Lesson 73 – Dancing with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

What Are Special Duties of the Wife?

ŚLOKA 73
It is the wife’s duty, her strī dharma, to bear, nurse and raise the children. She is the able homemaker, standing beside her husband as the mother and educator of their children and the home’s silent leader, gṛihiṇī. Aum.

BHĀSHYA
The biological differences between man and woman are part of their human dharma. The two together constitute a whole. They are equal partners in joy and sorrow, companions and helpmates, yet their functions differ. The Hindu home and family is the fortress of the Sanātana Dharma, which the wife and mother is duty-bound to maintain and thus to perpetuate the faith and create fine citizens. As long as the husband is capable of supporting the family, a woman should not leave the home to work in the world, though she may earn through home industry. The spiritual and emotional loss suffered by the children and the bad karma accrued from having a wife and mother work outside the home is never offset by the financial gain. The woman’s more intuitive and emotional qualities of femininity, gentleness, modesty, kindness and compassion are needed for the children’s proper care and development. The Vedas encourage, “May happiness await you with your children! Watch over this house as mistress of the home. Unite yourself wholly with your husband. Thus authority in speech till old age will be yours.” Aum Namaḥ Śivāya.

Lesson 73 – Living with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

Choosing Your Mental Diet

Have you ever given thought to the diet of your mind? Of course, our physical diet and our emotional diet are also diets of the mind, because they affect our consciousness. But let’s now consider the intellectual processes. How much information, how many facts is it necessary and healthy for us to ingest in a single day? It’s a good idea for a devotee to budget his reading, to choose and discriminate what he wants to make a part of himself through the process of mental digestion. We have to discriminate to the nth degree whether or not we will have the time and the capacity to digest everything that we desire to place in our minds. For instance, quickly reading an article in a newspaper might stir your mind and emotions. If it is not properly digested, it could conceivably upset your whole day. In the realm of intellect, the commonsense rule “Don’t eat when you are already full” also applies.

You may read a book of philosophy, and if you have time to digest it, well and good, but many people don’t and suffer from philosophical indigestion. They have read so many things and only digested a small part of what has passed through the window of the mind. Then again, it is one thing to digest something, and it is still another to assimilate it and make it a part of you, for when it becomes fully a part of you, you have a hunger and room for something more.

Many people come to lectures and then tune themselves out and simply benefit from the vibration created by the teacher and others in the room. They tune themselves out so that what is said is not absorbed consciously, but rather subconsciously. This is a good method for those who are still digesting material received from previous lectures. Another practice that makes for a very good mental indigestion pill is that of opening a spiritual book and allowing your eye to fall upon a random sentence on the page. Often you will find it will accent ideas that you are currently concerned with.

Just as you would participate in a seminar, gaining from the interpersonal relationships, so can you learn from the intrapersonal relationship established between your perceptive state of mind and the conscious and subconscious states of mind. When you awaken to the point where your inner mind teaches your personality, you are involving yourself in the “innerversity” of your own being. But this will not occur until you have balanced your physical and emotional bodies to the point where they are functioning at a slightly higher rate of vibration.

Add to your contemplative lifestyle a hobby or craft. Working creatively with your hands, taking physical substance and turning it into something different, new and beautiful is important in remolding the subconscious mind. It is also symbolic. You are remolding something on the physical plane and by doing so educating yourself in the process of changing the appearance of a physical structure, thus making it easier to change the more subtle mental and emotional structures within your own subconscious mind. Energy, willpower and concentrated awareness are needed for both types of accomplishments—hard work, concentration and concerted effort to produce an effective and useful change in either the physical substance or the mental substance.

NANDINATHA SŪTRA 73: LIVING IN TRADITIONAL SURROUNDINGS
Śiva’s devotees, in their homes, endeavor to surround themselves with Śaiva images, music and song. In the world they may enjoy the arts of other cultures but strictly avoid lower-world artistic expressions. Aum.

Lesson 73 – Merging with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

Drawing on the Higher Energies

An affirmation can alter your life by creating mentally the patterns and moods of each day through which you will subsequently move. Here is one that can be used to dynamically begin each day. “I am now open to a flow of spiritual energy in which I perceive the most worthy course of action for this day. My service, being selfless, opens new doors of supply, making available all of the tools required so that my work will be beautiful, energetic and influential to the highest degree.” The subconscious mind is like a piece of clay that can be impressed. These impressions go into the subconscious from the conscious mind and remain there vibrating until changed. The intuitive mind, which we call the super­con­scious, works through the subconscious when the channels of the subconscious are open. Hence, in impressing the subconscious mind, we must be very careful to create positive channels, and not to create a negative block. You can also write your own affirmation, but it must always be positive and carefully worded.

