Nifmasi, niimf, liunasi. Posture for meditation. Feeling the life force. Four step process. The nadis, the aura, the seven chakras. Effecting a permanent transformation of the entire being.

Unedited Transcript:

Good morning everyone. Looking this morning at our June Mamsani. For those who don't know a mamsani is a simple form of a meditation in the Shum language. We have twelve of them. One for each month.

Shum words are nifmasi, niimf, liunasi. So, fortunately, Gurudeva explains them, those who don't know them.

"Nifmasi liunasi is the sixth mamsani of the year. Nifmasi is a portrait of the sixth dimension and the meaning has to be experienced to be known. It means that the inner body of the soul is alive and conscious in the physical body and to some degree is taking over the elements of the physical body because you have put the physical body into a certain position. Nifmasi also names this position, this sixth-dimensional position of the body where you can feel the power of the soul, the body of the superconscious that we study about to intently in The Master Course. The nifmasi position is sitting with your right foot on your left thigh -- you put that leg up first, and then you put your left foot on the right thigh. Your hands are placed in your lap, the right hand resting on the left, palms up, tips of the thumbs touching softly. The spine is, of course, straight, and the head is balanced at the top of the spine.

"Sometimes in the practice of nifmasi, great pain is experienced in the joints, muscles and ligaments. It is recommended, within the realms of wisdom, to experience some of this pain, because the inner elements are adjusting the outer elements of the body, and you are working out deep subconscious areas that may have been accumulating within you for many, many lives. This is a very important position and should be worked at until you can sit comfortably in nifmasi and feel the power of the soul for a half an hour or an hour or more without moving. So, work diligently with this posture while meditating upon this mamsani.

"Sitting in nifmasi makes it easy to come into the next area, which is named by the fourth-dimensional portrait liunasi. Liunasi refers to feeling the nerve currents of the body. There are thousands of miles of nerve currents in each of us. Don't try to feel them all at once. Start with the little ones, with the feelings of the hands, thumbs touching. Now feel the life force going through these nerves, energizing the body. Try to sense the even more subtle nerves that extend out around the body about three or four feet. This may take a long time. When you have located some of these nerves, feel the energy within them. Tune into the currents of life force as they flow through these nerves. This is a subtle feeling, and most likely awareness will wander into some other area of the mind. When this happens, gently bring it back to your point of concentration, to feeling the nerves within the body and the energy within the nerves. This mamsani, then, tells us that if we sit in nifmasi, we bring the power of the soul into prominence in the physical body and allow awareness to flow quite naturally into the liunasi area. The flowing line between nifmasi and liunasi means awareness traveling from one area of mind to another, and its name is niimf."

So, that's Gurudeva's explanation. So, he has two key ideas. The first is the importance of the posture chosen for meditation. So, Gurudeva of course, favors the lotus posture -- padmasana, the Sanskrit word, lotus posture is the English word -- as the ideal posture for meditation. Another option he mentions elsewhere is the half-lotus posture and part of the idea he presents is to not move during meditation. So, of course, we're breathing, right? So, some movement is needed but that's a very small movement. So, means no significant movement should be done during meditation as every time we have a significant movement we're starting over, to one degree or another, from the beginning of the meditation.

So, when it comes to feeling the life force, that's the second idea. And if you've noticed , you may not have noticed it if it's the first time you heard that, Gurudeva gives a very specific four step specific process moving from grosser to more subtle forms of liunasi. This is typical in the way Gurudeva explains a meditation, it's very step by step by step going from something that's grosser to something more subtle, to something more subtle, to something more subtle in a very methodical way. That's the way he's written up these Shum meditations.

So, what's the first step? Locate the nerves within the hands. So, those are the physical nerves. We want to feel the nerves within our hands. We don't want to think about them, we want to feel them. The whole idea of Shum is to feel or experience something, not to think about it. We're trying to feel the nerves in the hands.

After we've done that, the second stage is to feel the life force going through these nerves. energizing the body. So there's energy going through the nerves. So, we try and feel the energy which is more subtle than the nerves.

Third we try to sense the even more subtle nerves that extend out and around the body about three or four feet. So of course, these aren't physical. No physical nerves out there. These are subtle. They do exist, flowing out from the body. And then, we try and feel the energy flowing through them, once we've found them.

So it's a four step process. The physical nerve, the energy flowing through the physical nerve, the subtle nerves going out from the body and the energy flowing through them.

So Gurudeva describes this in his definition. He says: "Strive to locate the basic instinctive energy flow within your body (meaning physical body) and subtle bodies (meaning not physical) in the portrait liunasi."

