On Attainment and Experience - To Realize
God You Have to Want God
·
No one who is not
established in God as an entirety of existence can feel a kinship with Nature
or even a sense of brotherhood with others, let alone have peace of mind within
one’s own self. Unselfish dedicated work for the welfare of all (sarvabhutahite ratah) and constant
devotion to God as the universality inseparable from one’s true being are marks
of perfection (sthitaprajna).
·
When man’s
meditation on God ends, and God begins meditation on all Creation, the
consummation is reached. It is here that all questions are answered and all
problems solved.
·
The highest
meditation consists in the recognition of the Self in all things, so that there
is no object before the Self to think or deal with. It is here that the mind
melts like an exhausted camphor cake in the process of self-sublimation.
·
The highest ‘bhava’ which rouses ‘para bhakti’ in a devotee is that
in which one cannot recognise even one’s own body as if forgotten since many
years, for there is no body-consciousness when the mind expires in pure
experience.
·
To be able to
realise God, you have to first want God. It is almost a question of supply and
demand. To want God is not merely to ‘think’ but to ‘feel’ through your ‘whole
being’ that you cannot exist without Him. The entire personality vibrates with
a longing that cannot be satisfied by the beauty and the grandeur of the world.
There is a want for ‘That’ alone, and nothing short of it.
·
The sense of
perfection slowly enters the mind, when it gradually learns to dovetail the
various discrepant particulars of the world into a coherent whole. This stage
comes when the existence and activity of the mind coalesce in an adjustment of
oneself with God’s Creation.
·
Life is a process of
entering into God. This is achieved by seeing God in the objects as well as the
actions of the world, which is not the seeing of particulars, but of the
Universal in them.
·
Tapas is the process of stilling the senses and the mind and
allowing the lustre of the Atman to manifest itself spontaneously. The power of
the sage is this energy of the Atman revealed by the cessation of the
externalising activity of the senses and the mind.
·
Brahmabhavana, the art of the affirmation of Brahman, is called
Brahmabhyasa in the words of the Yoga Vasishtha. It consists in constantly
thinking of Brahman, speaking about Brahman, discoursing to one another on
Brahman and depending on Brahman alone for everything that one values in life.
This is the final stage of meditation.
·
It is of little
consequence to one who has awakened to normal consciousness whether he or she
was a king or a beggar in last night’s dream. Likewise, what one is in this
world matters little to one who has awakened to the Presence of God.
·
When the senses
stand together with the mind and the intellect does not shake, the state of
yoga supervenes. The secret of meditation is this: The mind and the intellect
should shine, but not shine upon things other than the shining awareness. This
is the realisation of God within.
·
Appearance is the objectified character of Reality; and when this character is
negatived in the immediacy of experience, it is not appearance that becomes
Reality, but it is Reality free from objectification that knows itself as such.
·
The depth and
solidity of substance in the world is similar to the distance and
substantiality of things seen in a mirror. This truth is not realised in life
because the body of the observer is itself involved in this reflected
appearance called the world.
·
The passing of the
soul from plane to plane is all a process of Consciousness within the Absolute.
Just as our movements in the dream-world are actual spatial allocations of
personality but are really within the circumference of mental activity - all
dream being only within the mind - so is the transmigration of souls real
empirically but are activities of Consciousness within its bosom.
·
It is the opinion of
Bhishma that it would not take more than six months to attain Samadhi if the
needed precaution is taken to prevent the mind and the senses from hovering
round their objects. That this achievement has not been possible in most people
shows that it is easier to glorify God than to feel it in one’s heart, and the
effort at self-control is more difficult than it is announced from pulpits.
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