When a person has become used to meditating on a regular basis and the practice has become a part of your life, we reach a kind of threshold which some people don’t cross. Initially, when you begin to meditate, it’s challenging, it’s difficult just to get yourself to sit down once or twice a day to do it. Then you begin to see results. There’s more energy in your life, your mind works better, your body feels better, things appear to be brighter, you have more enthusiasm, your awareness shifts, you start to become a little bit clairvoyant, you can see inside people, see inside yourself and you just see there’s a rise of your power. Everything in your life begins to come together.
Then what happens is the practice becomes a practice. It becomes something that is a routine, and each meditation may be fulfilling and you don’t stop because if you did, you’ll notice the days are not as bright. So meditation becomes something that we have to do because the loss of it reduces our energy level. But it’s not something that we do because we are making continuous breakthroughs. It develops a kind of functional autonomy.
There was a time we didn’t meditate, and we obviously got by. Now we start to meditate and there’s a brightness and an addition, but now the reason we meditate is not because we seek a greater brightness but simply because the loss of meditation will bring us to a lifestyle, an energy level, an awareness level that we find unacceptable.
So then, once we’re meditating on a regular basis and that’s become part of our life, if not the main focal point of our life—the meditation and all that implies—the issue is how to continually make breakthroughs in meditation. How never to let meditation become just a routine in our lives, something that we have to keep because we fear the loss of it as opposed to something that is each day taking us into realities of mind, taking us into warp drive, taking us through dimensions, changes, dissolutions of the self and so on that are each day more amazing than any day before.
Now that’s realistic when you get into advanced practice. In the beginning, that’s not realistic. You can’t say, well, each meditation is going to be five times stronger than the day before, because you have not yet developed the consistency of reaching a singular level. One day you’ll do well, one day you won’t. It’s sort of like in sports, there’s amateur and professional. An amateur is someone who one day is brilliant, the next day they’re not. A professional is someone who demonstrates a consistency in brilliance. And their worst day will be about the best day of the amateur. They have their off days and their off seasons. But even when they’re bad, they’re consistently good. They’re just not amazing.
Meditation is similar to that. In the beginning you’re an amateur. This is once you’re consistent and meditate once or twice a day for an hour, hour and a half a day. You’re meditating consistently, but one day you’ll have a great meditation, and then maybe for three days it’ll just be so-so. And what I mean by that is not how you’ll feel during the period of meditation, but how you will feel after you’ve meditated. During the period of meditation, it’s not a good idea to evaluate your meditation. When you’re running, you don’t say, “Gee, this is a great run” or “This is a bad run.” You just run.
When you meditate, you just focus. And if you’re evaluating, that means you’re not doing a good meditation because you’re not focusing or dissolving, depending upon your level of ability in meditation.
So then, we’ll have one great meditation, then four or five that are just so-so. Meaning that afterwards, one day after we’ve done what we would call a great meditation, we know it’s great because everything shines. The whole world shines, everything is bright, we’re flooded with optimism, new ideas, enthusiasm, or maybe there’s just a perfect peace and stillness, a sense of self-transcendence, and it’s a day like no other day.
It’s kind of like a perfect spring day, when winter fades, and there is such a thing as a perfect spring day when the whole world is awake and alive after winter. And the breezes that blow, these just kind of gentle little breezes, when they touch your body, your body is alive in a way that normally it isn’t. There’s an energy present on certain days in spring that’s not available at other times. Each season has its special days. We call them days of power when certain energies are available in our locale or on the earth that are not available all the time.
So when we do meditate well, when we’re able to stop our thoughts for a long period of time—or if you’re not at the point where you stop thought, yet you are able to concentrate intensively on one point and you really hold to it, you really just put a lot of effort into it—then the day will be very good because you’ve released a lot of kundalini energy in that process. That energy will flow through you all day and all evening. Your personal power is up; you’ll just zig when you should zig and zag when you should zag. When your personal power level is up, you see better. So you’ll know, “Oh gosh, I’m not going to take that exit today, I’m going to take this exit,” and get a whole different day. Everything works out. The days that our personal power level is low because we haven’t done a good meditation, we don’t see well. Then we don’t meet the right person, we don’t attract the right energies to us. Things don’t work as well in life.
