. . . There are
people who say that meditation is a way to self-realization, for fusion of individual
awareness with the highest awareness, but in my humble opinion I feel this aim
for meditation is too high. Meditation is for self-realization; but this, I think,
very few people can teach, fewer can learn, and only the rare individual can practice.
Unless the mind is sane and healthy and the subliminal inhibitions, the errors
of personality, are completely remedied, it is not at all advisable to practice
expansion of individual consciousness to cosmic consciousness. Otherwise it tends
to become a kind of self-hypnotism.
When
I discuss yoga this evening, I shall discuss it in relation to individual and
human welfare. Spiritual awareness may be the basic goal of life, but it is too
early for us to think about it because we are not keeping healthy; our minds are
ill. We are suffering from chronic illnesses, not only from physical diseases
but from mental ones also. People in under-developed countries are suffering largely
from physical maladies, and we in our so-called prosperous and advanced civilization
are also suffering from chronic mental illnesses about which we are totally ignorant.
We are not aware what these psychological errors are, the deep-rooted tensions
and afflictions which are guiding our destiny and which guide human behavior.
These individual afflictions, the tortures and pains which are inevitable in our
life, are guiding the destiny of the world. The restlessness throughout the world
is an outcome of the sickness in the mind of modern man. There must be some way
to cure this sickness, some way to develop a healthy condition in society, in
the community, in the family and in the mind of the individual. Religions have
failed; the economic programs have also failed to give peace to mankind and to
solve the problems of the individual, the community and the society. The problems
start basically with the individual and these problems can only be solved by the
individual. The individual is the nucleus of most of the problems that lie before
us. It is with this background that I speak to you about meditation.
If
you agree with me that meditation is a science of mind and a science of God, and
that it is a system for the reorientation of human personality as a whole and
not metaphysics; if you agree it is a system through which we can root out the
individual pains, the unseen afflictions and the tensions that are all around
us in the muscular, mental, emotional and spiritual bodies, then let us go ahead
with the subject. You will agree that our behavior, our thinking, our actions
and our reactions are guided by the soul, that is to say, by consciousness. This
consciousness is not pure; it works in association with the environment and other
conditions, as a result of which tensions pile up in the different spheres of
our personality of which we are unaware, and so we suffer from insomnia, inhibitions,
juvenile delinquency, sexual anarchy, hared, restlessness, anxiety and worry.
We look for tranquility and peace, but the pace does not come from outside and
the tranquility cannot be introduced, but rather they come with unfoldment within.
Meditation
is the system by which we are able to get rid of these tensions and analyze our
deep-rooted psychological errors. Meditation is concerned with consciousness;
consciousness that is empirical and consciousness that is internal-the consciousness
that perceives the world and the consciousness that is unable to perceive the
world. This consciousness in man is the subject of meditation.
The
first process in meditation is relaxation, and remember that meditation begins
with relaxation. But this is not relaxation where you lie down quietly, close
your eyes and feel that you are becoming lighter and happier and so on. I don't
mean the method of auto-suggestion or self-hypnosis. The method of yoga is the
real relation. In yoga a process of withdrawal is the process of relaxation. What
Patanjali calls pratyahara or the withdrawal of external consciousness, or the
act of disassociation of your consciousness from outside objects, that is relaxation;
but this relaxation cannot be complete unless you have relaxation in the system.
Before
we proceed with the topic of mediation, let us discuss what we mean by tensions.
Tensions have physical, mental and emotional causes. Faulty secretions in the
endocrinal system can cause tensions and they are not necessarily due to the psychological
problems of your society or to economic pressure, or to emotional maladjustment
in your family. Nervous disorders and problems in your body can be due to a faulty
endocrinal system. Faulty endocrinal secretions are caused by faulty living, faulty
breathing and so on.
Therefore,
in the scheme of yoga, asanas and pranayama come first as they help to get rid
of muscular and physical tensions, to neutralize the faulty secretions and to
eliminate toxins from the body. For instance, you could be suffering from hypo-thyroid,
or over-secretion of the pituitary, or deficiency in the pancreatic gland, and
this would greatly influence your behavior and thinking. This tension due to a
physical cause, which can cause a lot of trouble and which bars the experience
of peace in our day-to-day life, can be solved by the practice of asanas, pranayama,
and hatha yoga.