So. as I mentioned. Shum is systematic in experiencing something gross and then something more subtle, more subtle. So, the whole idea of liunasi, experiencing the energy in the nervous system -- physical and subtle -- is it prepares us to experience the more subtle energy, the spiritual energies in the spine which are called simshumbisi. And that's in the preparation for meditation. That's where we go from liunasi and then into simshumbisi. So, we're going from something that's a little grosser to something more subtle. One has prepared us for the other.

So there's a Sanskrit term that's used for. It's nadi -- n-a-d-i -- and it refers to all this nonphysical part that we're talking about both liunasi and simshumbisi. The nonphysical nerves experienced in liunasi and simshumbisi are all called nadis in Sanskrit. Looking up on the web to see what I can find and I almost printed it out for everyone, it was such a great picture. At goggle images if you look up nadis they have a beautiful picture of a yogi sitting there with all these nadis within and outside of him. Gives a good idea of how many there are, thousands of them.

So, our lexicon defines nadi, it's, the literal meaning is conduit or river. And the definition is: "A nerve fiber or energy channel of the subtle inner bodies of man." So, it's what energy flows through. It is said there are 72,000 nadis. These interconnect the chakras. The three main nadis are ida, pingala and sushumna. These three main ones along with eleven other prominent nadis comprise the fourteen nadis of simshumbisi. Gurudeva describes simshumbisi as the area of fourteen strong psychic nerve currents of the subsuperconscious state of mind running along the spinal column.

So, the whole network is called nadis but there's three that are the main ones. They're not dealt with in this meditation but in others coming up. Ida, pingala and sushumna are the Sanskrit names. So, those are the three main ones and they along with eleven others, fourteen in total, run through the spine and comprise simshumbisi. Fourteen nerve currents.

There's another perspective Gurudeva gives, it's helpful in understanding nadis. It's in Merging with Siva as part of the concept of the seven aspects of man. He states: "Man, as the mystics understand him, is the immortal soul surrounded by seven aspects. Here follows a summary of the seven aspects of man established around the actinic causal body of the soul, anandamaya kosa, sheath of bliss."

So, the idea is: We're the soul, the anadamaya kosa, and then around that there are seven progressively grosser aspects of ourselves. So, we're not going through all seven, just the ones to get us past the nadis. So, the seventh, the most subtle aspect, is the intuitive mind, actinodic causal sheath, vijnamayakosa or sheath of cognition. That's the seventh. The sixth is what we're talking about is the subtle nerve system, nadis and chakras. The fifth is the intellect, odic causal sheath. So, you can see the nadis and the chakras are pretty subtle is the point. They're up in that realm between actinodic causal sheath and the odic causal sheath.

There's another description which is helpful of the nadis relating them to the aura. So the aura is an area both within and surrounding us that's filled with lots of colors. And it, the one that's outside of us reflects our current state of mind. The one inside of us reflects conditions from the past. So, both of those are permeated with the nadis.

Gurudeva says: "Within the aura are psychic nerve currents called nadis. It is through these nadis that you feel someone standing next to you without turning your head to look at him. Also, by standing next to a person, two or three feet away, you can feel how he is feeling. Feelings are transferable, for feelings are vibrations which can be felt through the subtle nerve system. You feel them with these astral nadis that extend out from the body into and through the aura. Oftentimes you may identify with the feelings that you pick up from others and begin to feel that way yourself, while actually you are just picking up the vibration from someone near you. As we have learned, through the clairvoyant vision these feelings can be seen as colors in the astral atmosphere surrounding your acquaintance."

So, that's something we have to be careful of. We can take on the emotions of others easily, particularly if we know them, and think they're our emotions and that's kind of confusing. Why am I feeling like that? Well, you're not, it's your friend that's feeling like that.

Another description, the nadis, this a very useful one. "These powers are conceived through the nadis -- small, elastic-like psychic nerve currents extending out into and through the aura of the body. The nadis work in conjunction with the chakras, and with the major currents of the body, ida, pingala and sushumna."

Last one is the most subtle one. So, the most subtle form of nadis is of the seven chakras that lie above and within the crown chakra at the top of the head. So, these are so subtle we usually don't talk about them. Usually just talk about the main chakras from the head chakra down to the memory chakra. But these are above and it helps us understand the full concept of the nadis.

"These higher chakras have been experienced by a rare few as a conglomerate of nadis, spiritual nerve currents, which when stimulated and developed by many samadhi experiences, slowly descend into the mental and astral bodies, effecting a permanent transformation of the entire being."

So, that's our June meditation. Thank you very much.

[End of transcript.]