So the trick in life, of course, is keeping your personal power level as high as possible, and that’s what meditation does. But in the beginning, we don’t necessarily have the consistency to make that happen no matter what. You may wake up one morning and you feel kind of sick, and you can’t necessarily meditate very, very well. You may wake up one morning, and you’re just nervous or you’re depressed or something’s bothering you, and it’s just hard to bring the full power of concentration into your mind. One day you just—your thoughts won’t stop; they’re incessant. And every time you try and concentrate, you forget that you’re supposed to concentrate and you get caught up in your thoughts.
A professional is someone who is able, no matter what the state of their mind or the state of their life, to sit down, meditate, stop thought, enter into a state of deep concentration and shut the world off, bring their mind back from the senses, back from the thoughts and back from the feelings, and enter into a quiescent state. When we stop thought, when we don’t feel the senses or ignore them, when we don’t feel feelings, per se, when we shut off the emotions and the thought processes and the sensorial processes, all of our awareness is free. And then, if we don’t direct it, it directs itself. That’s when we really begin to meditate. At that point, the mind enters into deeper spheres of its own being and we start to touch the radiant spheres. And of course, there’s no way to talk about it at this point because we go beyond words into actual, occult, metaphysical, meditative, enlightening experiences.
The trick, then, to keeping your meditation practice alive—not simply consistent but wonderful—is you need to bring a certain will or force into every meditation. For the person just starting, I wouldn’t be concerned. It’s just enough to get yourself to the point where you meditate every day and then you see meditation as indispensable. That’s a good place to get to, where it’s just, it’s like breathing, when you just get up in the morning and you meditate. You can’t conceive of a day when you don’t do that because the day would just be horrible. It wouldn’t be a day; it would be a nightmare. And it’s not that you’ve become addicted to meditation, it simply means that you want to be in touch with eternity and life at every moment. It’s just an intelligent way to live.
I suppose we could say a person is addicted to food, and maybe they should give up eating for six months or a year. I don’t think we get addicted to meditation. I think we just realize that it’s an innate, natural process. To not meditate is very unnatural for a person who’s evolved.
So then, once you’re meditating every day and you see it as something that’s indispensable, it usually becomes a routine. You sit down, you focus, you go through the usual states of mind that you go through. You may have pleasant experiences. But you’re just driving down the highway at 55 [miles per hour]. You don’t even have to pay much attention to your driving. You’re fairly reflexive and usually nothing unusual occurs, so you just kind of drive. You get to where you’re going, but it’s not remarkable. That’s not meditation. That’s just a boring state of mind. But a lot of people call it meditation.
Or you have a certain power of concentration, you do increase your energy levels so you have more energy during the day, but there’s no white light, there’s no ecstasy, there’s no smile on your face that’s so big while you’re meditating that it hurts after a while. There’s no sense of brilliance, the world flooding into a thousand lights, your mind cascading through a billion dimensions and then going completely clear and entering back into the qualityless state—that’s a hard word to say, “qualityless.” That’d be a good tongue twister.
And—so you’re not meditating. If it’s not ecstasy, you’re not meditating. I don’t know what you’re doing. Ecstasy comes in many forms, in many shapes and colorations. But you’re not meditating if you’re not experiencing ecstasy. You may be learning how to meditate but once you’re meditating, once you’re a meditator—one who meditates daily and who sees it as indispensable, as part of their life—you should be experiencing ecstasy every time you meditate. Not necessarily during the meditation—maybe at the end, maybe afterwards. But you can’t be satisfied with anything less.
You concentrate so intensely, you bring your will to such a singular point that you break through all the limited mind states. You bring in so much kundalini because your focus is so intense that you snap out of the limited mental states into higher mental states, and then, of course, you experience the pure, shining void in whatever form you’re capable of experiencing it and seeing it as, from your sentient mind state, and that in itself is ecstasy.
