Bhagavadgeeta : ( 26/11/2012. )

7: The Art of Meditation-4. Thus is a great dictum that is placed before us by Bhagavan Sri Krishna at the very beginning of the sixth chapter, which is going to describe to us the method of meditation. With this interesting introduction and a very important foundation of values, the practical techniques are described. Yoga is meditation finally, and meditation is a fixing of attention on consciousness. Consciousness pervades the whole body, and our consciousness, secondarily, pervades even our society. This peculiar relationship of ours with human values and things of the world creates a peculiar self outside us, which is known in Sanskrit Vedantic terminology as the gaunatman. A father regards his son as his self; he has so much love for the son that anything that happens to the son appears to happen to his own self, and the same is true in regard to many other things. So, there is a social self. Social self means the particular person or object with which the consciou...

7: The Art of Meditation-3 But the unselfishness that is indicated here, in the art of meditation, is not merely the social definition of unselfishness. Well, a person who has a desire to take care of his family—wife, children, brothers, sisters, etc.—and who does not cling very much to his own bodily individuality would be regarded as an unselfish man. And a person who has love for the whole nation rather than merely his own family, can be regarded as an unselfish man. And a person who has love for the whole of humanity and works for the good of mankind, rather than clinging to the ideals of one’s own nationality, can also be regarded as an unselfish person.  But here the word ‘unselfishness’ is used in a more profound sense, not in the social sense of unselfishness—which of course is good in its own way. There is a qualitative enhancement in the realisation of the higher Self in the movement the individual towards the family, or from the family to the nation, ...

7: The Art of Meditation : 2. What is the higher Self, we may be wondering, whose law we have to abide by and whose law we have not to contradict? The higher Self is not some different thing; it is not another person. It is a larger degree of our own personality. It is a wider dimension of what we are in our own selves. It is, to give an example, an adult in comparison with a small baby. Very crudely, in a physical sense, we may say the mature mind and consciousness of a wise adult is the higher self of the baby that knows nothing. But the higher Self here is used in a more significant manner than this analogy would indicate. It is a qualitatively more intense consciousness and a quantitatively larger dimension at the same time. We may also give an example of waking and dream, to make the matter clear. The waking consciousness may be regarded as the higher Self in comparison with the consciousness of the dream subject, which can be regarded as the lower self in comparison ...

7: The Art of Meditation : 1. Dhyana yoga, or the art of meditation, is the subject of the sixth chapter of the Bhagavadgita. The subject of the collecting of the forces of one’s personality into a centre is the great theme of this chapter. The dissipated energies of one’s individual personality, which channelise themselves through the senses in the direction of objects, are conserved and raised to a higher level of potency for the purpose of an ascent in a vertical direction, we may say, towards the realisation of the highest Self of the cosmos. So at the very beginning of the chapter we are asked to raise ourselves by our own selves—uddhared atmanatmnam. The self has to be raised by the Self, uplifted by the Self. We ourselves are to lift our own selves. The difficulty in the practice of this yoga is precisely in this interesting feature, namely, that the manipulator and that which is manipulated are one and the same. The meditator and that which is meditated upon do not s...

6: Universal Action-9. There are two types of attachments—attachment to objects and attachment to actions. Both of these are taken into consideration here. One is not to be attached to either of these—either to the object or to the action. We have the feeling that a particular object is desirable and a particular action is desirable. Now, this desirability of the object or the action arises on account of a sense of agency in oneself, doership, which is the root ill of the whole of human life. The consciousness of agency or doership is the fear of suffering, because whether it is attachment to objects or attachment to actions, it stands as an attachment, which means to say, a movement of the mind towards some external location other than the Self that is non-externalised. In this externalisation of the mind by way of attachment to objects and actions, there is an automatic reaction set up, because reaction to action is nothing but the corollary that follows from interferenc...

