The Atma Jyoti Blog

• Meditate Daily

“The self resides within the lotus of the heart. Knowing this, devoted to the self, the sage enters daily that holy sanctuary.” (Chandogya Upanishad 8:3:3)

Meditation should be done daily, and if possible it should be done twice daily–morning and evening, or before and after work, whichever is more convenient.

When your period of meditation is over, do your utmost to maintain the flow of the japa of Om in time with your breathing in all your activities. For those who diligently and continually apply themselves, attainment is inevitable.

When you find yourself with some time–even a few minutes–during the day, sit and meditate. Every little bit certainly does help.

• Length of meditation

How long at a time should you meditate? The more you meditate the more benefit you will receive, but you should not push or strain yourself. Start with a modest time–fifteen or twenty minutes–and gradually work up to an hour or an hour and a half, perhaps once a week meditating longer if that is practical. But do not force or burn yourself out. It is a common trick of the mind to have you meditate for a very long time and then skip some days or weeks and then overdo it again. It is better to do the minimum time every day without fail. Remember the tortoise and the hare. Also, if you go about it the right way and live in the manner which makes you supremely responsive, one hour’s meditation can equal hours of “ordinary” meditation.

• Keep it inside

Do not dissipate the calmness and centering gained through meditation by talking about it to others. Experiences in meditation are not only subtle, they are fragile, as delicate as spun glass, and speaking about them can shatter their beneficial effects. Bragging, eulogizing, and swapping notes about meditation experiences is a very harmful activity. Avoid it.

Do not satisfy any curiosity about your personal yogic experiences or benefits except in the most general terms. Naturally you can tell people that meditation helps you, but do so in only a general way unless you really feel intuitively that you should be more specific. When people seem truly interested in spiritual life and serious about it, give them a copy of this book, or of Introduction to Om Yoga, and discuss the general and practical aspects freely.

Q: Why is Yoga considered a science rather than a religion?

Because it is a precise methodology that has nothing to do with faith or the action of another being–including God. If you do it, it works, if you don’t, it won’t. It is just like a machine. Doubtless there is such a thing as aptitude for yoga, as with any other practice, but the machine does not determine the success of the operator.

Facts are facts. And yoga is based on the highest facts.

Also, even though a general philosophy has developed as a result of the unanimous experience of yogis through the centuries, the philosophy is a side effect and of absolutely no influence in success in yoga. We have lived so long at the whim of “authorities” that we just can’t imagine not needed someone interfering with us. But yoga is a completely personal matter. You need not believe in it, and you can even laugh at it and deny its value. But if at the same time you are practicing you will get the same result as a person who has faith and values it. Oh, how wonderful it was to escape “If it be Thy holy will, O Loward” religion and find yoga that worked no matter how “worthy” or “sincere” I might not be.

When I was little I reached for a metal ring that was lying on top of a heater. “Don’t touch it!” I was warned. “You will get burnt.” I have no idea why, but I did not believe I could not manage. So I picked it up and got the most painful burn of my life, and hurt for a couple of weeks. My lack of faith did not affect the effectiveness of the ring to burn me.

No one need accept yoga. Just do it. As Yogananda pointed out, the critics and deniers of yoga are the ones that have no experience of it, because they do not practice it.

When I was first learning yoga I often laughed at how funny the processes were, and how odd that they would produce the desired result. But they did. Always.

Now, can you equate that with religion? Hardly.

But yoga is the highest dharma. That is sure.

[The yoga spoken of here is the science of Self-realization, not the bodily postures commonly called "yoga" today. For more reading on this subject, visit An Introduction to the Yoga Sutras.]

“I have explained to you the true nature of the Atman. Now listen to the method of Karma Yoga. If you can understand and follow it, you will be able to break the chains of desire which bind you to your actions.”
(Bhagavad Gita 2:39)

In studying any text, sacred or otherwise, it is sometimes as important to notice what is implied–or even not said–as well as what is actually written. This verse is a case in point. Krishna says that he has explained the true nature of the Self and now will outline the path of karma yoga. The implication is that karma yoga is impossible without our first being established in a correct understanding of the Self. For karma yoga–as is bhakti yoga and jnana yoga–is based on the nature of the Self. Without a correct perspective our attempt to follow those paths will be fraught with uncertainty and an almost sure incidence of misstep and failure.

