What is Meditation?

Relating to Space – the Only Element that can Reflect Consciousness

Meditation is falling in tune with nature, with Existence. This is your natural state, your true state of bliss. This is connecting with the Ultimate Consciousness.

You see, the universe or the macrocosm is made of the five elements – earth, water, fire, air and space. In the same way, the body, the microcosm, is also made of the same five elements. We can relate to the macrocosm, the Whole, the Divine through any or all of these five elements. The microcosm can experience the macrocosm by relating with these five elements that pervade both.

Relating to the macrocosm through the earth element is worshiping through idols or deities. Deities are made of the earth element, such as clay, brass, copper, etc. So worshiping through them is worshiping through them is worshiping through the earth element. Relating through the water element is offering abhishekas, holy baths to deities or bathing ourselves in holy rivers. Relating through the fire element is performing homas, fire rituals. Relating through the air element is chanting mantras, divine chants. Relating through the space element is meditation. Through these five ways, we can relate to the macrocosm.

Understand, out of the five elements, space is the only element that can reflect consciousness. The four grosser elements, earth, water, fire and air cannot relate with or cannot reflect consciousness. Only space can reflect consciousness. And the way to relate with space energy is meditation.

1. When is it a good time to meditate?

This is always a controversial question! All the youngsters think “I can do this in my old age after I have lived my life fully and don’t have anything else to do.’ All the elderly people think, “I should have done this in my young age when I was fresh and energetic.’

So the question is not just how long to meditate everyday, but also when to make the decision to include a meditation practice in your routine.

Meditation is just like reading an owner’s manual before you start driving the car. The person who does not read the owner’s manual before driving the care will naturally meet with accidents. In the same way, meditation is like the owner’s manual for you body and for your life. The person who has not started meditation before entering into life will end up with suffering and depression at one point or the other.

Please understand, meditation is the basic need for every life. It is not an option. It is a very basic need.

Aft the age of seven, you need meditation because until then, as a child you are by nature in a meditative state. It is only after seven that you start getting conditioned by society and drop out of your true nature.

To really understand and enter into meditation, one important thing needs to happen in you – psychological revolution.

What do I mean by psychological revolution? It means a clear understanding about the Self, world and god.

As of now, the understanding that you are carrying about life is not complete. That is why you are not able to experience a peaceful, relaxed feeling in your system. When I say the words ‘psychological revolution’, I mean having a clear understanding about the Self, world and god; that is having a clear understanding about the source of the Self, the source of the world and the source of god.

The understanding that is able to give you a completely restful feeling, through which you are able to solve all you problems, through which you are able to find your own life solutions, is call psychological revolution.

Only a person who has gone through this psychological revolution can meditate. Until then, any technique that you try will seem to fail at some point in time.

People come and tell me, “the moment I close my eyes, I get more thoughts than when I did not meditate. If I am in action, doing something I have fewer thoughts. The moment I close my eyes and try to meditate I have more thoughts.` This means the psychological revolution has not happened.

If you straightaway close your eyes and start meditating, you may have an increased number of thoughts. So in the initial level, I always give a technique which is not directly a meditation, but is more a contemplation. When you work with the technique, it won’t lead you directly to a thoughtless state. It will lead you towards more and more clarity. It will lead to the psychological revolution.

The psychological revolution will develop an intense inner space where you can analyze your understanding, consider your decision and rethink again and again your desires, fears, worries and all that you consider as the basis of your life.

So in the initial level, taking up a technique that can awaken you, that can help the psychological revolution in you, is the best way to start.

Start meditating here and now. Neither age nor time can be the reason to postpone meditation.

The next question people ask is whether they should meditate in the morning or in the evening. My answer is that the goal is not to make meditation a quantity of life, but rather a quality of life.

Meditation Benefits Your Physical health

Meditation has the power to transform you physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

See, physical health means digesting whatever you eat and having that food become part of your body. Mental health means digesting all the ideas and problems that you encounter and forming a clear solution. In other words, it is living without conflict. Spiritual health means receiving all the great teachings and energy, digesting them and living a liberated life. Having all three is total health.

Meditation is also a complement to medication. Through meditation, you can regulate your blood pressure and blood sugar and you can increase your body’s resistance to disease. Through meditation, it is possible to heal even chronic problems like skin allergies, asthma and arthritis. No disease can escape the power of meditation.

