practice, because you will go in for a very fine meditation and get into profound depths and burst into new and interesting areas. This will happen, and the sidetrack will be fascinating, perhaps much more than your meditation subject. That is the time you must hold awareness firmly and fulfill your original intent.

The potter is a good example. He is going to make a beautiful planter pot, and it turns out to be a milk pot instead, simply because he was sidetracked. Then he says, “Oh, an impulse told me I should make a milk pot, right in the middle of making a planter pot.” This example tells you that you have to fulfill your original intent. Then you get confidence. You build a whole layer of subconscious confidence because you know where you are going to go on the inside.

Think about this and work with it, because it’s very important to get a grip on awareness in all areas of the mind. Start out with a very firm foundation. This principle will carry through everything that you do. You will become more and more precise. Your physical body will become firm and energetic. Your personal habits will become precise. The way you handle your thinking will be precise. You will pay more attention to details. You won’t assume so much, and you will follow intricate lines of thought through to their conclusion.

Someone who meditates well also thinks well. He can flow through that thinking area of the mind and work out things through the thought processes. Someone who meditates has confidence in all departments of life. You can build that confidence. If you sit down to meditate, meditate! Don’t get sidetracked on anything else, no matter how attractive it may be. If the power builds within you, sit for a long time afterwards and let the energy absorb into the cells of your external body. Great energy is released from within. Don’t get up after your meditation and immediately run off to do something. Sit in silent stillness until that power subsides in a gradual and refined way.

Progress Takes Discipline

When you go into a meditation, decide first what you are going to meditate upon and then stick with it. It is not advisable to habitually sit for meditation with no particular goal or direction, for we often end up walking in mental or subconscious circles. We have to avoid going into a meditation and then taking off into random or unintended directions, for this then can lend new vigor and strength to uncomely states of mind. You have to be very firm with yourself in meditation sessions. They are serious, not ponderous, but serious applications of life’s force. They are moments of transformation and discovery, and the same care and earnestness of a mountain climber must be observed constantly if real progress and not mere entertainment is the goal. In the very same way, in the external world, if you begin something, you finish it. If you are working on a project creatively, you maintain your efforts until you bring it to a conclusion. It is such people who become truly successful in meditation.

You can learn to meditate extremely well, but will be unsuccessful if you don’t approach it in an extremely positive way, if you allow yourself to get sidetracked on the inside once the inside opens up and you can really become aware of inner states. Care must be taken not to wander around in inner states of consciousness. You can wander in extraneous, unproductive areas for a long, long time.

So, you have to be very, very firm with yourself when you begin a meditation so that you stay with it the way you originally intended to do and perform each meditation the way you intended to perform it. This brings us into discipline. Undisciplined people are generally people whom nobody can tell what to do. They won’t listen. They can’t tell themselves what to do, and nobody else is going to tell them either! If you sincerely want to make headway in meditation and continue to do so year after year after year, you have to approach it in a very positive, systematic way. By not seeking or responding to discipline, you can learn to meditate fairly well, just as you can learn to play the vīṇā fairly well, but you will never go much farther than that.

For many years I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people come and go, each one firmly determined to go in and realize the Self, firmly determined to meditate and meditate well. Many did, up to a point. Then they lost interest, became involved in the next social fad or just reached the depth equal to their ability to be constant and well disciplined. They are not anyplace today, inside or outside, for they undoubtedly reached the same barriers in their next pursuit and were compelled to seek another and yet another. I want to impress on you: if you start a meditation, stay with it. Attack it positively. Go on and on and in and in and in.

Realization Requires Will

Work with willpower, awareness and energy as three separate items first. Feel awareness and discover what it is. Use willpower and discover what it is. Feel energy and analyze energy and discover what it is. Then separate the three of them in your intellectual mind and experiential pattern. Then, after you’ve gotten that done, you will begin to see inside yourself that the three are one and the same. And it is actually the beautiful, pure intelligence of the immortal soul body, that body of light of you, on its path inward into its last phase of maturity on this planet. This inner body of light has been maturing through many, many different lives.