In other words, the universe is ecstasy. Now that doesn’t mean much; that’s just a phrase. What does it mean, “the universe is ecstasy”? I mean, you experience the universe and you do not necessarily experience ecstasy. How could plants, trees, stars, quasars, black holes—what does that have to do with ecstasy? Ecstasy is a personal experience. Those are—the universe is filled with things. Not true! That’s how the universe appears through the senses.
But if you rise above the sense level, if you don’t view life just through the senses, if you view life through the emotions, then the universe is made up of feelings. If you view the universe through the mind, it’s made up of understandings. If you go beyond the mind that thinks and analyzes and understands, if you go beyond the senses that see, smell, feel, touch and hear, if you go beyond the feelings of pleasant, unpleasant, love, hate, I like it, I don’t like it, attraction and repulsion—there are other levels of perception within us.
Meditation is a process by which we go beyond the senses, the mind and the feelings, and we engage the other levels of perception, other forms of perception. It’s like sense perception, or mental or emotional perception. We have many other ways of perceiving infinity. But most people, of course, are completely unaware of them. And when you perceive life through those other modes, that’s when you see that the universe is ecstasy. That’s when you experience its ecstasy.
There is physical ecstasy, something sensorial. A great food or a great lay, or whatever it is. There is emotional ecstasy, the feeling of oneness, of love, of kindness, euphoria, joy. There are feelings of mental ecstasy where we just understand something, we just grasp something, we intuit something—a higher beauty, an intelligent understanding of life, of ourselves or of a project.
There is ecstasy in the body a little bit, in the mind a little bit and in the emotions a little bit. But there is also pain in the emotions—unhappiness, depression, disillusionment. There’s pain in the mind, in the thoughts; there’s a lot of pain, discouragement, confusion. There’s pain in the body, physical pain. But in the other modalities for perceiving infinity, there’s no pain. There’s only ecstasy. And the mere fact that most human beings—out of the five billion people that are currently extant on the planet Earth, maybe several hundred, maybe several dozen, maybe a dozen, experience life in its true pure state—maybe a dozen. Maybe there are several dozen who experience it on and off in its pure state. Maybe there are several hundred who touch the pure state once a day. Maybe there are several thousand who touch it once a week, and then the rest only have heard about it or don’t even know it exists. Or don’t believe it if they hear it.
Maybe there are just a dozen people who live in the pure state all the time, a dozen fully enlightened people on the planet Earth. Maybe that’s all. But because there are only a dozen, doesn’t mean, because the number is few, that their perception isn’t much more correct than the billions who don’t perceive that way. There were very few men who framed the Constitution of the United States. A lot of people couldn’t read and write back then. More couldn’t read and write than could. Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Jefferson, these people—there were very few well-educated people—they put together a Constitution which has created a framework for millions. Just because they were a minority doesn’t mean that they didn’t see much more clearly than anyone else.
So there are very few people who are actually enlightened, who live in the higher spheres, in this particular world. There are worlds where everyone is enlightened, where everyone is in touch with that qualityless essence of existence, mind perceiving itself without coloration, and that’s normal and natural. In this world it’s normal and natural that most people perceive life through the three primary bands of attention. And when someone perceives life through the senses, that’s a correct form of perception. It’s not incorrect; it’s just limited, limited to the senses. When someone perceives life through the emotions or through the mind, they’re not perceiving life poorly. But let’s say you’re looking at life through a glass darkly. You don’t see much through the senses, you don’t see much through the emotions and you don’t see much through the mind. They’re very distorted levels of perception—distorted in that they don’t show you the whole picture. They show you only a fragment. But the illusion is that when you see life through those three modes, you see life completely.
When you go beyond those three modes into the other levels of attention, perceiving life through other aspects of what we would generally call mind, you realize that all your life you’ve lived in a tiny village, maybe three tiny villages. And you would visit them. But there was a vast world with continents, oceans, mountains, things you never knew about, cities, that were outside of that. And it’s only when you leave your three-village area that you go and see the universe. It’s fun to live in a three-village area. I like it. But sometimes you need to leave to get a proper perspective, and there’s pain there, and suffering, but there’s no pain and suffering beyond the senses and the mind and the emotions. There’s only ecstasy in variant shapes and forms.
