The Way to Liberation
When you are seated for
meditation, have a clear mind first. Viveka precedes vairagya and mumukshutva. Understanding is at
the back of your renunciation and your aspiration for liberation. This
understanding should guide you always. All your performances should be based on
understanding, says the Bhagavad Gita. "Establish yourself in buddhi yoga, the yoga of
understanding," which is the operation of the higher reason.
There are two types of reason:
the lower reason and the higher reason. The lower reason is always attending
upon the reports of the sense-organs. But the higher reason warns you,
mentioning to you from moment to moment that there is a higher than what you
are, higher than the world, higher than people, higher than even the gods in
heaven. With this surety in your mind, sit for meditation.
Harmony is called yoga,
balance is yoga – balance between the inner and the outer life. The extrovert
and the introvert conditions of the mind have to be balanced in an awareness of
your larger individuality. You should neither be an introvert nor an extrovert,
but a balanced person which will produce a sense of cheer in your face – a
smile, a kind of satisfaction which a healthy person has after a good meal, for
instance. Such a satisfaction will arise in the mind.
"On what do you
meditate?" is a question that repeatedly will come up. According to the
cultural background in which you have been brought up, even considering the
ethnic impressions at the back of your mind, take to the concentration on that
visualized form of the Supreme Creator of the universe. We should not try to
impose upon ourselves any new thought alien to our svadharma
or svabhava, i.e., a concept that is
alien to our belief and faith.
Why do you meditate on this
divinity? Because, it is all-power, all-knowledge, all-blessing. Take to that
particular form of the higher ideal which is satisfying to you. This is the
initial stage in which you can adjust your mind to the concept of your ishta-devata.
Then, in a second step, you
raise your thought and feeling to the presence of this very divinity in many
places at the same time. As the sun can manifest himself in millions of rays,
so God can manifest Himself in millions of forms. This is a step in advance
over the initial concept of God standing in front of you, alone before you.
The third higher step is to
conceive your divinity as present everywhere, in all places. It is feeling the
presence of this divinity not pervading merely your room or the nearby
atmosphere, but even all the sky and all space. When you look up, you see
nothing but this flood of the forms shining like brilliant stars everywhere;
wherever you cast your eyes, you see only that god.
Then go a step further. If
everywhere this divinity is seen, then where are you sitting at that time? You
also have gone to the stars. You have become one of the stars; you have become
one of the forms of this divinity. You have also started shining like a star at
that time. Stars are contemplating the stars, divinity is looking at divinity;
God is meditating upon Himself. It is the "I" of God, the only
"I" existing everywhere, supreme aham brahma, as
the Upanishads say. This is a very high state of meditation, penultimate to
merging completely, in which you do not know what actually happens to you.
Don't be under the impression
that it is all so easy, as it has been described here. Your physical nature,
your bodily impulses, will prevent you from taking sudden steps of this kind.
You have to be austere in your thinking and detached in your personality from
all contacts in the world, and learn to be satisfied with your own self.
That sufficient individuality
only is capable of taking such steps in meditation, as described. So the
prerequisites come to our mind once again: yama
(self-restraint), niyama
(self-discipline), viveka (reasoning
capacity), vairagya (non-attachment), shatsampat (sixfold moral virtues),
and mumukshutva (longing for
liberation). We should pave the foundation of cleansing before the meditation
commences. A dustbin cannot meditate. There must be the clarity of a crystal,
which is possible if the dirt of kama-vasana, krodha-vasana, lobha-vasana are melted down from
their gross condition to the transparent condition of luminous spirit. Then
meditation becomes possible.
This is the reason why the
yoga texts tell you that meditation is not the first step. The earlier stages
are not to be ignored (yama, niyama, asana,
pranayama, pratyahara). Dharana (concentration) comes later
on; dhyana (meditation) is very far
indeed. Though meditation is what you should practice every day, you must also
have paved the ground of all the previous stages in your mind. Either you go
stage by stage, or, with your power of discrimination and will, transform
yourself through all the earlier stages at the same time and become a giant of
understanding. Either way is possible. The first way is called the ant's
process and the latter way is called the bird's process. The ant goes slowly,
crawling, but it will reach its destination one day. This is how you go slowly
practising yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara,
dharana for years and years, and then go to meditation. This is the
ant's process.
But the bird flies at once to
the point where it wants to reach. You can compress all the stages into your
personality, if you have the power to do that. That power will be there if you
have no desires in your mind. It is up to you to decide whether you are an ant
or a bird. The bird has two wings; the ant has no wings, so you have to develop
the wings of viveka and vairagya so that you may fly like
the bird. Both things are possible, and in fact you have the capacity to do
both the things. But if you are not sufficiently competent, don't endanger
yourself by breaking your legs, running fast too early.
Excerpts from:
Chapter 4: Sadhana – The Spiritual Way by Swami Krishnananda
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