THE MASTER ANSWERS PART 11, Mysticism, reading, forums, Numerology, Sun Signs, Divination

Posts: 5115 · Posted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 7:56 am

Q My legs will not permit me to sit in the regular posture. Is there any other way that we can sit, or is there any other proper means?

A Posture has absolutely no relationship with our meditation. This is just for health purposes. We, in India, are used to sitting without the support of any chair, or cushion, so we can just squat as I am doing now; and if you will squat like this and keep your hands here and straighten your arms, your backbone will naturally be straight. It is always essential to keep the back bone straight in meditation. Then you will not get sleepy, you will feel no discomfort, and there will be no physical trouble in the body as in an incorrect posture. (The 'squatting' referred to here means to sit cross-legged on the floor.) But if you cannot sit like this, you can make your own posture comfortable for meditation. We should not wrestle with the body; we should sit in a relaxed manner, a relaxed way. Any posture which suits your requirements and your physical fitness is all right. If you can sit like this, it is all right; but posture will not help you i your meditation in any way. It can only help your body, so that you can forget about it and do not have to be conscious of it in any way during meditation. Mentally, when you are meditating, you forget the way you are sitting. You are to become absolutely unconscious of the way you are sitting. The posture does not make any difference, whether you sit on a chair or on the floor, or lie on your back. But if you lie on your back, naturally that posture has association with sleep, so you are likely to fall asleep. And if you do not sit comfortably nor in a way which is good for your health, that is not advisable as far as the body is concerned. But in a man's spiritual development, posture does not make any difference at all. We are just to keep our attention here, between the eyebrows, inside, and by repetition and concentration, we have to forget about the posture.

Q Master, pertaining to the question of posture, what about Hatha Yoga? The positions that they advocate healthwise, would they be beneficial?

A Hatha Yoga is for health purposes. It has nothing to do with meditation. Hatha Yoga, in other words, is a set of physical exercises, just to keep the body fit for meditation, but it is not meditation in itself.

Q Yes, I realize that; but would it be advisable in certain cases?

A There is no harm in doing Hatha Yoga to keep the body fit. For example, I do some of the Hatha Yoga exercises, because I do not get time to walk or go out. So, for ten or fifteen minutes every day, I do some breathing exercises or Hatha Yoga exercises just to keep the body fit.

Q Why do the older forms of yoga require the cultivation of the lower bodily centers?

A Brother, yoga, as we take it to be today, is something different from the teachings of the saints. I should say the teachings of the saints are the real yoga. Yoga means something which unites your soul to the Lord. It really means 'union'. But some yogis, as I call them, rather than do the real yoga, try to make progress from the lower centers upwards to the eye center, and then think of going higher up. If you are in the middle of a hill and you would like to reach the top, you would not like to come back to the bottom and start from there to reach the top; you would like to make a start from the middle upward. We are all sitting here, in the eye center. This is the seat of the soul and mind knotted together. If you forget anything and you want to think about it, recall it, your hands automatically touch your forehead. So, this is the headquarters which has to do with our thinking; this is the thinking center. And the saints say that from here we should try to go up rather than first draw our attention down to the lower centers, and then again slowly take it from there to the eye center, which is already our headquarters. So, why not just concentrate here and go up with the help of the Sound?

Sant Mat, the teachings of the saints, are quite different from those of the so-called yogis, who try to come back to the lower centers instead of taking the attention up from its present headquarters. Some saints have described those centers so that the yogis may not think that the saints do not know about these centers. Swami Ji, Kabir Sahib, Guru Nanak and many others have described them; but all the same they advise us not to get entangled in these centers. We have to rise above them eventually, so why waste time in going down to them and perhaps even getting stuck there and forgetting our goal? Nothing is gained thereby. Besides, even if we do not get deceived and detained at the lower centers, which is unlikely, why take that chance and waste precious time? In this modern world, when the life span is so sort and we are so much absorbed in this world, in our struggle for existence, we shall never be able to achieve our goal if we start from the lower centers.

Q When we start withdrawing from the feet upwards, do we not in any way, at least, have to by-pass the lower centers?

A When you try to hold your consciousness at the eye center, automatically you will withdraw the attention upward, without paying any attention whatsoever to any of the centers below the eyes. Somewhere in the Bible is mentioned, "I die daily". This is what Saint Paul mystically tried to explain to us. Every saint in the East explains to us that we have to die while living. WE have to withdraw our attention from the body and bring our consciousness back to the eye center.

Then, to follow those yogic exercises is very difficult. We cannot do it in this modern age. Today we have hardly any time even to sit for meditation for an hour or two. Those yogis who performed these difficult exercises to the olden times had to go through extremely rigid disciplines to achieve all that. And after all that, they still had to start from the eye center if they wanted to go up. It is impossible for you and me to do those exercises in these days, so saints always advise us just to forget about all that and to keep our attention here, at the eye center, and go ahead. The Living Master saves us from all that danger, hardship, confusion and delay.

