(From a talk at Sri Rajarajeswari Peetam, Rochester, NY, on Thursday, July 18, 1996.)
Guruji: Every one of us exists in two modes—one that I call a “localized” mode and the other a “diffused” mode. In our localized mode of existence, we identify ourselves with our body, mind or intellect. This is our limited state of existence. Our non-localized, diffused, spread-out form of existence consists of our consciousness pervading all life forms—plants, animals, birds, the sun, the skies, the stars—everywhere. In this mode, you are a witness to all of these things and yet you are none of them.
The relationship between these two modes is like that between a circle and its center. You cannot have a circle without its starting point, the center. The center is within the circle; it’s not attached to the circle. Just like when you bisect a sphere through the center, the center is unchanging, but the circle is always changing. The center must remain fixed. If the center is moving, the circle cannot be formed. There must be a center.
In the same way, you must be centered on yourself. We need both these states of our existence to discover our roots, our innermost desires, the purpose of our lives— and to be able to express that purpose through the way we live each day.
You need the non-local, diffused mode where you are not your body, not your mind, not your intellect, but rather where you are the whole: you have spread yourself; your consciousness is part of the entire universe. You should get into that state maybe three times a day. If time does not permit, at least two times a day. It is in the silence of the mind that God is known. This has been called Saṃdhyāvandana: three times a day you have to take your shakti up into a transcendental state and just be there for a while. In this delocalized mode of your functioning, what is important is not the content of the information, but the container of the information. It’s not how much you know that matters, but how much you can forget. It is not subject to logical reasoning, not even to emotions; it’s beyond both of those. And you have to reach that state.
Therefore, I’d like to say a few words about how to access this state—what is called samadhi. You should make a commitment in your life to spend 15 to 20 minutes in the morning and another 15 to 20 minutes in the evening doing this. You may well ask, “Why do you want me to do this? I already have so many pressures in life. What do I gain by doing this? What’s in it for me?” So first of all, you need proof that you need to do anything at all. Let me give you that proof.
Let’s suppose you’re in a classroom, an elementary school classroom, and the history teacher comes and writes a few lines on the blackboard. He’s telling a story from the Rāmāyaṇa. He says, “Once there was a king called Dasharatha,” and he writes Dasharatha up there. “And he had four sons named Rama, Bharatha, Lakshmana and Shatrughna,” he continues, and writes their names on the board as well. After a little more storytelling, the class is over and the history teacher leaves with his notes remaining on the blackboard. Next the mathematics teacher comes in, and he writes the equation (a+b)^2 = a^2+b^2 = 2*a*b on the board. He explains the meaning of all this and then, after class, he goes away, too. And now you, the student, when you go back home, have the following information jumbled in your mind: Dasharatha = (a+b)^2, Rama = a^2, Lakshmana = b^2, Bharatha = 2*a*b — and Shatrughna is nothing!
The moral of the story? It’s not just the chalk piece that puts information in your mind that’s important, but also the duster that removes it! If you do not periodically clean your mind, then the data entering it can get mixed up and a lot of confusion can result. If we do not allow our minds to be cleared at least twice a day, we cannot have clear perception. So which is more important, the chalk piece or theduster? Without the chalk piece you are stupid, without the duster you are confused. You need both.You need the chalk piece - the world, which writes its information on your mind - but you have to be able to clear it, too. This process, of clearing the conscious part of the mind and being able to remain thoughtless for some time, is meditation. We need both.
So that’s one aspect. The other aspect is that—once you are really able to achieve silence of the mind, to stop all of the dialogues, all of the monologues in your mind — that’s when you enter a state called yoga: yōgaḥ-citta-vṛtti-nirōdhaḥ.
When all manifestations and fluctuations of the mind are subdued, your body identification disappears. When you are in the witness state and only the subject remains; when the object has merged into the subject. The object is no longer there, because the subject has become the object. You are seeing the world and you have become the world—you stop seeing yourself. That is the state called manōlaya — a
state in which you have eliminated your mind. You’ve got to try to reach that state, three times a day preferably. If you can manage a wink at the office—great, nothing like it. If you can’t, at least do it twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. It is necessary in these days of high-tension living and high-pressure jobs — you simply need this relaxation process.
So what are the steps leading to this relaxation of the mind? I think there are basically four:
1. Be a Little Hungry
If you eat heavily and then sit down for meditation, what happens? You sleep like Kumbhakarṇa — who slumbers for six months continuously! On the other hand, if you’re totally hungry, with a burning sensation in your stomach, you can’t sit and meditate well in that state either. So a slight hunger should be there, but not too much.
2. Be a Little Tired
If your mind is totally fresh — for instance, if you have just woken up from sleep — that is also not a state conducive for meditation. The mind wants to think. It has finished its sleep; it wants to become active. And that doesn’t create the slope necessary for the mind to settle down into a thoughtless state. So the second important step is that — just as you should have a little hunger — you should have a little tiredness, too.
When your body and mind are tired, the mind wants to stop thinking and start relaxing. This sets up a small slope in the mind, and it starts gently rolling downward—just like if you take a bottle of water, put some mud in, shake it well and let it stand, it will start settling down. This settling-down process happens because the mind has a natural tendency to be lazy. Therefore, you try to move into a state of non-thinking by following a natural gradient.