Karma

“Karma” comes from the Sanskrit root kri, which means to act, do, or make. It is exactly the same as the Latin verb ago from whose form, actus, we get our English words act and action. Both verbs are “all purpose” words–that is, they can be applied in many situations to express the idea of many forms of action both mental and physical. This is important to know so we can realize that karma yoga covers the entire range of human action that is beneficial.

Karma, then, means any kind of action, including thought and feeling. But it also means the effects of actions. For karma is both action and reaction. Being a fundamental principle of existence it may be thought of as the law of causation governing action and its effects in the physical and psychological plane. It extends back to the moment of our entry into relative existence and extends forward to the moment of our exit from relative existence–even if that exit is a matter of transmutation of consciousness rather than external cessation of manifestation in a relative form or body.

Yoga

“Yoga” comes from the Sanskrit root yuj, which means to join or connect or even to unite in the sense of making many into one. It can also mean to bring together. But in the scriptures of India it always is applied in a spiritual sense, meaning both union with God and the way by which that union is effected. Yoga, then is both spiritual life and the culmination of spiritual life. Yoga is union with the Supreme Being, or any practice that makes for such union.

Karma yoga

Karma yoga, then, is the path of union with God through external action performed in a detached and selfless manner, dedicated to God alone Who is seen as its origin and its goal. This includes the performance of one’s own duty and service of humanity, but always in complete dedication to God. This is an essential distinction, for many people do good because they consider it a personal virtue. They themselves are the measure and the purpose of the act. Others act for the welfare of others, whose benefit then becomes the measure and the purpose of the act. Karma yoga is utterly different, for it is performed as an expression of divinity for the revelation of divinity, all other benefits, individual and communal being secondary–even insignificant.

Next: The Psychological Nature of Karma

In material life we are often promised great benefits if we will only do what the promisers want us to do, the implication being that if we do not obey we will lose or be denied the benefits. But Krishna has a very different thing to say. Happiness in both this world and the next are guaranteed to the yogi.

“Die, and you win heaven. Conquer, and you enjoy the earth. Stand up now, son of Kunti, and resolve to fight.” (Bhagavad Gita 2:37) In the sixth chapter Arjuna is going to present to Krishna the usual manipulative and resentful view of religionists: are not those who “fail” in or “abandon” spiritual life “lost” and hopeless? “No, my son,” replies Krishna. “That man is not lost, either in this world or the next. No one who seeks Brahman ever comes to an evil end.” (Bhagavad Gita 6:40) And this is true in the inner struggle. If we literally die before winning the battle or are overcome in the battle and “slain” by the enemy, we shall still reap profound benefit. The intensely positive karma generated by meditation will result in our rising to high spiritual realms after death and enjoying it fruits there. Then, when we are once more reborn we will reap the good karma in the form of once again coming into the orbit of meditational knowledge and resume our practice. If on the other hand we persevere and win the ultimate victory we shall find life here on earth totally transfigured to a glory presently unimagined by us. The great Master Sivananda of Rishikesh expressed it this way:

When I surveyed from Ananda Kutir, Rishikesh,
By the side of the Tehri Hills, only God I saw.
In the Ganges and the Kailas peak,
In the famous Chakra Tirtha of Naimisar also, only God I saw.

In tribulation and in grief, in joy and in glee,
In sickness and in sorrow, only God I saw.
In birds and dogs, in stones and trees,
In flowers and fruits, in the sun, moon and stars, only God I saw.

Like camphor I was melting in His fire of knowledge,
Amidst the flames outflashing, only God I saw.
My Prana entered the Brahmarandhra at the Moordha,
Then I looked with God’s eyes, only God I saw.

I passed away into nothingness, I vanished,
And lo, I was the all-living, only God I saw.
I enjoyed the Divine Aisvarya, all God’s Vibhutis,
I had Visvaroopa Darshan, the Cosmic Consciousness, only God I saw.
[From Practice of Karma Yoga by Sri Swami Sivananda. This is only a partial quotation.]

Sri Ramakrishna said that to the enlightened yogi the whole world that now is a sea of suffering becomes “a mart of joy.” A Buddhist mystic wrote: “I walk through this world and no one guesses that Paradise is within [me].” Is it any wonder then that Krishna concludes: “Stand up now, son of Kunti, and resolve to fight”?