Meditation Benefits Mental Health

- Awakening of Intelligence and Flowering of Intuition

On the mental level, meditation enhances clarity of thought. Meditation is also a proven way to improve concentration and memory power. Above all, meditation leads you from intellect to intelligence to intuition.

With meditation, you go beyond the mind, into the being. In the being no rules exist. You become free to explore your full potential. That’s why with meditation you will suddenly find yourself at ease with your surroundings, easily able to cope with new situations. You rediscover your spontaneity.

There are three types of Karma – agamya, prarabdha and sanchita.

Sanchita Karma is like a bank, a reserve bank. Understand, this may not be the first time you have taken a body and come to planet earth. You may have taken millions of bodies before! In those millions of bodies, whatever thoughts you had, whatever you spoke, whatever you did, all those unfulfilled experiences have become your engrams (engraved memories) Put together, they are like a bank called sanchita karma. When I say ‘bank’ it is not a collection or saving, it is debt! You will have to pay back all the loans!

The next type of karma is prarabdha karma. Prarabdha means this: from the sanchita bank of karma you take some karma out of which you create your present body. You then decide to enjoy and exhuast all those karmas that you brought with you through that body. So prarabdha is just a small bit of the accumulated sanchita karma account that you have brought into this life. You have planned to enjoy or exhaust these through this body of yours.

The third type of karma is the worst. It is the agamya karma, the karma that you start collecting after coming down to plane earth, because of fresh thoughts, words, and deeds.

Anybody who lands on planet earth has to exhaust his prarabdha karma before he dies. For example, let us say you have 1000 karmas in you sanchita bank. Out of these 1000 karmas, suppose you take only 10 karmas with you as your prarabdha karma when you take up your body saying, “Let me finish these ten karmas this time.” However after coming down, instead of exhausting your own prarbdha karma you start watching others and collecting karma based on their desires. These are desires that you have borrowed from others around you. Because of these borrowed desires, you create certain thoughts, words and actions.

For example, if you see someone more beautiful than you, your thoughts multiply due to comparison and jealousy. You create karma based on thoughts. Sometimes you talk ill of others, without knowing any of the related facts. When you do this, you accumulate karma based on words.

We can’t speak about silence. The moment we speak we disturb the silence.

Let me try and explain how to create that silence in us.

When I use the word silence I don’t mean soundlessness. Soundlessness is negative silence. When I use the word silence, I mean a living, vibrant silence.

It is not the silence of a graveyard. It is the silence of an enlightened Master. The silence of a graveyard is totally different from silence of an enlightened Master. An enlightened person’s silence is vibrant and alive.

When Jesus says ‘Be still and know that I am truth’, he means this silence, the silence of enlightenment.

To enter into that you need to go beyond words. Words and silence, you should cross both these to realize that silence of an enlightened Master.

When we enter into that silence, our whole being radiates, we start singing. When I say we start singing, not only through our mouth, our whole being starts singing. Our very movements will be graceful. Our very presence on the planet earth will be a blessing. Our air, our space will heal. That itself will radiate so much energy, so much life, and so much light. We can touch and feel God in the presence of that person who has experienced God.

What is keeping us from experiencing this silence?

The first thing we don’t have the trust that we can also experience that silence. We always think this is not for us. It is the property of the whole universe. It is our birthright. Being alive is the only qualification to experience this silence and be enlightened.

One more obstacle is that we always have guilt about ourselves. We don’t respect ourselves. We always measure ourselves only based on our failures. We don’t even remember the good things we have done or the right decisions we made. The strength of our being should be measured only on the positive decisions we make, not on the negative decisions we made.

Also we have to drop the wrong ideas about enlightenment. Enlightenment is very simply going beyond desires; it’s going beyond thoughts and words.

The moment we drop the wrong ideas about ourselves, the wrong ideas about enlightenment, we start experiencing enlightenment. We are in that silence. The silence of enlightenment is a living, vibrant silence, a living, vibrant energy. It is the heartbeat of existence. Meditation is the doorway to this silence!!

