Lesson 301 – Living with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

The Hope of the World Is Love

Your Śaiva Siddhānta religion can be lived every minute of the day and all through the night. All you have to do is decide whether you are going to expect anything back from anyone. All you have to decide is what part of the person you love. If you love the soul, you love the whole person, no matter who the person is, no matter what he does, what he says, whether you know him or whether you don’t know him, because he is the light of Śiva, the energy of Śiva, the love of Śiva walking around in human form. This is the kind of love that keeps you in harmony with everyone.

Love is expressed in so many different ways. It is a force, a vibration that you have to work at to keep it flowing. Everyone has human emotions, instinctive emotions. Love controls those emotions. Love is appreciation, which can be expressed through gratitude, kind words, and especially through kind thoughts, because unkind thoughts create unkind words which create unkind actions, and everything begins with a thought. Love is an inner happiness which you want to cultivate in someone else, and if you begin to work at cultivating an inner happiness in someone else, you will have it yourself. If you work to cultivate an inner happiness in yourself, it doesn’t work so well. That’s a selfish approach, and you are likely to bring up instinctive emotions and memories of the past, especially of the bad things that happened in the past. In expressing love, one has to be very careful to know that it is a building situation, and be very careful not to indulge in unkind words, unkind thoughts and sarcasm. Sarcasm is the first breakdown in relationships. Trying to change another person’s character is also disastrous to a relationship. You have to accept everybody as they are. People change by the example of other people. Children learn first by the example people set for them. They follow that example—they don’t learn by mere words in the beginning—and that carries out all through life. Everyone admires a hero; everyone needs a role model. So if you want to change someone else, be a role model for him. Then he will become like you eventually, but it takes time. Be forgiving, because love is also forgiving. And be compassionate, for love is also compassionate, along with showing gratitude and expressing appreciation.

Love says, “I’m sorry.” Love says, “Thank you.” Love is also generosity, because whomever you love you are generous toward. You have generosity; you give and you give and you give and you give. And according to the great law of karma, you can’t give anything away but that it will come back to you. If you give love, it comes back to you double, and then you don’t know what to do with that, so you give that away, and that comes back double, and again you don’t know what to do with that, so you give that and it comes back double, and your whole family begins to flourish. The community begins to flourish.

Out of all the philosophies, out of all the psychological maneuverings and the psychiatric analyses, the hope of the world is love. It will be a wonderful day when all of us see that the hope of the world is love. You will discover ways yourself to express love. Love is decorating the home, bringing flowers into the home, arranging flowers in the home. It is cooking a wonderful meal and serving it properly. Love is cleaning and tidying up the home, bringing fresh air into the home so that those who come into the home are uplifted simply by being in the home. Love is taking care of the shrine room, bringing fresh water, fresh flowers and lighting incense, polishing the Deities, keeping them bright and shiny and dressing them in new clothing so that those who see and receive the darśana are uplifted. There are many physical ways we can express love. Love is bringing the whole family to the temple at auspicious times. Love is meeting with the family daily, solving all the little problems, sharing and talking and understanding each other’s minds and where they are in their consciousness. Love is being patient with people who have problems until the problems go away by talking them through. Love is respecting the elders. Love is also respecting yourself, because unless you have self-respect, unless you respect yourself, which means having a good self image, you will find it difficult to respect others. And unless you love and respect others, you will definitely have a hard time living in harmony with the world around you.

NANDINATHA SŪTRA 301: DEVELOPING A USEFUL CRAFT
All my devotees are encouraged to learn a skill requiring the use of their hands, such as pottery, sewing, weaving, painting, gardening, baking or the building arts, to manifest creative benefits for family and community. Aum.

Lesson 301 – Merging with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

Sensitivity and The Third Eye

When you meditate, you become inwardly strong. You become extremely sensitive, and sensitivity is strength. But if you are not psychologically adjusted to the things you may be hearing and seeing and the depth to which you might see, you might see things that will be disturbing to you, that will upset your nerve system. Now, it is true that if you are centered in yourself completely enough to be all spine and just a being of energy, you can go anyplace in any type of environment, inside or outside, and the environment would be better for your having been there. You would not absorb any of the distracting or negative vibrations. But until that day comes, it is better to be wise and live in a positive vibration and among people who can help stabilize the force field around you, so that your inner life goes on without interruptions—of spinning out, having to crawl back, and spinning out and then having to crawl back. Why go through all those frustrating experiences, which are inconvenient, time consuming and totally unnecessary?