The power of thought is very strong, but only strong for a short time. It is the power of feeling that awakens the knowing consciousness. For example, suppose we repeat an affirmation such as this: “All my needs will always be met.” And we repeat it again, “All my needs will always be met.” In the initial stating of this affirmation, we understand something about it. However, unless we gain a conscious mental picture of what the words mean, they mean little more than nothing, for they do not reach deep enough to make contact with the limitless powers of your inner self.

Get into the rhythm of the affirmation. This causes strong feelings and impressions deep in the inner mind. Each word has a certain rate of vibration. Feeling is greater than visualization.

Lesson 72 – Dancing with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

What Are the Duties of the Husband?

ŚLOKA 72
It is the husband’s duty, his purusha dharma, to protect and provide for his wife and children. He, as head of the family, gṛiheśvara, is responsible for its spiritual, economic, physical, mental and emotional security. Aum.

BHĀSHYA
By their physical, mental and emotional differences, the man is suited to work in the world and the woman to bear and raise their children in the home. The husband is, first, an equal participant in the procreation and upbringing of the future generation. Second, he is the generator of economic resources necessary for society and the immediate family. The husband must be caring, understanding, masculine, loving, affectionate, and an unselfish provider, to the best of his ability and through honest means. He is well equipped physically and mentally for the stress and demands placed upon him. When he performs his dharma well, the family is materially and emotionally secure. Still, he is not restricted from participation in household chores, remembering that the home is the wife’s domain and she is its mistress. The Vedas implore, “Through this oblation, which invokes prosperity, may this bridegroom flourish anew; may he, with his manly energies, flourish the wife they have brought to him. May he excel in strength, excel in royalty! May this couple be inexhaustible in wealth that bestows luster a thousand fold!” Aum Namaḥ Śivāya.

Lesson 72 – Living with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

Moderation Is The Keynote

I call our diet “nutrition for meditation.” We watch what we eat. Each type of food taken into the body tends to make us aware in one or another area of the nerve system. When we eat gross food, we become aware in the gross area of the nerve system, and less aware in the refined area of the nerve system. When we eat refined foods, such as fruit and vegetables that grow above the ground and absorb sunlight, this then makes us aware in the refined areas of the nerve system. When we are aware in the gross areas of the nerve system, over time the cells of the physical body begin to reflect this and cause the body to become gross in appearance. When we are aware in the refined areas of the inner nerve system predominantly—the psychic nerve system, the superconscious nerve system—the cells of the body also respond and we begin to look more refined. Therefore, āyurvedic nutrition for meditation and the practice of haṭha yoga āsanas are an aid in refining the physical body by allowing awareness to travel through the perceptive areas of the nerve system that are inner, refined and blissful.

However, we do not want to put too much emphasis on the consciousness of food, lest our entire nature become wrapped up in our stomach, and our subconscious and its astral body constantly involved in eating. To allow this would not only be detrimental to our own diet, but it would be an unnecessary disturbance as well to those about us, since we would be held in a strange emotional mold.

In deciding what foods you will buy and eat, listen to the voice of your intuition, which knows best what your current physical body needs are. It is possible that your forces might become too sattvic, too delicately refined, for the kind of activity and responsibilities you are engaged in. If this is the case, perhaps you should have a little rajasic food for balance. Likewise, you may become overstimulated from time to time through eating spicy foods, or foods with too high a concentration of sugar. In this case, you may need more fruits in your diet to raise the vibratory rate of your physical and astral bodies. Should your inner consciousness tell you that you are too rajasic, refrain from eating tamasic foods, those with lower rates of vibration. Eat more of the foods that grow naturally above the ground.

Of course, we have an emotional diet as well. Emotion is a condition or color of the mind. Emotions will always be with us as long as we have a physical body, but there is a difference between having emotion and being emotional. We have to balance our emotional activity. Our entertainment, our cultural pursuits, our social activities should be balanced and blended with everything else that we are doing. It would be a good idea to plan an entire month’s emotional diet along with your physical diet. Decide ahead of time what music you wish to hear, what plays, movies or concerts to attend. Think of your reading, the people you plan to be with, the traveling that may be involved. Make a list of those things which you conceive to be beneficial to your emotional diet, but proceed along the middle path, not too much to one side, not too much to the other. Look for a balanced emotional color in your life.

NANDINATHA SŪTRA 72: ACCEPTING PRAISE AND BLAME
It is well known that all Śiva’s devotees can absorb any amount of praise. But those who can withstand mental, emotional persecution, even physical torment, with the same infinite capacity are Śiva’s truest devotees. Aum.

Lesson 72 – Merging with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

Reprogramming Old Patterns

Here is another positive affirmation that might be helpful for you: “I am the complete master of all my forces. My spiritual energies govern and control the force fields wherever I am for the highest good. Through understanding, being pure, full of spirited life, I am filled and thrilled with unlimited power, now and forever. I will be what I will to be. I will do what I will to do.” Affirm this affirmation each day this week for seven days. Repeat it three times each morning, three times at noon and three times each evening.