People
think that asanas and pranayama, the yogic exercises are just exercises. They
are not only exercises; they should not be practiced as exercises, and they should
be practiced with great care.
Scientific
investigations that have been carried out in different parts of the world, in
Russia, in Poland, in India, in France and also in Germany, have proved that during
the practice of asanas and pranayama the whole endocrinal system is influenced;
the toxins are eliminated and the energy locks are cleared. So the practice of
asanas and pranayamas removes muscular tensions.
But
mental tensions are the greatest tensions which we have to consider. Over-thinking,
wrong thinking and vicious thinking which we cannot escape in our day-to-day life,
these cause the mental tensions. We can cure mental tensions by the practice of
relaxation where we withdraw our consciousness. This is the first part of yoga
which later leads to expansion of consciousness. There are different techniques
which withdraw or calm down tensions created by the ocular system, auditory system,
nervous system, and tensions created by internal functional deficiencies. All
this is done during the practice of relaxation, for in the process of relaxation
we have some of the most important techniques.
When
we practice meditation or rather when we start the process of relaxation, we must
choose a method or technique. Not every technique is right for everybody, but
there are some practices which can be practiced without any difficulty or risk.
The easiest one is ajapa japa, spontaneous awareness. In this spontaneous awareness
you concentrate on the breath and try to formulate an ascending and descending
process. This causes the consciousness to become diminished. The area of experience
is eliminated gradually, and when the consciousness functions in a limited area,
you start with a symbol. You concentrate on a psychic centre and there you try
to develop a clear-cut internal, non-sensual mental awareness of the symbol. The
symbol should become clear to you. This is necessary to effect complete relaxation.
It
is not enough if you are able to visualize just your subconscious mind. In meditation
you should be able to see your conscious mind, your subconscious mind and also
your unconscious mind, which is very difficult. The moment the experience and
perception of the unconscious personality occur, complete relaxation comes to
one. Therefore, you will find that there are moments in an individual's life when
he becomes aware of the unconscious during deep sleep, which leaves him with a
feeling of complete relaxation.
In
the technique of yoga it is believed that when consciousness is detached from
conscious, subconscious, and unconscious, when individual awareness functions
independently of these three dimensions of consciousness, complete relaxation
takes place and meditation begins. Meditation can never begin without relaxation,
but relaxation is very hard to achieve. You may be under the illusion that meditation
is difficult. No, it is not. Meditation is accomplished spontaneously. Meditation
comes to you and it does so instantly; but to develop meditation you have first
to go through the whole process of relaxation.
In
yoga the process is pratyahara and dharana. Pratyahara means withdrawal of consciousness,
and dharana, conception of consciousness in a particular way. You see your consciousness,
your awareness as an internal perception, in the form of a round stone, a triangle,
a flower, or it may be anything. That which you see within is not imagination;
it is a form of consciousness. If you see a flower within, you see your own consciousness
in the pattern of a flower, that form of consciousness through which you perceive
the world.
It is
this consciousness through which you are now understanding me. It's the same consciousness
through which I am able to tell you something about yoga, and the same consciousness
by which you know right and wrong, with which your intelligence or intellect functions,
which manifests in day-to-day life in the form of memory and by which you understand
hatred and love. It is the same consciousness which functions in the world, and
it is not imagination, not a hypothesis but a force. It is awareness or an instrument
of knowledge-a medium of understanding, or the substratum of perception.
It
is this consciousness which in yoga is withdrawn from exterior objects, from intellectual
knowledge, from experiences and memories of the past and from knowledge. When
it has been disassociated fr0m different bases of perception and becomes clear
to you in the form of a triangle, or flower, or stone, or light, or animal, you
are seeing your own consciousness and this is the fundamental secret of yoga.
Meditation,
therefore, is a process by which you see your own consciousness-consciousness
sees itself through itself, without any int4ervening medium, support or agency.
In meditation you undergo a process not of self-analysis but self-perception.
It is in this that meditation goes beyond the psychoanalysis of modern psychology.
You not only analyze yourself; you see yourself. How do you see yourself? D you
see your consciousness in the form of a triangle? No, you try to see yourself
in the form of a triangle, but when you do this, the triangle vanishes and is
replaced by the images of your psychological personality.
Images
come up in the hundreds and thousands like a film show. You o not see real life
pictures; you do not see what you have experienced; perhaps you don't even see
the people you know in this life But you will see images which represent the cause
of anger, passion, hatred, insomnia, anxiety and the cause of all sorts of psychosomatic
troubles.