Part of the psychic pitfall is the belief that in order to be spiritually awakened, one must also be psychically awakened, seeing auras, visions, hearing celestial music and such. We do not have to awaken the third eye. To me, that is a translation error made in the old scriptures. This third eye has never been asleep. It’s always awake. We are not aware, however, of the visual mechanism of the third eye. The artist doesn’t have to learn to see to distinguish hundreds of shades of color in a painting. He has only to learn how to be aware of his ability to see hundreds of different shades within a painting. The untrained eye cannot see such subtle variation of tones and hues, but just looks at the painting. It is the same with the third eye. It doesn’t have to be awakened. It’s always awake. As we become more and more sensitive, the third eye becomes more and more apparent to us, because we keenly observe through that faculty more than we did before.

If you are standing on a crowded bus and another passenger is just about to crash down on your foot with his foot, you will intuitively move it out of the way. You have often noticed that you moved your foot or some other part of your body out of the way of danger just in time. Well, your third eye wasn’t asleep then, and you didn’t see that foot coming down on you with your physical eyes. You saw it with your third eye.

We use this third eye all the time. When someone greets you who is apparently looking fine and you sense otherwise, thinking, “I feel he’s disturbed. I wonder what’s wrong,” you’re seeing his inner condition with your third eye. When you walk up to someone’s house and you have the feeling that nobody is home because you don’t feel vibrations coming from the house, you’re seeing this with your third eye. We see and respond to things seen with the third eye every day, whether we are fully conscious of it or not.

The third eye does not have to be awakened. In fact, it is harmful to consciously make efforts to see things psychically—a big sidetrack on the eternal path. We become sensitive to the use of it by using it, going along with our natural meditational practices in a regular way, morning and night, morning and night, when you awaken in the morning and just before you go to sleep at night. All sorts of wonderful things come to you. Protect yourself as you protect a precious jewel. Guard your awareness from coarse influences and you will enjoy the bliss of the natural state of the mind—pure, clear and undisturbed.

Lesson 300 – Dancing with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

Is Monistic Theism Found in the Vedas?

ŚLOKA 145
Again and again in the Vedas and from satgurus we hear “Ahaṁ Brahmāsmi,” “I am God,” and that God is both immanent and transcendent. Taken together, these are clear statements of monistic theism. Aum Namaḥ Śivāya.

BHĀSHYA
Monistic theism is the philosophy of the Vedas. Scholars have long noted that the Hindu scriptures are alternately monistic, describing the oneness of the individual soul and God, and theistic, describing the reality of the Personal God. One cannot read the Vedas, Śaiva Āgamas and hymns of the saints without being overwhelmed with theism as well as monism. Monistic theism is the essential teaching of Hinduism, of Śaivism. It is the conclusion of Tirumular, Vasugupta, Gorakshanatha, Bhaskara, Srikantha, Basavanna, Vallabha, Ramakrishna, Yogaswami, Nityananda, Radhakrishnan and thousands of others. It encompasses both Siddhānta and Vedānta. It says, God is and is in all things. It propounds the hopeful, glorious, exultant concept that every soul will finally merge with Śiva in undifferentiated oneness, none left to suffer forever because of human transgression. The Vedas wisely proclaim, “Higher and other than the world-tree, time and forms is He from whom this expanse proceeds—the bringer of dharma, the remover of evil, the lord of prosperity. Know Him as in one’s own Self, as the immortal abode of all.” Aum Namaḥ Śivāya.

Lesson 300 – Living with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

The Many Levels of Love

Those wondering how they could ever live with zero tolerance for all discord and disharmony need only realize that people are naturally tolerant with those they love. The good mother tolerates all the little problems her beloved infant brings into each day. The loving wife tolerates the faults and actions of her husband. A true friend tolerates another friend’s foibles and even rough words. If we learn to love, we automatically learn to have perfect tolerance for those we love. The ancient Tirukural reminds us, “When friends do things that hurt you, attribute it to unawareness or to the privileges of friendship” (805).

Love comes in many forms. There is physical love, magnetic attraction. This is dualistic love, because if the other person responds, you feel very good, and if he does not respond, you don’t like him. That is not the kind of love that is all encompassing. It is a very narrow form of love. It broadens a little bit with emotional love, which is the second kind of love. You love someone because he makes you happy, or you express love to make other people happy. But if someone doesn’t make you happy or you are trying to make someone else happy and he just won’t be happy, then you don’t like him anymore. That is also a dualistic form of love. It is not all encompassing. Physical love and emotional love are companions.