So then, we would say that your meditation is quite excellent when you are able to, each time you meditate, go beyond the senses, the emotions and the thoughts. Not into a sleeplike state where you’re just kind of unaware, but into states of complete awareness where you’re perceiving life in other modalities, other than the three I’ve alluded to.
The way you do that, the way you become consistent, I think personally, is unexplainable. I mean, it can be explained but I don’t think the explanation will change anything. I can say that, “Well, when you’ve suffered enough, and you see that the mind is wonderful and the senses are wonderful and the emotions are wonderful, but yet you’ve had enough suffering in them and you realize that they can never fulfill you completely and you seek that—then you’ll go beyond them.” Sure, I can say that, and it’s true. But it doesn’t really explain anything. I don’t think you can explain life. It just is.
So if a person were to say to me, “Rama, how can I become consistent? I mean, I meditate every day, but I want that ecstasy level, that deep understanding of life, the dissolution of the selves, and you know, all the things that happen in the upper gradients.” In other words, 99 percent of meditation occurs in the upper gradients, one percent is just getting started and getting above those three things and that may occupy a few years of a person’s time, but real meditation occurs beyond thought, beyond emotion and beyond sensorial perception. So how do you get up there, how do you do that? Well, I would say, “What really has to occur is a kind of magic. It can’t be explained. I can explain why or why not, but that won’t make you do it. Sometimes your life just puts your back against the wall and you’ve experienced so much unpleasantness in those three realms that it drives you further. That may happen.”
You can explain that to someone but if that circumstance comes along, it’ll happen; if not, it won’t. The closest I can come to saying this is—meditate. Meditate and realize that when you meditate, no matter how high you go, no matter how deeply you perceive, that you’re only touching the bare surface of infinity. Just hold in mind the fact that beyond your perception is ecstasy. Not far beyond. Just with the stoppage of thought there’s ecstasy—power, understanding, in limitless amounts. And no matter how far you go, you can never experience all of it. And if you dissolve the self completely, it doesn’t end. The self is just a filter that prevents us from seeing completely. It has its place. Sometimes we need that filter, but sometimes we don’t.
So I would simply say—meditate. Sit and meditate as deeply as you can. But when you meditate, don’t get so caught up in doing it that it’s kind of like the vitamin pill you take every day. You take it just because you assume it’s doing a good thing, and maybe you didn’t take it for a week and you noticed your energy was low, so you went back to it. That’s not meditation. Meditation is about ecstasy. It’s about the understanding of truth. It’s about us changing ourselves and making ourselves God-like. Our mind melds with the mind of infinity and we become infinity. And we become perfect by virtue of the fact that the universe is perfect in its nonphysical aspect. It’s perfect in its physical aspect, but it’s transient, it changes. But the light itself is perfect.
So I would just say meditate on the light and merge with it. And always remember that you’re only touching the surface of infinity. That it goes on forever, and that you have before you limitless ecstasy. Even the sage who’s going into samadhi, and he’s got all his terminology for nirvikalpa, salvakalpa, sahaja—you know, they divide it into a system, and maybe some of that’s true. Maybe you can systematize a little of it. But even the sage who’s doing sahaja samadhi, the great guru, I’d say, “Hey buddy, you know, I like the robes and everything, but remember, you’re only touching infinity. And if you claim to be doing more, I think you’re pretty much in the senses and the body and the mind, because infinity is endless. None of us can compromise it or understand it.”
But we can swim in it. It’s like the ocean. You can go swim in that ocean. That ocean is big. It connects to other oceans and it changes all the time. And there are tides and currents, and even the very water that’s before you today will be someplace else in the world tomorrow, and there’ll be different water in your section of the ocean. And it’s deep! The mountains under the ocean are higher than the Himalayas. But we don’t even see them. There are many worlds there.
So when we meditate, we’re going swimming in the ocean—the ocean of bliss, the ocean of ecstasy, the ocean of transmutation and personal refinement. Just remember that it’s big and that every part of it is perfect and it’s fulfilling beyond imagination. And if you do that, I think you’ll find that you will be more likely to touch more of it, just with that simple understanding.