Q Is the pineal gland the third eye?

A Yes, that is right. But the third eye itself is not a physical part of the body. If you dissect, you will not find it.

Q Is there a center in the solar plexus as well? Through reading various philosophies I find that some of them seem to say that a center of subconscious feeling is there in the solar plexus, and the yogis talk about the solar plexus chakra?

A They start from the lowest chakra in the physical body and try to go up slowly and slowly by passing through the various chakras below. The saints have however modified the process so that we need not go through all the lower chakras of the physical body. Our thinking center in the body is the eye center, and this is the seat of the mind and the soul in our conscious state. From here we have to go up. Supposing you are in the middle of a hill and wish to reach the top. Would you like to go to the foot of the hill first and then climb upward or go straight up from where you are? You are already at the eye center. Why not go up from here rather than go down to the solar plexus and then cover the arduous journey upward.

We have just to concentrate here, at the eye center. When our thoughts are running out from this place, we have to bring them back and try to hold our thoughts at this place, keep our consciousness in this place, and from here our spiritual journey begins. So, we need not bother to go down and then again come up to the starting point.

Q If a person meditates according to the Raja Yoga method, it seems that forces could be aroused, as I have heard, by the Kundalini rising within an individual and he could find himself in certain difficulties. That is why the Raja Yoga approach is not so safe?

A Brother, I would not like to comment on any other method of meditation. But let me tell you that in modern times it is very difficult to follow these yogas, or to try to awaken the Kundalini. You cannot control it. Neither have we that health nor that energy nor that time to do these yogas in this modern age, nor are there such practical guides as can help us on that path. They are more or less a thing of the past, I would say. By raising the Kundalini within you, what you will get is power or control of the mind to perform some supernatural things; that is all, nothing else. For example, you will be able to make your body so light that you can fly, but to what purpose? You have planes to fly over thousands of miles. There is absolutely no use dabbing in these things at all. We have to do spiritual practice for spiritual advancement, for having the real bliss and real love of the Lord. That is the purpose.

With these other methods, sometimes the ego sprouts in us: " I can do this; I can do that," but with spiritual practices, we learn to 'digest' His grace, and humility comes to us. The more humble we become the more He gives us. The more we get from Him, the more we digest, and the more humble we become. But in these other practices we generally become egoistic, and this takes us far away from our destination. We have to develop our mind. We have to develop our spiritual consciousness. We have to come to that stage nearer to the Lord, so that we can merge into that Divine Will, that Divine Light, that Divine Music, and get real peace and happiness within.

Q I was referring to the type of yoga by which a person concentrates here, and my thinking has always been that if a person concentrates between the eyebrows, the Kundalini will automatically arise?

A No, with this practice we do not arouse the Kundalini at all. We are unconscious of the body. We are not conscious of any organ of the body at all when we start spiritual practice. We do not even feel that we are in a body, not to speak of arousing the Kundalni. We have a split consciousness, so we feel that our body is somebody else's body moving about or sitting -- w are the onlookers. So, this spiritual practice that I am trying to explain, this Surat Shabd Yoga as we call it, or Sant Mat, or attaching ourselves to that Divine power of Shabd or Nam, has absolutely nothing to do with the Kundalini, which is aroused at one of the lowest centers in the body, Our concentration starts above this; in fact, we start at the highest center in the body, which is the eye center.

Q Do you approve of ascetic practices as a means of purifying the body and soul? And if you do so, what kind of practice do you recommend?

A Brother, when we withdraw from the body, the body is automatically purified. It becomes sublime. There is nothing wrong with the body, it is when the mind runs to the senses that we say that the body is bad. When we withdraw the mind to the eye center, the same body becomes pure. So, we have first to make his body pure. Then we have to make our mind pure by attaching it to the Shabd or Nam inside. When it returns to its destination, its source, the mind becomes pure.

In our body, the seat of the soul and mind knotted together is in the center behind the eyes. From here our mind is being pulled down by the senses. As long as the mind is a slave of the senses, you can say that the body is impure. When you withdraw your mind from the senses, and take it back up to the eye center, you can say that the body has become pure; but still your mind is not pure because it can be drawn back to the senses again. However, when you attach your mind to that Shabd or Nam, that attachment detaches you permanently from the world, and you rmind starts going back to its own destination or home. Then the mind becomes pure.