Then there is intellectual love, which comes in and breaks it all up. In the intellect, if you love somebody and he doesn’t agree with you, then you don’t like him. That interrupts the physical love and the emotional love. Arguments start, sarcasm begins to well up. These are all forms of partial love. People experience this every day.

Spiritual love is the fourth kind. Somewhat hard to come by, it is the love from the soul body. Spiritual love transcends physical love, emotional love and mental love. It transcends all kinds of feelings. It has a feeling of its own, which is called bliss—the ever-flowing energy from Śiva out through your body, the ever-flowing energy from Śiva out through your mind, the ever-flowing energy of Śiva out through your emotions. Caught up in that ever-flowing energy, you can truly say to everyone, “I love you.” And what does you mean? You means Śiva, because you are seeing Śiva in each one. What are you looking at when you say that? You are not looking at the body. You are not appreciating or depreciating the intellect. You are not even bothered about the emotions, whether you are liked or not liked, because you are seeing Śiva emanating out through the eyes, emanating out through the aura, emanating out through the skin. Śiva is there, and you are living with Śiva.

This great, Supreme God of all the Gods is limited in one respect: He cannot take Himself out of you or anyone else. So mentally say, “I love you,” then ask yourself the question, “What does you mean?” Does you mean you like the body of the person? No. Does you mean you like the emotions of the person? No. Does you mean you like the intellect of the person? No. Does you mean you like somebody as long as they are always pleasing to you, always agreeing with you, never upsetting you, never pulling away from you? No. It means that you love their soul. It means that you love Śiva inside of them. The light within their eyes is Śiva’s light. The light that lights up their thoughts is Śiva’s light, and that is what you love. That love is all encompassing. That love is not partial love, half love or just a little bit of love given when it pleases you. It’s not magnetic love; it’s not intellectual love. You are not putting any demands on the other person at all. You are not expecting anything back. It is love for the sake of love.

There should be a unique English word for spiritual love, but there is not. In Sanskrit we do have a word for divine love: prema. Therefore, we have to adjust our thinking when we say, “I love you,” to this all-encompassing, beautiful love that radiates throughout the universe—the perfect universe where everything is in harmony and order. And even if it is seemingly out of harmony, you know it actually is in harmony because you are in the state of consciousness where harmony is, where peace is, where bliss is. Therefore, your Śaiva Siddhānta religion can work in your daily life.

NANDINATHA SŪTRA 300: PROUDLY USING ONE’S ŚAIVITE NAME
All my devotees bear and legally register their Śaivite Hindu name, first and last, and use it proudly each day in all circumstances, never concealing or altering it to adjust to non-Hindu cultures. Aum Namaḥ Śivāya.

Lesson 300 – Merging with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

Undesirable Influences

Being on the path is a marvelous thing, but it is a path. There are jungles on either side, and if we wander off into the jungle, taking too many liberties, continuity of the vibration of our unfoldment will begin to wane. Suppose you are meditating regularly in the morning and at night, day after day. Perhaps they’re not long meditations, but they are regular. You are generating a certain vibration out of it. If you then stop that routine and take your awareness into feeling sorry for yourself or mentally arguing with a friend, you lose the subtle thread of superconsciousness. You’re going through an old, old pattern and it will be difficult to get back into the vibration of meditation. Your dreams at night may become nightmares. Your circle of friends may change. This is called, in a sense, spinning out into a different area of the mind. If you have not yet experienced this yet, it’s not a recommended experience on the path. And if you have experienced it, you know what I am talking about, and you know the importance of protecting yourself and your meditations. Psychic protection, to sensitive people, is extremely important. It involves every detail of life—your home, friends, clothes, diet, even your dreams. You should live in places that are clean, very clean. Paint your place. Assure yourself that the inner atmosphere is clean and unpolluted.

We have an outer atmosphere and we have an inner atmosphere. The inner atmosphere can become polluted, too, just like the outer atmosphere can. All sorts of influences from the astral plane can come in on the inner atmosphere, and this we don’t want. We want the inner flow of the inner atmosphere, which is within this atmosphere of air and ether, to be absolutely peaceful and sublime. How is this done? By keeping your house, your meditation room, as clean as possible. By entertaining few guests and then only people of the same caliber and nature. Guests, other than close relatives, should not stay more than three nights. Why? Because otherwise they bring too much distraction, too many other influences into the home. Finally, the whole atmosphere may be disrupted. Many families have broken up and lost their home, and children have gone homeless, simply because guests have stayed too long and worked into the inner atmosphere and brought in too many influences of a distracting and disturbing nature. This is an old, old traditional custom of hospitality that dates back many thousands of years, and these old customs are based on sound judgment. If they are understood and followed, they assure and protect our contemplative life.