Read more commentary on the Bhagavad Gita in “The Battlefield of the Mind.”

Meditation is not an end in itself, but rather the means to an end–to the daily living out of the illumined consciousness produced by meditation. We go into meditation so we can come out of meditation more conscious and better equipped to live our life. The change will not be instant, but after a reasonable time we should see a definite effect in how we live. If the meditator does not find that his state of mind during daily activities has been affected by his meditation, then his meditation is without value. This is especially important for us in the West since meditation is continually being touted as a “natural high” or a producer of profound and cataclysmic experiences. Such experiences may sound good on paper or in a metaphysical bragfest, but in time they are seen to be empty of worth on any level–ephemeral dreams without substance.

Success in meditation is manifested outside meditation–by the states of mind and depth of insight that become habitual. The proof of its viability is the meditator’s continual state of mind and his apprehension of both reality and Reality.

Many things lighten and purify the mind, but nothing clarifies the mind like the prolonged and profound practice of meditation. The state of mental clarity produced by meditation should continue outside meditation. Meditation should by its nature prepare us for living. At the same time, meditation should establish us in interior life, making us increasingly aware both inwardly and outwardly. This is because reality consists of two aspects: the unmoving consciousness of spirit and the moving, dynamic activity of evolutionary energy. Reality embraces both, and to be without the awareness of one or the other is to be incomplete.

Meditation enables us to see deeply into things outside meditation. Through meditation we cultivate the ability to be objective–separate from objects but keenly aware of them and thus able to intelligently and effectively function in relation to them. Meditation, then, is the most effective school for living open to us. And it manifests in the simplest of ways: a more compassionate outlook, a deeper self-understanding, an awareness of changelessness amidst change, a taste for spiritual conversation and reading, and experience of inmost peace. One man who had been practicing meditation for a while remarked to another meditator, “I can’t figure out what is happening to me. Last night for the first time in my married life I helped my wife do the dishes.”

In the practice of the japa and meditation of Om we are putting ourselves into a totally–even sublimely–different sphere of consciousness and experience from that in which so much phenomena arise. Meditation is done for the development of consciousness–truly pure and simple–whereas it is our active life that is meant for both seeing and experiencing. It is all a matter of consciousness–of consciousness that pervades our entire life–not just a “wonderful feeling” in meditation. It is the fundamental state of consciousness and mind outside of meditation that matters.

Two of the most important words in analyzing the dilemma of the human condition are Raga and Dwesha–the powerful duo that motivate virtually all human endeavor. Buddha, in common with all philosophers of India, continually refers to them, so an understanding of their import is essential to us. Unfortunately, both Hindu and Buddhist translators are prone to do just that–translate them–and thus obscure or distort their meaning. There may be exact equivalents in other languages, but NOT in English, and translators do us a real disservice by not retaining them and explaining them somewhere in the text, by a footnote, or by a glossary. Here is my preferred definition of them:

Raga: Attachment/affinity for something, implying a desire for that. This can be emotional (instinctual) or intellectual. It may range from simple liking or preference to intense desire and attraction.

Dwesha: Aversion/avoidance for something, implying a dislike for that. This can be emotional (instinctual) or intellectual. It may range from simple nonpreference to intense repulsion, antipathy and even hatred.

They are commonly referred to as “rag-dwesh”–as a duality, for they are the alternating currents or poles that keep us spinning in relativity, reaching out and pushing away, accepting and rejecting, running toward and running away from. The horror of them is that they not only alternate, spinning us around, they also mutate into one another. What we like at one time we dislike at another, and vice versa. For they, like everything else, are essentially one, a double-headed monster.

“When he has no lust [raga], no hatred [dwesha],
A man walks safely among the things of lust and hatred.
To obey the Atman
Is his peaceful joy;
Sorrow melts
Into that clear peace:
His quiet mind
Is soon established in peace.” (Bhagavad Gita 2:64,65)

Buddha lists ridding ourselves of raga and dwesha as the first step in the Holy Life. But what a gigantic step! It will not be made overnight, we may be sure, for raga and dwesha have driven us along from the moment we were plants, what to say of animals and human beings.

Read about more concepts of inner life in The Holy Life Defined.