6: Universal Action-8. On what are you going to concentrate? People are very enthusiastic about meditation; they want to meditate, but on what? That is not clear because there are umpteen things in the world on which you can concentrate and absorb yourself. Here, in the language of yoga at least, meditation means meditation on the ultimate reality of things; not on the forms which are passing, not on the shapes of things which come and go, not on the illusory presentation of the phenomena of the world, but on that which lies as the background of phenomena. The noumenom is the object of meditation, not the phenomenon. What is this noumenom? In the language of the Bhagavadgita, the noumenom is referred to as the Atman of things. The selfhood or the being that is at the root of all things is called the Atman. The contemplation or the meditation prescribed in the sixth chapter of the Gita is on the Atman of things, as was mentioned in the earlier verse in the fifth chapter tha...

 6: Universal Action-7 Moksha-paryanah—here is another glorious message for us. You have to be yearning for liberation. Your aspiration for moksha is the masterstroke. It is the forte before you in yoga which dissolves the senses, the mind and the intellect at one stroke. As mist dissolves before the sun, the senses, the mind and the intellect dissolve, as it were, in a flow of moksha-consciousness. In this state your soul is surging forth into infinity. Your heart is yearning to attain union with the Absolute, like the calf running to the mother cow that it had lost, like a river rushing towards the ocean, not resting quiet until it reaches the ocean. As you gasp for breath when you are being drowned in water, so is the soul to surge forth to that great destination called moksha, or liberation of the spirit, in the absolute Brahman. This longing is the panacea for all ills of human life. This desire for moksha is the destruction of all desires. It is the self-consummat...

6: Universal Action-6. This equalisation of the breath between the ida and pingala by driving it into the sushumna is called the practice of kumbhaka, a stoppage of the breathing arrived at either by alternate breathing, known usually as sukha purvak pranayama, with which we are already acquainted, or by a sudden stoppage of breath which is called kevala kumbhaka—we neither breathe in nor breathe out. Various types of kumbhaka are mentioned in systems like the sutras of Patanjali, for instance. Either the breath can be held by alternate breathing, or after expulsion, or after inhalation, or suddenly. Generally, the sudden stopping is regarded as the highest type of kumbhaka, where we do not think too much about the breathing process, but hold it by a sudden attention fixed upon the object of our meditation. So, pranapanau samau krtva nasabhyantara-carinau, yatendriya-mano-buddhir. Here is the masterstroke of yoga, which rises above what I already have said. There ...

 6: Universal Action-5. Now, this is an esoteric teaching which has psycho-biological implications, with a spiritual profundity at the background. The various phases of the moon, which are fifteen in number counted through the bright half and the dark half of the lunar month, as we call it, are connected with the various plexuses in the system of the body, and the digits of the moon are regarded as representative of the digits in the psychic body, which are the plexuses or centres, called the chakras. They are not in the physical body, though they have an impact upon the corresponding centres in the physical body. According to this doctrine, the ajnachakra is the location of the blossomed intellect or the mind when it is fully awakened from the slumber of earth-consciousness and is about to wake up into the consciousness of the super-physical. This is perhaps the reason why this point is recommended as suitable for concentration, one having withdrawn the attention from th...

 6: Universal Action-4. To be united with your Self is equivalent to uniting with everything else. This is the magnificent outcome of the practice of yoga—to know your Self is to know everybody. This is a wonder indeed, that knowledge which is of the Self—Self-knowledge—is the same as world knowledge. It is equivalent to Universal knowledge. It is brahmasakshatkara. You become sarvabhutatmabhutatma. “He becomes the Self of all beings.” One who has become the Self of one’s own self has, at the same time, become the Self of all beings. To know my Self is to know you and everybody. Such a person acts not while acting, because actions cease to be actions in the case of a person who has ceased to be a person and thereby has ceased to be an agent of action, therefore evoking no consequence of action. This is Universal action; this is the great vision of karma yoga that the Bhagavadgita places before us in a concentrated verse in the fifth chapter. For this attainment, dee...