Keep your environment positive, so that the inner feeling is always content. Keep your home shrine or meditation space radiant, so that the inner feeling there is always uplifting. As you advance along the path, the radio mechanism will become highly tuned, very positive. Being positive, it will register all types of influences. Influences that are distasteful to you will come through as strongly as influences that are really magnificent. You have to learn to shield out the static by finely tuning this mechanism. That is why you strive for mastery of sādhana, mastery of concentration, your ability to hold awareness where you want it, when you want it for as long as you want it, and mastery of your ability to experience kaīf, pure awareness aware only of itself, by taking awareness out of the entire context into just being aware. This practice of kaīf is one of the fundamental protectors from psychic or astral invasion, for when you are in that state, great clarity and willpower persist and the lower states are transcended.

To attain and sustain kaīf is a simple practice. You pull awareness out of the thought processes. You pull awareness out of the emotion processes. You pull awareness out of the bodily processes, and you’re just completely on that pinnacle of being aware of being aware. That’s so necessary to practice every day, even if you do it for a split second.

The experience of kaīf can be attained by anyone on the face of the Earth, at least for a split second, because it’s so easy to be aware of being aware. To hold that experience and to stabilize the physical and emotional elements long enough to hold that intensity for even a minute takes more practice—not too much, but consistent practice. To maintain kaīf for two minutes requires more effort, more will, more dedication to the life of sādhana. Five minutes requires more. That’s the test.

Lesson 299 – Dancing with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

What Is the View of Monistic Theism?

ŚLOKA 144
Monistic theism is the synthesis of monism and dualism. It says God is transcendent and immanent, eternal and temporal, Being and becoming, Creator and created, Absolute and relative, efficient and material cause. Aum.

BHĀSHYA
Both strict monism and dualism are fatally flawed, for neither alone encompasses the whole of truth. In other words, it is not a choice between the God-is-man-and-world view of pantheistic monism and the God-is-separate-from-man-and-world view of theistic dualism. It is both. Panentheism, which describes “all in God, and God in all,” and monistic theism are Western terms for Advaita Īśvaravāda. It is the view that embraces the oneness of God and soul, monism, and the reality of the Personal God, theism. As panentheists, we believe in an eternal oneness of God and man at the level of Satchidānanda and Paraśiva. But a difference is acknowledged during the evolution of the soul body. Ultimately, even this difference merges in identity. Thus, there is perfectly beginningless oneness and a temporary difference which resolves itself in perfect identity. In the acceptance of this identity, monistic theists differ from most viśishṭādvaitins. The Vedas declare, “He moves and He moves not; He is far, yet is near. He is within all that is, yet is also outside. The man who sees all beings in the Self and the Self in all beings is free from all fear.” Aum Namaḥ Śivāya.

Lesson 299 – Merging with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

Heightened Sensitivity

People are worried about the world’s coming to an end. Every now and then a religious sect proclaims the new coming of the end of the world. But although the Earth as we know it continues its steady progress around the Sun, the conscious mind for thousands of people has come to an end, for the simple reason that they are no longer interested in it. For them, the world of inner sounds and colors has opened its far more attractive fare. But the job of sustaining and maintaining expanded awareness is not accomplished by losing the controls over one’s powers of awareness. The actinic world is only attained and sustained by initiating definite controls over the odic world. One state of consciousness is controlled in the process of awareness moving and expanding into another state.

As we progress along the path, we become more and more and more sensitive. This sensitivity is a wonderful thing. It’s like graduating from being an old battery-set radio of the 1920s and ’30s to a sophisticated, solid-state television. This sensitivity that you will begin to recognize is so refined and yet so strong. You communicate with yourself through the nerve currents which extend out, around and through the physical body—physical nerve currents as well as psychic nerve currents. Before we get deeply within on the path, we’re not too sensitive. But as this sensitivity develops, we begin to see through our hands. We begin to hear feeling. We begin to see sound, and all sorts of new faculties manifest.