Then again
you try to bring back the triangle, but is disappears anew. It is replaced by
even deeper psychological images, because in the subconscious mind there are depths
and layers which you will have to realize one after the other. There is a moment
in meditation when you will see visions, both good and bad. You will take them
to be astral images. You will think that a host or an angel has come. But nothing
comes from outside, for everything emerges and explodes from inside.
It
is only your consciousness. There is nothing beyond your consciousness, and anything
that you see in the deeper states of meditation is a manifestation of your personality,
of different complicated, unseen, unknown, indivisible layers of your personality,
perhaps which you could never know through any method of psychoanalysis. You see
the experiences of your life forgotten when you were a child, which are insignificant
but which were causing trouble. They come up in the form of an explosion, in the
form of evil pictures or of divine expressions.
So
these are the subliminal images, the samskaras as they are called in yoga, the
past impressions. They come up and thus exhaust themselves, one after the other.
But this is possible only if you can bring about a concentration, a consolidation
or crystallization of your consciousness.
In
meditation, when you concentrate on breath, the natural breath, you not only concentrate
on the natural breath but you try to locate a psychic passage for the natural
breath. Breath is breath; as you know, it is something physical. But the idea
that, "I am breathing," is not physical, it is psychic. When I breathe
it is physical. The breath goes to the lungs and supplies oxygen and purifies
the blood. But when I know that "I am breathing" and I am breathing,
it is not physical but psychic. You create a psychic idea, and this psychic idea
is the gateway to meditation, to relaxation, to concentration and to psychoanalysis.
You create a psychic passage. In yoga there are hundreds of passages, but I will
introduce only two of them.
One
passage for beginners is between navel and throat, and the second passage is the
vertebral column, the spinal cord. The idea "I am breathing," the consciousness
"I am breathing," should be felt in one of these two passages. Either
you have to feel, "I am breathing" in the frontal passage, or you have
to feel it in the spinal cord. If you feel it in the spinal cord it is much better,
because concentration on the spinal cord takes you to the unconscious directly.
I
am not talking about the frightening kundalini yoga, please remember; but I do
not believe that kundalini yoga is so frightening because as a student of psychology
and as a student of yoga I believe kundalini yoga is a way to go to the unconscious,
and I know that to get into the unconscious brings perfect peace and complete
power. I do not mean that kundalini yoga in which you break your body or bones,
no. You take your consciousness to the spinal cord, right from the bottom up to
the top in the form of "I am breathing in, I am breathing out." When
you breathe in, you must feel you are ascending, and when you breathe out, you
must feel you are descending. Who is ascending and who is descending? Consciousness
is ascending and consciousness is descending. But then why do you synchronize
it with the breath? Because it makes it possible, it makes it easier to feel the
ascending and descending order. But at the same time if you breathe in and breathe
out you create more oxygen in the system, which helps you to relax. When you accelerate
the metabolism in the system by oxygenation, relaxation is also speeded up.
In
this ajapa japa, you should remain aware of the fact you are breathing in and
breathing out by counting the breaths so that you do not fall into deeper unconsciousness,
so that your consciousness does not suspend. Sometimes in meditation, when concentration
takes place, the breath will stop, and this brings unconsciousness. The purpose
of yoga is not to become unconscious.
The
purpose of meditation is to develop awareness in absolute unconsciousness. I am
not talking about Samadhi, or about cosmic awareness or divine experience. I am
saying that yoga is a method by which you can see your own unconsciousness.
At
night when you fall asleep, you become unconscious. You go to the unconscious
every night, but you do not see it or experience it, and therefore only partial
relaxation takes place. Yoga can bring you to the unconscious so you see it; you
can investigate and visualize your unconscious. When you come back, you will come
back with energy, with power, confidence and absolute equilibrium. This is the
basis of yoga.
This
process of inhalation and exhalation, and of ascending and descending consciousness
in the spinal cord or in the frontal passage, is not real meditation. It is an
act of negation of consciousness, an act of withdrawal of empirical, external,
objective consciousness. A moment comes when consciousness is negated to one point-the
circle is reduced to a point, and they you have to stop relaxation. If you continue
relaxation further, you will enter into unconsciousness.