The Karma theory (theory of action and reaction) has no basis according to me. It is only a faith, a belief created by man. By creating this law, man has done a great service to society, but he has done a great conspiracy against humanity. For social well being, this theory or law is good. For example, one implication of this is that you will not kill me, so I should not kill you. It is only an understanding between people so that they can live in peace and harmony. There is no spiritual attribute to the law. But, we can start giving a spiritual explanation saying that you will be punished for your sins. This sense of torture is not correct. It is just to instill fear in you so that you follow the dictum of morality as dictated by society.

May be when you are teaching kids about morality, you may resort to telling stories to teach them the idea of right and wrong and what repercussions can happen if they don’t follow morality. But this type of fear is not necessary to make mature people understand morality.

The truth is that you neither carry your sins nor merits with you. Then you may say that means we can do whatever we can in our lives without regard to others. What you carry with you is the mental setup. For e.g, a murderer carries the mindset which tortures him. Be clear , it is not the burden of a hundred murders actually that he carries with him.

You think that you will go to hell if you do sin. Actually, it is the other way around; you sin because you are in hell! when you are in bliss, you can not harm anyone. It is only your conscious attitude that will make you joyful.

As long as the Karma theory is based on fear, it will never give fulfillment. No morality should be based on fear and greed. It should be based only on understanding. Man should be given techniques to create such a deep awareness; he should be taken to that level of maturity to understand the laws, there should be no fear of hell and heaven. Surely there is no hell or heaven based on Karma theory. In fact, if you associate yourself too much with the so-called ‘wrong actions’, you are tied so closely to your body that you can’t disconnect yourself from it at the time of death.

For instance, a man who has lived only for sensual pleasures can’t leave his body easily at the time of his death. There is too much pain and that is really what hell is.

If you live with awareness and consciousness, you will radiate joy, bliss and compassion. You will experience life to be so enjoyable and radiant that living leaves little time for anything else.

This is the reason I never give rules even during our meditation camps. I never ask people to refrain from non-vegetarian food. Surprisingly, even confirmed non-vegetarians have become vegetarian after attending my meditation camps. The awareness and consciousness will become so sharp and heightened that your very being will start guiding you. There is no need for any law. If I force vegetarianism on people, they will come up with excuses for not giving up non-vegetarian food.

So, I don’t believe in morality since I know it is not going to work. I believe in experience. I don’t believe in conscience; I believe in consciousness. When the consciousness happens in you, automatically, awareness will happen in you. All the social morality will start happening in you. There will be no conflict between inside and outside. Morality will become your life.

People spend more time arguing about whether they are driven by destiny or acting out of than doing what they should do. They forget that they waste their time of their own accord, their own sweet freewillfree will!

There is no such thing as future. Future does not exist till you create it in your present moment, here and now. We all waste our time regretting or savoring what happened in the past and speculating about what would like in the future. Neither is of any productive value. There is nothing we can do about the past, it is gone; it is history. There is nothing that you can do thinking about the future; you have to act now to make your future. Your future is in your hands, and your hands only. Trying to fashion your future based on past experiences is like driving car looking at the rear view mirror. All you will meet is disaster!

We are comfortable being told that we are destined to do certain things. We are relieved when we learn that our sins and problems are because of our past karma, because then we can disown responsibility.

Be very clear, there is no such thing as karma, the way you understand it. Your unfulfilled desires shape your actions and this is karma. As of now your future is driven by your fantasies, your unfulfilled desires, and what you do not have. When the product arrives, you ask, who ordered this, not I!

Start being comfortable with what you have. Enjoy what you have acquired instead of hankering after what you do not have. Spirituality is not about renouncing in the sense of what you understand. There is nothing that you have now that you need to renounce. Nothing at all. Just renounce what you do not have, your fantasies. You will see your life change in front of your eyes.

When you focus on enjoying what you have now, you will have to focus on the present instead of wasting time speculating and regretting. Your entire mindset will be on action. Because this action is not tinged with regret and speculation, you will automatically fall into what Krishna refers to in the Gita as the action without expectation.

When you learn to stay in the present, your freewill destines you to be a true Yogi, one who is truly uniting material and spiritual life. You will be in eternal bliss, nithyananda.

Nithyananda

Living Enlightenment – Gospel Of Paramahamsa Nithyananda

A monastery is not an ashram.

In a monastery there is hierarchy; there is order; there are rules, regulations, and how much work each person has to do.

