Guruji: I had talked very little about the ritual in all this. It is important to realize that your body is the temple of God and the God, who is residing in the temple, is inside your body. This recognition of the divinity of yourself, as well as the divinity of the temple is important. This is just a way of saying that just as you keep the temple clean, you keep your body clean. What is the meaning of saying, the body is clean? My body consists of not only the physical body, when you consider flesh and blood, but also of my thoughts. Everything that I see, is my body. I am seeing that, I am not that. So that is coming out of me, all that is my body. How do you artificially distinguish yourself from this? There is no distinction really, this distinction is artificially assumed.The question arises - is the ritual essential or not? When you sit for a meditation, you are doing a saguṇa [upasana] or assuming a form of God or Goddess.
And because you can love that, you want to have it in a form, so you can relate to it. It is in the mind or externally? Is there any distinction between thought and action? That is as much a ritual as when you perform it outside. Even when you are performing it outside, that ritual is not complete until the major mental visualizations are properly done. So there is always a unity between the ritual performed either internally or externally. Now what corresponds to the internal? Let us say nirguṇa dhyana, when translated into the external terms - bahya pūjā. Supposing I am walking along a road, which is what I am doing these days, I’m walking three miles a day, and at each step I keep on saying one bījākṣara after the next, let’s say Rāma. So right foot forward - Ra, left foot forward - Ma. Rāma, Rāma, Rāma, Rāma. It keeps on going. This is my centering device. Now as I keep walking, initially for some time, I am interested in looking at the houses, at the flowers that are arranged in front of the gardens. And as I'm walking on the road, I am cognizing the cars that are coming. And when the car comes, I just move to the left and I keep walking and then when the car is not there I can walk on the road again. We Indians like to walk on the road. And this behavior persists for some time.
And then, after some time you stop seeing the different parts, it’s just the whole scene you are taking in. You are not saying that this is a tree, this is a road, this is a car, this is me - all those ideas have disappeared and you are just walking and the whole thing is slowly coming over you, flowing over you. You have entered the Tao of walking meditation. Your cognition has stopped, your thinking mind has stopped, you have gotten to nirguṇa dhyana, in that there are no divisions. The picture is there, but you are not cognizing it. Similarly, inside the mind there also can be a picture, but if you are not cognizing it, you merge into that. You become one with that, you can become a part of it. Then the car is a part of you, you are a part of you, the trees are a part of you, the road is a part of you, everything is one single whole and there is no time in that. Time does not flow in that. The motion has halted, it has become a still picture. You are not giving any name to anything. So the ritual can be internal, the ritual can be external, the ritual can be with form, internally or with from, externally. Or without form, internally or without form, externally. All these possibilities are there. I do not see any essential distinction between these things.
It is easy to identify the beauty with God, but you become the master when you are able to identify everything with God. Even when it is ugly. It is easy to identify the good with God, but you are a master when you are able to identify also bad with God, because that's also a part of you. You must love it and transform it. You cannot reject a part of it, you cannot throw it away. It won't go away. If there is a darkness in the shadow, you cannot trample upon it and try to wish that the shadow would not be there. What you are trying to do is to shine a light on it. That light is your love. You must love it and transform it. Start having a better dream. That is the way. So the ritual is a means of learning a harmonious and a joyful mutually supportive kinds of actions. We have the technology that makes a war - that is also a ritual. But we can have a technology that makes peace. We can use the technology for eliminating the wants of the people.
So let us start having dreams of those things and those dreams have to start from the people. We have to withdraw the power from the media, which is trying to present those violent images to us. How do we do that? We stop seeing those things and they will lose their energy. And then, they have to go away. If a public does not respond to the violence aspect of it and obviously the advertising industry cannot survive, they'll have to change their advertising strategy to meet the needs of the people. If the people are peaceful, then they will demand the peaceful things. The transformation has to come from within and once having found the light within, we must try to express that light. Do not be conditioned by what other people are saying, just go with whatever your heart says and your heart always says the right thing. The heart always says - love everybody. That is because that is unity, that is the way the heart functions.