As long as your mind is being drawn downward, towards the senses, it is your enemy. When the mind starts withdrawing from the senses and goes back to its original home, which is Trikuti, the second stage on the spiritual journey, then the mind becomes your friend. So, we have to convert this enmity to friendship, and when the mind goes back to its own source, to its own destination, then only the soul gets released from the mind. AT this stage the soul also becomes pure, as all the coverings and influences of the mind are removed. And when there is no particle left on it and it becomes absolutely pure, it shines in its own pristine glory and automatically merges back into the Lord again. So, it is by meditation, the spiritual practice, that we make our body pure, we make our mind pure and we make our soul pure.

Q Most of the events of our lives are predestined, but is the even of reaching Home the only event that is not predestined? That is, can we reach this Home whenever we put the proper effort into it?

A Brother, from that point of view, everything is destined in the sense that, when the Lord wants us to go back to Him. He creates those circumstances, that atmosphere which makes us think about Him, about the path, the way leading back to Him. Without His grace we will never come on the path or on the way of devotion; or, in other words, we will never come in contact with the saints at all without His grace. When He wants us to come back and to merge into Him, then only all these processes start; then only we come in contact with the saints; then only we start meditating. But we ourselves have to work; we have to make ourselves receptive of His grace. His will create the circumstances; He will create the atmosphere for us in which we can work our way back up to our Home. So, when He wants us to do so, then only do we work. But unless we make the effort and work, we cannot reach our destination.

Q In other words, no matter how much effort we put into it or how hard we try, if the time is not right, we will never get Home?

A Brothers, it is just like this: a beggar comes to your door to ask you for alms, but first he wants to be assured that he is going to get something from the house, before knocking at the door; otherwise, he is not going to beg. This is a wrong attitude. We are all beggars at His door. We have to beg. We have to ask, but He always gives. We should not say that when He wants us to meditate we will meditate; otherwise, why bother about it. That is a wrong approach, and definitely a wrong attitude. We are all beggars at His door, so we should all do our best and leave everything to Him. Of course, we will only get when and what He wants us to get, but we must make the effort by doing the spiritual practice. And I assure you, if we really beg from our heart, He is always ready to give. If we come one step, He comes ten steps to receive us. But our devotion must be pure; our longing, our desire to merge back into Him must be absolutely one - pointed. WE have to love Him for His sake. We do not have to worship Him for our children's sake or for the sake of business, money or worldly achievements. That is surely a wrong way to approach Him. That is a wrong attitude, or motive for meditating on Him. We want Him, we worship Him, we love Him, because we want to go back and merge into Him. In India some people worship snakes, not because they love them but because they fear their bite. We should not worship the Lord out of fear that if we do not worship Him some calamity will befall us or that He will punish us in some way. We should worship out of love. The basis of religion is not fear; it is absolutely pure love. So, we have to base all our worship and meditation on the foundation of Love. Then only shall we get the best results.

Q Master, is it necessary to be completely relaxed during meditation? How can we guard against trying to force it?

A The results that we will get will be much greater if we attend to our meditation with an absolutely relaxed mind. We should never sit in meditation with excitement that I am going to see something, something is just going to happen, something is just going to happen, something is just about to come. Then your mind is always in that excitement of expectation. You should just attend to your meditation with an absolutely relaxed mind. Whatever is to come, will come automatically. It comes when you least expect it. And when you are anticipating or when you are excited about it, it does not come at all, because then the mind is not actually concentrated, but is scattered in excitement. So, we have to attend to meditation in a completely relaxed manner. That is why it is generally advised to sit for meditation in the morning. Usually, by morning, we forget all that happened to us in the past day, and our body is also relaxed physically; besides, there is more quietness and calmness in the atmosphere. So, if we try to meditate in that relaxed atmosphere it is always better.

Q Maharaj Ji, most of the books tell us, or indicate at least, that prior to going in, the whole body becomes numb. Is that always the case, or are there cases occasionally where the person might go in and not have the feeling or sensation of numbness throughout the body?

A We may not be conscious of our body having become numb, and still we have withdrawn. We say we start withdrawing from our feet upwards, and that we call numbness. It does not exactly mean physical numbness. It is withdrawal of the attention, not being aware of the body, that kind of numbness. When our soul current is not spread through this body, outward, but is being withdrawn inward; that is numbness. Sometimes we do feel a little numbness in the body, we can be 'in' -- we can see many visions inside. But that is not within our control. However, when we have actually withdrawn, when our body has become absolutely numb, then it is in our control as to what we are seeing inside. Otherwise too, it may happen that even before our actual withdrawal, we have a glimpse or experience of spiritual vision.

What do we mean by 'inside'? When you close your eyes, you are automatically 'inside'. Holding your attention within here, between the eyebrows, that is 'inside'. There is no particular inside, where we have to see or search. When you do not think about anything in the world, then you are here, in the center behind the eyes. When your mind is not scattered and your attention is concentrated here, you are 'in', you are within yourself, you are 'inside'. Then naturally you start withdrawing upward and start seeing something inside. That is what we mean numbness.