In an ashram, there are no man made rules and regulations. No one measures how much one does and how much another does. There is chaos, outwardly. There is no equality on terms of responsibility or duties in an ashram; but there is uniqueness. Each person in an ashram does what he or she is best suited for.

In an ashram, an inmate does not work out of fear, greed, motivation or necessity. An ashramite, a resident of an ashram, works out of gratitude. Once people start measuring what they are doing and what others are doing in comparison, you create a political organization, not a spiritual organization.

People mostly work out of fear and greed; all organizations control people out of fear and greed. A few graduate out of fear and greed and then get caught in the need for attention, or jealousy and comparison to prove that they are some way superior to others. Even those who shed all these negativities retain their ego, need for an identity. When all these are shed, one moves up in surrender, working out of sheer gratitude.

A cook in a monastery cooked in the monastery for thirty years. He never bothered to be around the master, rarely attended the master’s discourses. When it was time for the master to leave the planet earth, he called every one to announce who would be the next heir to his seat in that monastery. All of them were expecting one of the disciples very close to the master would succeed him as the master. The master, however, appointed the cook as his successor. He said to his disciples, you have been listening to my discourses all these years, but this cook just lived my teachings. Just with these words, the master made the cook enlightened and capable of being his true successor.

People are not equal. Each one comes with one’s karma and with different attitude.  As long as the Master is around, He will take care of every thing. When Master is not there, the whole thing will become dharma, set procedures. When the Master is there every thing will become moksha, liberation. That is the difference between dharma and moksha. Work for moksha. That is the difference between an ashram and a monastery.

Nithyananda

Living Enlightenment – Gospel Of Paramahamsa Nithyananda

Imagine for a moment that the first half of this column is empty. Imagine that the tape you are listening to you is silent and has no content for just two minutes. What happens?

Your mind races. Thoughts flood you. What has happened, you wonder, what has gone wrong? Why are there no words?

Nothing has gone wrong, nothing at all. Your mind cannot tolerate silence; that is all. Thoughts and words are a call of your Consciousness telling you that your center is unfilled.

There are two kinds of people. One kind is the people who follow words and seek meaning behind the words. Another kind is those people who ignore the meaning and seek the source of thoughts.

Seeking words and thoughts cannot fulfill you. When you seek words you move into the outer world. You move into the space of sense objects, which results in pain or pleasure. However many times you may experience the physical or sensual pleasure led by your thoughts, you still keep seeking the same pleasure. What one calls karma, is really the effect of these unfulfilled desires.

The meaning of thoughts and words is not to provoke movement towards these external experiences that can never be fulfilled but to move towards the center, the core of your being. Only there you will find the comfort in silence.

Words soothe your superficial mind the same way as scratching an itch seems to provide some comfort. In actual fact it makes the problem worse. It is the same with words. More words you use more confused you are. Be careful of all these scholars and philosophers who use highly complex language and words to propound their theories. They themselves do not understand what they are saying, so they are forced to confuse others by using complexity as a tool.

Whenever you ask questions, more questions arise. This is seen as the measure of intelligence in our system of education. When one really understands, one realizes two things. Firstly, one realizes that questions and answers do no lead to any understanding at all. Secondly, one realizes that understanding happens when thoughts cease.

Truth resides in silence. Truth resides in contemplation. As you move inwards towards the source of words and thoughts, mind become still in simplicity.

This stillness, this silence leads to fulfillment.

Nithyananda

KARMA is the collection of unfulfilled experiences that stay in us and constantly pull us to fulfill them.

~ Paramahamsa Nithyananda – from his Best Selling Book: Living Enlightenment

Pure action with no end objective is KARMA

~ Paramahamsa Nithyananda – from his Best Selling Book: Living Enlightenment

KARMA is not a law of reward and punishment. It is a reflection of your mental state.

~ Paramahamsa Nithyananda – from his Best Selling Book: Living Enlightenment

You create your own KARMA. Karma does not create you. You are not a by-product of your actions. You are far bigger than your actions.

~ Paramahamsa Nithyananda – from his Best Selling Book: Living Enlightenment

Intention is the baggage, the karma, not the action. If action creates intention, it becomes the baggage. Pure action with no end objective is karma.

~ Paramahamsa Nithyananda – from his Best Selling Book: Living Enlightenment

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http://living-enlightenment.com/living_enlightenment/index.html