If you would like to know how it came along, for instance if you had ninety lives on this planet, each life the body of light matured one year. So your body of light would be ninety years old, so to speak. You can look at it that way. That’s not quite the way it actually is, but looking at it that way gives you an idea of the maturing of this body of light. The pure intelligence of it is your awareness—which is energy and which is willpower—that life after life becomes stronger, more steadfast. Finally, in your last incarnation on the Earth, you merge into its final experience, that great samādhi, the Self, beyond the complete, still area of consciousness. You go in not knowing what you are getting into, and you come out wise. Your complete perspective is changed, and you only talk about it to those that are on the path of enlightenment, as they are the only ones steady enough or free enough to understand the depth of this realization.

Here are the ingredients: attention, concentration, meditation, contemplation, samādhi. Willpower is the fuel. It does not take time. Someone asked me, “Do you think I can have this samādhi, realize the Self, in ten years?” I said, “I certainly don’t. I don’t think you have enough willpower to realize it in a hundred years, because it doesn’t take time. It takes will. If you had the will, you wouldn’t add ten years on it. You would simply be telling me, ‘I am going to have this realization.’ And I would believe you because I would feel your will moving out of every atom of your body. But the mere fact that you take an intellectual approach, I have to say no, because whatever I did think wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other. You are not going to get it with an attitude like that, because it’s not something you go out and buy. It’s not another getting, like ‘I have a car. I have clothes. I have a little money. And now, after I get my television paid for, I think I’ll get the Self, because that is the next thing to get. It’s really great. I read about it. I heard about it. I heard a speaker speak about it. I’m all fired up to get this Self, and it’s next in the line of getting, so I’m going to get it!’ It doesn’t work like that. You don’t get that which you have. You can’t get that which you have. It’s there. You have to give up the consciousness of the television, the money, the clothes, the people that you know, the personality that you thought you were, the physical body. You have to go into the elements of the physical body, into the elements of that, and into the energy of that, and into the vast inner space of that, and into the core of that, and into the that of that, and into the that of that, and finally you realize that you have realized the Self. And you’ve lost something. You lost your goal of Self Realization. And you come back into the fullness of everything, and you are no longer looking, and you are no longer asking, and you are no longer wanting. You just are. When you get tired of the external area of the mind that you are flowing through, you simply dive in again.

Willpower Is the Fuel

You need a tremendous, indomitable will to make a reality of your quest of realizing the Being within. Unfoldment doesn’t take a lot of time. It just takes a lot of willpower. Someone can go along and sit at attention, and concentrate and meditate for years and years and years and, with a minimal amount of willpower, constantly be distracted, constantly be complaining and constantly be unsuccessful. Another person can have the exact same approach and over a short period of time be extremely successful, because he has will. The previous way he lived his life, the previous things that he did, he handled in such a way that that willpower was there, or his awareness is a manifestation of willpower, and he goes soaring within on this will.

Will is the fuel which carries awareness through all areas of the mind, that spirit, that spiritual quality, which makes all inner goals a reality. Unfoldment does not take time. It takes a tremendous will. That will has to be cultivated, just as you would cultivate a garden. It has to be cultivated. Those energies have to all be flowing through, in a sense, one channel, so that everything that you do is satisfying, is complete, beautiful.

Discover the will. Back to the spine. Feel the energy in the spine. There is no lack of it, is there? The more you use of it, the more you have to use of it. It is tuned right into the central source. When you become aware of the energy within your spine and within your head, you have separated awareness from that which it is aware of, for that is awareness itself, and that is will. We are playing with words a little. After awhile we will gain a new vocabulary for this kind of talk, but right now we are using our old-words’ way of looking at it, because our subconscious mind is more familiar with these words. Energy, awareness and willpower are one and the same. When we are subconsciously conscious that we are a superconscious being, and the subconscious mind has accepted the new programming that energy, willpower and awareness are one and the same thing, when the subconscious mind has accepted the fact that the mind was all finished long ago in all its phases of manifestation, from the refined to the gross—then the subconscious begins working as a pure channel, so to speak, for superconsciousness. Awareness can then flow in a very positive, in a very direct, way.