Now, this can be very distressing, because we see things that we ordinarily would not be able to see. We hear meaning in what people say that ordinarily we would be unaware of, and we can become very disappointed in life, in people or in ourselves. This may seem like falling into a bog on the path, and we don’t want to do this. We want to be sensitive, and yet we want protection, psychic protection. Our dreams become more well defined, but we don’t want to be vulnerable to negative areas of the mind, disruptive areas, experiential areas of the astral plane, while we are sleeping. Neither do we wish to be attacked on the astral plane by the mischievous beings, entities, that are on that particular side of life.

We need this astral protection. We need this psychic protection. The group helps the individual and the individual helps the group. The force field of a group of people on the path goes along at a certain rate of intensity which is not broken, and this gives us tremendous psychic protection. In the very same way, a positive group of people only admit into their midst other positive people. A group of businessmen have a well-managed force field, and generally only a businessman of their same caliber can come and mix with them. A group of artists has a force field, and only artists of the same caliber can get into it. Why? If they let everybody in, they wouldn’t have a force field. The business would fail. The art would go into chaos. Friendships would be destroyed because of other influences coming in and amongst the people.

Force fields protect and sustain not only our outer forms of expression, but deep spiritual layers as well. When we go “out” into superconsciousness, if we are sensitive and unable to protect our subconscious mind, all sorts of other types of influences can enter. We don’t want this to happen, and it’s not necessary. It is a deterrent on the path, for we then are exposed to unseemly astral influences that detract us from our quest.

Make friends with those who are on the path. Be with fine, positive people. Don’t be with negative, complaining people who have no relationship to what you are doing on the inside, or who are criticizing you for what you are doing. There’s the old statement, “One bad apple can turn the whole bushel rotten.” Maybe that will be reversed in the New Age; a lot of things are changing in the New Age. Maybe at some time a whole bag of good apples will make a bad apple good, but so far it hasn’t occurred. Until such a time, we have to be wary of a natural law of nature and live among others of virtuous character and conduct, others who share spiritual insights and seeking.

Lesson 299 – Living with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

Heal All Hurts Before Sleep

When an inharmonious condition arises in a seeker’s life, it forms a deep, dark veil within his mind, inhibiting the progressive process of seeking inwardly. Shall he store it away and forget it, put it behind him and get on with life? That is a temporary relief, to be sure, only temporary insofar as retaliatory karma will come back in full force at another time as an even deeper, darker veil that will effectually stop the seeking. Only at this second round will the seeker, now knowing the effect of past causes, begin to perform japa, do prāṇāyāma and strenuous religious practices, such as penance and kavadi, beseeching Lord Śiva to lift the veiling doom.

The wise seeker obviously will endeavor to lift the dark veils once he realizes they never go away but always persist when he stores problems away. At the same time, he realizes that certain obstacles in his progressive life pattern are beginning to show. Thus, the super-wise seeker will not store a problem away when it arises, but handle it adroitly and magically heal all wounds before they fester. To be super wise on the path to enlightenment, one must have the siddhi of humility.

When an argument flares up in the home between mother and father, it affects all of the children. They feed on the iḍā and piṅgalā prāṇas of the mother and father. Super-wise parents heal their differences before they sleep at night, even if they have to stay up all night to do it. Failure to heal differences before sleep means that a first separation has occurred.

Domestic abuse is a difficult issue, but one we must confront openly. I urge you all to stand up and say it is no longer acceptable for a man to abuse his wife or for either the husband or the wife to abuse their children. This must stop. In order to heal the differences that arise within a marriage from time to time, both partners have to give in. The best place to do this is at the feet of their Gods in the temple or shrine room. There is no other solution. This is the only way. The method of giving in, yes, is to talk it over. A major emphasis is to see the other’s point of view, finding points in the disturbance both can agree with. Agreement is the key word. The relationship between the husband and wife, who are also a mother and father or potential mother and father, has more lasting influence than their opposing opinions. Some relationships are easy and some are difficult. But resolving disagreements before nightfall is the aim. Some couples need to work harder at it than others.

Habits are formed through the repetition of the same events over and over again. No matter what you have seen or heard from parents, relatives, neighbors, friends or society itself, heal your differences before sleep, even if it takes all night. By doing this repeatedly, a new habit will be created. Don’t go to sleep in anguish, holding on to anger, fear, confusion or ill feelings. The inconvenience of this wise remedy will cause each one to be careful of his or her words, thoughts and actions.

NANDINATHA SŪTRA 299: SACRED MANTRAS FOR MEALS AND GATHERINGS
All my devotees chant the Bhojana Mantra before each meal, offering thankful praise to God, Gods and guru. They chant the Vedic Śānti Mantra to begin and end all meetings, invoking peace and one-mindedness. Aum.