6: Universal Action-3. A self-controlled person is also a sense-controlled person, and vice versa. The one is the same as the other, but the matter is not over here. There is an establishment of the mind in pure sattva when there is the withdrawal of sense energy into the mind by way of consideration and an establishment of oneself in non-distracted attention or concentration. All concentration of sense is distracted attention, but the concentration that we attain to when the senses are withdrawn into the mind is not distracted—it is sattvica. Therefore that state is referred to as visuddhtmta. Visuddhtm vijitatma jitendriyah: We become pure in the literal sense, not only in the ethical or social sense. It is not the ethical righteousness that is spoken of here, but the purity that is of a spiritual character. The resplendence of sattvaguna, the equilibrated condition of the psyche where the Atman within gets reflected as the sun is reflected in a clean mirror, that unity o...

 6: Universal Action-2. Vijitatma  jitendriyah:  One who has restrained the senses is one who has taken one step towards the goal, risen at least one step above the earth level of object experience, object indulgence and object longing. All spiritual life is a step towards subjectivity of experience, from the externality or objectivity in which we are immersed. Yoga is only this much—a return to subjectivity from objectivity, a subjectivity which will encompass, in the end, all that we regard as the objects of sense. Towards this end the Bhagavadgita  admonishes us that we have to learn the art of restraining the senses so that we do not live an object life, and we must learn at least the first lesson, the kindergarten lesson, of returning to the subjectivity of experience which is the conditioning factor of all experiences. Jitendriyah, a control over the senses, has to be exercised to the best of one’s possibility. Such a person is called vijitatma, one...

 6: Universal Action-1. In a single verse which occurs in the fifth chapter of the Bhagavadgita, the gradual stages of the ascent of human perspective are given to us. Yoga-yukto visuddhatma vijitatma jitendriyah, sarvabhuttmabhutatma kurvann api na lipyate. Jitendriyah: ‘One who has restrained the senses.’ This is the definition of a person who has risen above the ordinary prosaic level of attachment to objects. The connection of the senses with objects is so common and apparent that we may almost be said to be living in object-consciousness, and living an object life, a fact that would be obvious. When we analyse our own minds and discover what we are contemplating, all our contemplations are of objects—of this and that and what not. The intention behind this thought of objects is a deluded notion of the senses, that they become enhanced in their dimension by the increase of pleasurable experiences. The very same chapter in the Gita gives us an insight into the f...

5: God is Our Eternal Friend-5. ( Last Part ) We are filled with doubts in our minds—we can prepare a dictionary of all our doubts—they are endless. Everywhere we have a suspicious attitude about the world, about things, about people, about ourselves, about the past, about the present, and about the future. These doubts cannot be dispelled until knowledge arises, and we know what knowledge means, an insight into which we have been given in the second chapter of the Gita. Knowledge is the knowledge of God ultimately, and as a result, knowledge of the nature of the world in its reality, as mentioned in the third chapter. This is true knowledge, and when we are awakened to this real knowledge, all doubts get dispelled. Then what happens? Atmavantam—we become truly possessed of the Self that we really are. We are people who have lost ourselves and are in pursuit of things outside. Yes, this is what has happened; we have grasped the world and lost our own selves, and we are ...

5: God is Our Eternal Friend -4. Such is the glorious message that is inherently present in the fourth chapter of the Bhagavadgita. When we are awakened to this fact, we are blessed not merely with knowledge, but also with a power that is not of this world. What are the blessings that this yoga of meditation and awakening into God-consciousness brings us? The blessings are these: equanimity of perception (samatva), dexterity in action (karmasukaushalam) and the capacity to see that which is between us and the world, that which works secretly in the midst of visible things, unknown and undiscovered. Yoga-sannyasta-karmanam jnana-sanchinna-samsayam, atma-vantam na karmani nibadhnanti dhananajaya. This is the final touchstone of the grand message of the fourth chapter. One who has renounced by yoga and dispelled all doubts by jnana and is possessed of the Self—such a person is not bound by action. This is a difficult passage, but it has a profound meaning. The renunciation t...