You want awareness to be renewed. The first step is—don’t try to go to the Self; you haven’t realized it yet—go to the spine. Feel the spine. After you realize the Self, you go deeper than the spine, you go into the Self and come back. Before you realize the Self and have that samādhi—attention, concentration. Concentrate on the energy within the spine. Go in. Awareness, energy and will are all one. Come slowly out again and you have all the willpower you need to finish any job that you’ve ever started, to make decisions, to do things and handle your external life in a very positive way, so that it does not capture awareness and hold it steadfast for a period of time, deterring you on the path of enlightenment.

Finish What You Start

We are not always sitting down concentrating on a flower in the search for the Self. Once you have decided that Self Realization is the ultimate goal for you, go on living your normal life. Everything that you do in life can collectively be channeled toward the ultimate goal, for what you need is a dynamic will. You need a strong willpower. Willpower is the channeling of all energies toward one given point for a given length of time. This will can be brought out from within in everything that we do through the day. It’s a powerful will. It’s available to everyone. It is channeling the rarefied energies of the body, of awareness itself, into attention and concentration upon everything that we do through the day.

How do we cultivate the willpower? What do we mean by will? Will means that if you’re going to complete something, you complete it. Finish that which you begin. Finish it well, beyond your expectations, no matter how long it takes. If you are going to do something, do it well, no matter if it is a simple task or a complicated one. If you’re going to read a book and intend to finish the book, then read the book, finish the book, and understand what it had to offer you, for that was the purpose for reading it.

It is not developing a strong will by having a lot of half-finished jobs. It is not developing a strong will by starting out with a bang on a project and then fizzling out. These only attach awareness to that which it is aware of and lead us into the distraction of thinking the external mind is real. Then we forget our inner goal of Self Realization because the subconscious becomes too ramified with, basically, our being disappointed in ourselves, or the willpower being so diversified, or awareness being so divided in many different ways that whatever we want to do never works out because there is not enough will, or shove, or centralization of energy, or awareness is not at attention over the project enough, to make it come into completion. A tremendous will is needed on the path of Self Realization, of drawing the forces of energy together, of drawing awareness away from that which it is aware of constantly, of finishing each job that we begin in the material world, and doing it well, so that we are content within ourselves. Make everything that you do satisfy the inner scrutiny of your inner being. Do a little more than you think that you are able to do. That brings forth just a little more will.

Maturity Of Being

Now we begin to see the vastness and yet the simplicity of the superconscious mind as awareness flows through it. Nothing is there for awareness to attach itself to. When aware of something other than itself, awareness is in its natural state in subsuperconsciousness. Occasionally in superconsciousness we can feel and actually inwardly see the inner body, the body of the soul, and we can feel this body inside the physical body. This is the body of light. Then we know through feeling and seeing that this body has existed and will exist forever and ever and ever, and we enjoy moving within the energies of this inner body. As we feel them, we become so quiet, so centered, that awareness is aware of itself so intently that we are right on the brink of the Absolute, ready to dissolve, to merge, into That which is man’s heritage on Earth to realize, the maturity of his being, the Self God.

We grow up physically. We grow up emotionally. We acquire a lot of knowledge. We must acquire the best knowledge, the cream of all knowledge. This is the knowledge of the path to enlightenment. And then, as awareness soars within, we begin to experience the realms of superconsciousness, man’s natural state. Then we have our ultimate experience, awareness dissolving into itself, beyond superconsciousness itself.

After Self Realization, you are looking at the film, the movie of the actors and actresses, including yourself, previously seen as real, being more subsuperconsciously conscious of the light projected on the back of the film than of the pictures displayed, which were seen as real before this awakening.