You have perhaps often heard friends repeat the same complaint over and over again. They were not only making an affirmation, perhaps unknowingly, for their own subconscious mind, but for yours as well. Therefore, it behooves us always to be with positive people, spiritual, life-giving people, in order to be positive ourselves. It behooves us to listen to that with which we want to live, and to be the changer rather than the changed. The affirmations which violence sets up in the subconscious reactionary habit patterns in the minds of men cause them to fight and kill by spinning emotional force fields out of control. Fear then holds them in these brackets of mind as they react to what they have done. It takes great courage to go from one force field of the mind to another, for this means tearing up long-accustomed patterns and facing a period of adjustment while new subconscious patterns are created. It all has to do with changing the subconscious patterns. This is a power. You can change the patterns of your mind yourself. Try it. It is not too difficult.

Each day we make affirmations with our thoughts and our feelings—and the very words that we speak stabilize these patterns. But as the inner light begins to dawn its life-giving rays, a new, positive power comes into our words, our thoughts and the feelings that well up from the subconscious, making new manifest patterns in the force fields of the conscious world for us to meet and speedily experience.

Lesson 71 – Dancing with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

What Is the Central Purpose of Marriage?

ŚLOKA 71
The two purposes of marriage are: the mutual support, both spiritual and material, of man and wife; and bringing children into the world. Marriage is a religious sacrament, a human contract and a civil institution. Aum.

BHĀSHYA
Through marriage, a man and a woman each fulfill their dharma, becoming physically, emotionally and spiritually complete. He needs her tenderness, companionship and encouragement, while she needs his strength, love and understanding. Their union results in the birth of children and the perpetuation of the human race. Marriage is a three-fold state: it is a sacrament, a contract and an institution. As a sacrament, it is a spiritual union in which man and woman utter certain vows one to another and thus bind themselves together for life and for their souls’ mutual benefit. As a contract, it is a personal agreement to live together as husband and wife, he to provide shelter, protection, sustenance, and she to care for the home and bear and nurture their children. As an institution, marriage is the lawful custom in society, bringing stability to the family and the social order. Marriage is a jīvayajña, a sacrifice of each small self to the greater good of the family and society. The Vedas exclaim, “I am he, you are she, I am song, you are verse, I am Heaven, you are Earth. We two shall here together dwell, becoming parents of children.” Aum Namaḥ Śivāya.

Lesson 71 – Living with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

Examining Your Total Diet

Each day that we live, we are striving for the middle path, the balanced life, the existence which finds its strength beyond joy and sorrow, beyond pleasure and pain, beyond light and darkness. But in order to arrive at this state of contemplative awareness, we must begin at the beginning, and this week our study is diet: physical, mental and emotional foods. According to the ancient science of āyurveda, nature is a primordial force of life composed in three modes, qualities or principles of manifestation called guṇas, meaning “strands” or “qualities.” The three guṇas are: sattva, “beingness;” rajas, “dynamism;” and tamas, “darkness.” Sattva is tranquil energy, rajas is active energy and tamas is energy that is inert. The nature of sattva is quiescent, rarefied, translucent, pervasive. The nature of rajas is movement, action, emotion. The nature of tamas is inertia, denseness, contraction, resistance and dissolution. The tamasic tendency is descending, odic and instinctive. The rajasic tendency is expanding, actinodic, intellectual. The sattvic tendency is ascending, actinic, superconscious. The three guṇas are not separate entities, but varied dimensions or frequencies of the single, essential life force.

The food we eat has one or more of these qualities of energy and affects our mind, body and emotions accordingly. Hence, what we eat is important. Sattvic food is especially good for a contemplative life.

Tamasic foods include heavy meats, and foods that are spoiled, treated, processed or refined to the point where the natural values are no longer present. Tamasic foods make the mind dull; they tend to build up the basic odic energies of the body and the instinctive subconscious mind. Tamasic foods also imbue the astral body with heavy, odic force.

Rajasic foods include hot or spicy foods, spices and stimulants. These increase the odic heat of the physical and astral bodies and stimulate physical and mental activity. Sattvic foods include whole grains and legumes and fresh fruits and vegetables that grow above the ground. These foods help refine the astral and physical bodies, allowing the actinic, superconscious flow to permeate and invigorate the entire being.