Question: How to remove the negativity?
Guruji: There is a beautiful book by a lady, Shakti Gawain, called “Creative Visualization”, I would advise you to read. But I’ll also tell you about the answer to the question. We have anxieties, we have fears, we have insecurities, we lose our job. This is a very common; or we lose the lover that we had. There’s a feeling of insecurity. As I was saying, that insecurity is a part of you, it is one of your children. You have to accept that insecurity. You are to love that insecurity; it is like a child that is craving for your attention. You must give it that attention and that attention is the love that you are giving. You cannot keep telling your child, that you are good for nothing, you are useless and I kick you whenever I see you. That child is going to become a rebel and is going to break away from you and act out in antisocial ways. The way to convert that child is to give it your love and attention and not by rejecting it. So negativity is like your child, you have to accept it and nurture it.
What do you mean by nurturing your negativity for some time? Supposing you lost your job or you are about to lose your job, then be with that thought. Imagine the worst possible kinds of things that can happen when you do not have a job. Go deep into that, into the negativity. Give it your total attention. And as you are doing that, you will go deeper, and deeper,and deeper. If you get depressed, get depressed. Do not run away from it, keep with it. After some time your mind starts to move away a little from that idea. It cannot bear the tension of the negativity. And it is at that point your training in meditation should help you to let go of this. When your mind starts moving away from this. To give you an example. Supposing you are in a room, it is absolutely dark and the power has failed. You cannot put the light on and you know that there is a cobra inside that room. You are afraid. That fear is, what is going to happen. You cannot just shove that fear, saying that I do not want to have this fear. It will not go, it will be with you. What happens then? You get into an altered state of consciousness, an altered state of awareness, mode number two of your functioning, where your mind has totally become alive and concentrated. Every little sound, every little movement, you are able to perceive, even though you are not able to see anything.
You have become the room and you have become the snake also, because you are able to feel its movements. You are not seeing it, but you are visualizing. Through your heart you are seeing without seeing. You are seeing with your heart; you have become the snake and you are visualizing how you are reacting to this. And this is not a situation which the mind is liking very much. It cannot stay in that state for a long time, the adrenaline that is being pumped into your system induces the fear. But you can only retain this altered state of consciousness depending upon your conditioning and evolution, up to a certain level. Then the inhibitory levels come up in your mind and you lose your awareness, then you become merged totally. At the time you can let go of the fear and the fear will go away. I had experienced this at Devipuram.
==============
Vira Chandra: very powerful techniques to work with a fear and negativity ware described by Viktor Frankl and are called "Paradoxical Intention" and "Dereflection".
In short, Paradoxical Intention is a technique that invites you to wish for the thing that you fear most. This was originally suggested for use in the case of anxiety or phobias, in which humor and ridicule can be used when fear is paralyzing. For example, if you have a fear of looking foolish, you might be encouraged to try to look foolish on purpose. Paradoxically, your fear would be removed when you set an intention to behave as foolishly as possible. Hasya (Laugh) Rasa has been described by Abhinavagupta Pada as the highest, so when you are looking at the most frightening things with a humor, you are invoking a God Vision on the Reality.
Dereflection refers to diverting the person's attention away from their symptoms. Dereflection has been originally developed by Frankl for people suffering from sexual disorders, in which the patient's desire for sexual pleasure becomes an obstruction to achieving it. Because the more the person wishes egoistic pleasure, the more it runs from him/her. The therapist discourages intercourse and thus breaks the cycle of desire, striving, and disappointment.
These techniques are so powerful because deal with 2 purely divine phenomenons: the ability to self-transcendence and the ability to abstract from oneself's lower nature [which is inherent in the sense of humor] - which are mobilized by these techniques.
No comments:
Post a Comment