3. Be a Witness
But what invariably happens when you sit for meditation is that some disturbance, some trigger, comes along. Maybe some little sound, and you start analyzing what it might be. That starts a train of thought. And when you have these trains of thought, it’s like when a ball rolling down the slope of a hill comes across an obstacle. It stops there. It doesn’t roll any further. Sometimes the obstacle is such that it pushes the ball back up the slope! So what do you have to do?
Well, have you observed that no thought ever remains with you all the time? Is there any thought that has remained with you forever? No, not a single one. All thoughts are born, they grow and they die in your mind. The obstacles to reaching a thoughtless state are the thoughts themselves. But if you observe that all thoughts are temporary in nature, you know they will never stay for long. They cannot. The mind has a natural tendency to kill them.
All you need do is remain a passive witness to the thought. Don’t get involved with it. And certainly don’t invite the thought in, put it on a pedestal and do puja to it as you would to the Devi! But nor should you ask the thought to go away. Because if you push it away, you’re working with the emotion of the thought. “This is a bad thought, I should not be having it. Why do these thoughts come to me when I am trying to clear my mind? I should have only good thoughts, not bad thoughts.” You see? So suspend your judgment of these thoughts. Your judgment — that this is a good or bad thought, one that I should or should not have — is itself a thought. If I think it’s a good idea, then I want to hang on to it; if I think it’s a bad idea, I want to push it away from me. Thoughts are not the problem; judgment of thoughts is. If you judge not, then you are in a passive state of mind, a witness state of mind. A witness is not affected. Even though my name is Sastry, I can witness this guy Sastry having this thought — but it’s not me. Take yourself a little bit away from yourself. Detach yourself a little. And then, without judgment, let the thought come. Let it stay for as long as it wants to, and let it go when it wants to go. Then let a new thought come, and let that one go, too.
4. Be Expectation-Free
There is one more important thing — the most important thing. Being able to accept God’s creation, good or bad, whatever it is, as being perfect: that is surrender to God. But how does it relate to meditation? Well, sometimes my meditation goes wonderfully; absolutely no problems—and I’m in seventh heaven, walking on rainbows, with the Mother leading me by her little finger and showing me different worlds. They’re singing for me, dancing for me—an aesthetic state of union with God.
And sometimes nothing happens at all. It’s just routine — boring. Where does the boredom come from? It comes when you have an expectation that something is going to happen, but nothing does—and you lose interest in the meditation. The expectation causes disappointment, and that causes boredom. What’s the solution? You should have no expectations whatsoever about how your meditation is going to proceed. If you have no expectations, then you’ll have no disappointments. If you have expectations, you will certainly have disappointments.
And that’s all that is needed for your mind to settle down into a quiet state. Once you have learned these tricks, it will come naturally to you. That’s the duster you have to apply once in the morning and once in the evening. You can choose your own time. But try to see if you can stick to the same time every day, so that it becomes a habit.
See if you can create an environment around yourself in which not too much external disturbance is present. Try not to be overfull; try to be comfortable. Assume a simple posture in which you can forget your body; don’t contort yourself into a position that you can’t hold for any length of time without discomfort. (If you are used to yoga asanas, that’s a different story. But otherwise what you do issukhāsana.) Whatever asana, whatever posture is convenient for you is fine so long as your body doesn’t keep hurting and bringing you back to body consciousness.
What you want to do is forget the body, forget the mind—but not go to sleep. That is called saṃdhyāvandana. You can use mantras if you like. And beyond that, there is the silence of the mind, where you don’t have the Goddess to hold onto. The shastras call this the nirālamba mārga. There is no support there, so support-less you must be. Any kind of support that you try to hang onto—whether it’s the guru, the mantra or an expectation—denies you independence. You have got to let go of everything. You have to be yourself, without expectation, and try to remain in that state. All the rituals we do are ultimately designed to help us to reach a state of mind that is in balance.
Having practiced it, I know it is in that state that clarity of perception comes, that universal love springs forth from your heart, that you feel your oneness with the entire universe, that you experience being at the bottom of the Ocean of Awareness. It is there that you see the oneness, not the diversity. You start feeling that, when you give to somebody, you are giving to yourself. You know for certain that when you improve yourself, you are improving the world around you. You understand that if you are helping yourself, you are helping the world. We have an equation, “I = YOU” established in that non-localized mode of existence.
We are so very used to the localized mode of existence that we’ve forgotten we can exist in the other mode. In physics, we have what’s called the quantum phenomenon: there is a particle mode of existence and a wave mode of existence. This applies to you as well. Your mind is a quantum phenomenon. It knows of no distance, no time, no path — it jumps from here to there, from this to that, without traversing any intermediate state of time or space.
In the classical model of physics, if I want to go from Rochester to New York City, we can put up sentries along the way—say, at Syracuse, Troy, Albany and then New York. And you can say, “Okay, he has just crossed into Syracuse; he has crossed into Troy; now he’s crossing into Albany” — all before I reach New York. But in the quantum mode of travel, this doesn’t happen. Instead, you disappear here and you reappear there. And that’s it. That’s how the mind functions, too. And if the mind is a quantum phenomenon, then the classical model of the continuous path does not have to apply.
The mind being a quantum phenomenon, it can disappear from being an individual and become a wave. It can dematerialize here and materialize there. Sometimes you’re a particle, sometimes you’re a wave. We’ve been taught to be particles all throughout our lives. What we must learn now is how to be waves.
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