When
you stop relaxation and this process of negation of consciousness, every student
of meditation must have a psychic symbol for himself. You can have a small green
leaf, a flower, a star, a triangle or a human figure. Anything, but you must have
a symbol. You should not use an abstract idea. The first is called concrete meditation,
and the second is abstract meditation. Abstract meditation leads to unconsciousness,
but concrete mediation leads to the unconscious with consciousness.
What
is the indication and proof that you have visualized your subconscious and unconscious?
I am not going to discuss the superconscious. In your unconscious you are able
to visualize the object of your meditation as clearly as you see me and you see
other people every day. The unconscious is not at all like a conscious dream.
If the state is like a conscious dream, and you see figures moving, or a flower
but you are not aware you are seeing a flower, then it is the subconscious and
another indication of the manifestation of the subconscious personality is that
you see psychic vision, one after the other, both good and bad. But when you go
into the unconscious, all these visions stop. No angels or ghosts come. You see
only that particular object upon which you are trying to crystallize your consciousness-the
lotus flower, the elephant, the serpent or the flame of fire. That is all you
will see because that was your object of meditation. But when you see the object
of meditation internally, it will be so clear and real that sometimes when you
return to normal consciousness you will wonder whether our reality is truth or
whether that unconscious reality is truth.
When
the unconscious is perceived, the distinction between conscious experience and
unconscious experience is dissolved. The experience of the object in the unconscious
is as real as experience of the object on the conscious plane. If you happen to
see me in the unconscious, perhaps you will see me as you see me now. When you
withdraw yourself from the unconscious and come down to the conscious plane, you
will say, "Oh yes, I saw Swamiji as real as this!"
This
particular state of experience is known in yoga philosophy as darshan. Darshan
means conscious visualization of the object in all its dimensions. When your consciousness
has become completely free from limitation, entirely free from sense consciousness,
intellectual consciousness and all other modes of empirical consciousness, then
deep peace is achieved. It is at this moment you become a yogi. They say it is
then the tensions, the afflictions, the trouble, the shocks, the after-effects
and reactions of day-to-day life are completely resolved.
Meditation
is not at all difficult, as you will see for yourself after some practice. Your
practice will be divided into two parts: first will be negation and second will
be expansion of awareness. In this process many experiences will come, also a
lot of mental turmoils. The subconscious will come before you and all the memories
of this life will be revealed, and you may even go back further.
Through
meditation, you go to different rooms of your life and try to clean them one by
one. Once you have cleaned yourself you should take to the bath of spiritual life
and go to a guru to ask him to give you initiation. Perhaps at that moment, if
he touches your forehead, you might pass into Samadhi. One can attain higher experiences
than the subconscious and unconscious dimensions of personality, but for that
we must qualify ourselves, which we do through the practice of yoga.
Yoga
is not the end, it is the means. Yoga is an act or process of self-purification.
By medicines we cure diseases, but by yoga you purify the body and the mind in
all its dimensions, conscious, subconscious and unconscious. All the three stages
of personality, all the three rooms are cleared. Then, when everything is calm
and quiet, when your samskaras or karma have been exhausted and afflictions are
no more, you should go on to the higher spiritual path and not before that, even
though the aim of your life should be spiritual realization. You should not seek
that higher spiritual path until mental health has been attained and the trammels,
errors, confusion and pandemonium in the personality have been completely calmed
down. It is for this purpose that we practice dhyana yoga or meditation.
Meditation
by itself does not help entirely, because though by meditation you clean your
body, your mind and your consciousness, your karmas will still accumulate as impressions.
Your emotional personality and thinking will again become erroneous. It is something
like cleaning the room, and then putting the dirt back again. You are trying to
clear your personality of dross, avidya, errors and tensions but simultaneously
karmas are accumulating. On one side you are clearing tensions and from the other
side tensions are coming in and again you are in the same state. It is for this
reason that a yogi who practices meditation must also practice karma yoga, bhakti
yoga and jnana yoga. Through karma yoga you stop the effects of samskaras, karmas
going into the deepest core of your personality. There is an art to do this-the
art is found in the Bhagavad-Gita.
There
are hundreds and thousands of people throughout the world who are practicing meditation
but who are not happy because they look for everything in meditation alone. It
does help them, there is no doubt about that, meditation is a great thing; but
when I start teaching the different techniques of meditation, please remember
that my personal opinion is this, that along with meditation, karma, bhakti and
jnana yoga should also be practiced.
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