People who are unfolding on the yoga path manifest the sattvic nature. Their path is one of peace and serenity. The rajasic nature is restless and manifests itself in physical and intellectual activities. It is predominant in the spirit of nationalism, sports and business competition, law enforcement and armed forces and other forms of aggressive activity. The tamasic nature is dull, fearful and heavy. It is the instinctive mind in its negative state and leads to laziness, habitual living, physical and mental inertia. As it is by cultivating the rajasic nature that tamas is overcome, so it is by evolving into the pure sattvic nature that the continual ramification of rajas is transcended. It is important to maintain a balance of our several natures, but to attain toward the expression of the rajasic and sattvic natures in as great a degree as possible.

As you examine a menu closely, you will find that you may allow your inner guidance to tell you what is most appropriate to eat. The desire body of the conscious mind may want one type of food, but the inner body of the subsuperconscious may realize another is better for you. It is up to you to make the decision that will allow a creative balance in your diet. This awakens the inner willpower, that strength from within that gives the capacity for discrimination.

NANDINATHA SŪTRA 71: SEXUAL FAITHFULNESS
Devout Hindus observe the eightfold celibacy toward everyone but their spouse, renouncing sexual fantasy, glorification, flirtation, lustful glances, secret love talk, amorous longing, rendezvous and intercourse. Aum.

Lesson 71 – Merging with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s cloned voice

Affirmation Is a Power

The power of affirmation changes and remolds the putty-like substance that makes up the subconscious areas of the mind. For years we have repeated sayings and statements, attached meaning to them in our thoughts and through listening to ourselves speak. This has helped form our life as we know it today, for the subconscious brings into manifestation the impressions we put into it. Therefore, to change the subconscious pattern and increase the spinning velocity of it, we must remold with new ideas and new concepts its magnetic forces. This can be done through the power of affirmation.

Affirmation, when used in wisdom for spiritual reasons, is a power, and should be understood through meditation. Before beginning to work with an affirmation, we must understand completely from within what we are doing, being sure that when our subconscious has been remolded we can take the added responsibilities, the new adventures and challenges that will manifest as a result of breaking out of one force field and entering into another. Only when we face and accept fully the new effects of our effort should we proceed with an affirmation. First we must understand the nature of this power.

An affirmation is a series of positive words repeated time and time again in line with a visual concept. Such a statement can be repeated mentally or, preferably, verbally. Words in themselves, without a pictorial understanding, make a very poor affirmation. To choose the affirmation best suited to our needs, first we must realize what we do not want, and then we must take steps to change it, in the very same way we would discriminate in giving away or throwing away our possessions in order to purchase new ones. Whether one is dealing with home and possessions, thoughts and concepts, self-created inhibitions or blocks and barriers of the subconscious, the principle is basically the same. If one feels, “I can’t,” he cannot. If he is always criticizing himself and lamenting over what he cannot do, then he has to reverse this pattern and change the flow of magnetic mental force, enliven its intensity by saying orally and feeling through all the pores of his body, “I can. I will. I am able to accomplish what I plan.”

In applying this tantra, begin by repeating the affirmation fifty or a hundred times a day. In watching your reactions, you may find that the subconscious will not accept these three statements, “I can. I will. I am able.” You may still have feelings of “I can’t. I won’t. I am not able.” This then begins a period to live through where the mind’s magnetic forces fight with one another, in a sense. The aggressive forces of your nature are trying to take over and reprogram the passive ones that have been in charge for so many years. Of course, the aggressive forces will win if you will persist with your verbal and visual affirmation. You must not give up saying, “I can. I will. I am able,” until you find the subconscious structure actually creating situations for you in which you can and are able to be successful, happy and acquire what you need, be it temporal goods or un­fold­ment on the inner path.

Lesson 70 – Dancing with Śiva

Posted on by Himalayan Academy
Recording: Gurudeva’s real voice

How Can Peace on Earth Be Achieved?

ŚLOKA 70
Peace is a reflection of spiritual consciousness. It begins within each person, and extends to the home, neighborhood, nation and beyond. It comes when the higher nature takes charge of the lower nature. Aum Namaḥ Śivāya.

BHĀSHYA
Until we have peace in our own heart, we can’t hope for peace in the world. Peace is the natural state of the mind. It is there, inside, to be discovered in meditation, maintained through self-control, and then radiated out to others. The best way to promote peace is to teach families to be peaceful within their own homes by settling all conflicts quickly. At a national and international level, we will enjoy more peace as we become more tolerant. Religious leaders can help by teaching their congregations how to live in a world of differences without feeling threatened, without forcing their ways or will on others. World bodies can make laws which deplore and work to prevent crimes of violence. It is only when the higher-nature people are in charge that peace will truly come. There is no other way, because the problems of conflict reside within the low-minded group who only know retaliation as a way of life. The Vedas beseech, “Peace be to the Earth and to airy spaces! Peace be to heaven, peace to the waters, peace to the plants and peace to the trees! May all the Gods grant to me peace! By this invocation of peace may peace be diffused!” Aum Namaḥ Śivāya.