All Knowing is Within You, Part 2
Author: Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami
Description: Shum came forth from the inner mind, through Gurudeva first in 1968 during Innersearch Switzerland. Gurudeva said: Before you start your meditation you must know your destination and means of travel. Mambashum are maps of meditation. The path of enlightenment: hold perspective as inner man, timeless man, immortal being. Shum series on the soul body: kai through kaymaduhohnuhkai. Every situation is just the next thing to do; don't label it a problem. Evolve the soul body through pulling ourselves together through challenging experiences. "Master Course Trilogy" 1970, Chapter 2. "Guru Chronicles."
Transcription:
Good Morning Everyone. We are continuing with Chapter 2 of "Merging with Siva" entitled "All Knowing is Within You" drawn from the 1970 "Master Course" and as I mentioned last time, we're out of 1967. So we have lots of information from "Guru Chronicles" I can add to get us from 1967 to 1970. And certainly one major event during that time period was the Innersearch.
So this is about Innersearch.
"In July of 1968 Gurudeva led 32 students on a travel-study program called Innersearch Switzerland. He had long been dissatisfied with presenting the philosophy and concepts of Hinduism and yoga in English. The subtle states of meditation and intricate inner disciplines cannot be easily conveyed through the medium of an externally oriented language like English, he found. (That's an interesting description of English. '...externally oriented language.') At Casa Eranos, Master went deep within, seeking a solution that would allow humanity better access to and understanding of the interior states of consciousness spoken of in Hindu sacred texts. After a series of meditations, on the morning of July 28 the alphabet of the Shum Language came forth from the inner mind, first one character, then another, as he sat in deep meditation clairvoyantly seeing and clairaudiently hearing the character’s form and sound. When he had written them all down, he ran outside excitedly waving the paper in his hand. 'I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’ he said to one of the monastics passing by. He showed what he had done and dedicated much of the remainder of the retreat to bringing out more. An entirely new language of meditation—its basic alphabet, script, syntax and first vocabulary words, called pictures and portraits—was developed during the retreat."
(So that's a pretty big accomplishment there.)
"The following year, 1969, Gurudeva returned to Switzerland on a second innersearch program and experienced the tremendous breakthrough of mambashum. These are Shum maps of areas of meditation that enable a devotee not only to map out his meditation before he begins it, but to make memos of the meditation as it progresses. Now devotees are able to go back to the same area of the inner mind, time and time and time again. By following the same mambashum, more than one person can go into the same area of the mind, time and time and time again."
So that's 1968, 1969 Innersearch Switzerland's Shum discoveries.
I like Gurudeva's summary of that which relates to mambashum. He says: "Before you start your meditation you must know your destination and means of travel." So that's what a mambashum is; it provides the destination and shows you how to get there. First you do this, then you do that, then you do that, then you go here, then you go there and then, you end up at your destination. So it's a destination as well as a means of travel: mambashum.
Lesson 11
"No Good, No Bad
"Each experience that we have is a good experience, because it molds us. It shapes us, just like an artist would mold a piece of clay. From an ugly hunk of clay can emerge a divine being, molded by the artist. In that same way, the experiences of life, even those that boomerang back on us and those we think are terrible, mold us. But they only mold us quickly and benefit us tremendously if we hold our perspective as the inner man, the timeless man, the immortal being. Only in this way can this happen. That’s the attitude, the thoughts we must have, as we go along on the path of enlightenment.
"The mere fact that you want Self Realization in this life means that you have been through hundreds of thousands of experiences. You have been nearly every thing that there is to be on this planet. And now, in your last lifetime, you are finishing up the experiential patterns that you didn’t handle in a life prior.
"Life is a series of experiences, one after another. Each experience can be looked at as a classroom in the big university of life if we only approach it that way. Who is going to these classrooms? Who is the member of this university of life? It’s not your instinctive mind. It’s not your intellectual mind. It’s the body of your soul, your superÂconÂscious self, that wonderful body of light. It’s maturing under the stress and strain, as the intellect gives back its power to the soul, as the instinct gives back its power to the soul, as the physical elements give back their power to the soul, and all merge into a beautiful oneness. In this way, the beings of the New Age are going to walk on Earth. Each one will have light flowing through his whole body and he will inwardly see his body glowing in light, even in the darkest night."
And there's a series in Shum on the soul body:
Kai
The heavenly fragrance of the soul body.
nuhkai
Several forms of sight happening at the same time, both physical and astral.
ohnuhkai
The sight of the soul body, which is the experience of the soul itself.
duhohnuhkai
Soul body appearing when pressing physically upon a hard object.
(Insert a story there. I never forget Gurudeva's story back in the 1960's he was saying that I'm, he was doing things by himself, he was taking out the garbage can. He would press the garbage can and turn to light. Say how you take out the garbage can when your whole body has become light. So that's that idea. The "...soul body appearing when pressing physically upon a hard object.")
maduhohnuhkai
The body of the soul seen as a plastic-like body of light.
(And the last one.)
kaymaduhohnuhkai
Contemplation on the soul body within the astral/physical.
Back to our text:
"The good-and-bad concept should be thrown out with a lot of other things, including the up-and-down concept. There is no good; there is no bad. You don’t raise your consciousness, nor do you lower it. These are just concepts that have come in by various philosophers who tried to explain these deeper teachings the very best that they could. What is bad is good, and what is good is good. And a higher state of consciousness and a lower state of consciousness, they don’t exist at all. We simply hold a certain perspective of awareness, and we look out, and we go in."
Lesson 12
"Inner States, Outer States
"When you look out through the eyes of your soul, it’s like a great executive in a large building’s penthouse office. His desk is right in the middle of that office, and he looks out and he sees the people working around him. Then he looks farther out and he sees the vast panes of windows. Then he looks farther out still, and he sees the city below, and he sees the sky, he sees the traffic. Then he looks back into himself. He sees his subconscious mind, with thoughts about his home life and other things that do not involve his immediate surroundings in this grand office. He looks deeper into himself, and he has an intuitive flash. Something has come to him, how he can help his enterprise be moved and motivated in a more dynamic way. He looks deeper within himself for the source where that intuitive flash comes from, begins to see light within his head, light within his body. Again he becomes conscious of people working around him. Again he becomes conscious of the panes of the windows. He has to leave this office. He goes down in an elevator. He walks out onto the street. He is the same being. His perspective is an inner perspective. He doesn’t go up and down in consciousness.
"The mystic does not go up and down in consciousness. It only seems like that. But that is not actually what happens. It makes it very difficult when we hold the up-and-down and good-and-bad concepts, because they work in time sequences. If we are bad, it takes a certain amount of time before we can become good. (That's funny.) And if we are good, there is a great possibility that we might be bad during a certain period of our life. If we are in a high state of consciousness, percentages have it that we may be in a low state of consciousness. It’s going to take a lot of time to climb up high, and we might fall down, so what’s the use? We have all of these semantic connotations with the words good and bad and up and down, and therefore we throw them out of our mystical vocabulary and the connotations that go along with them. We say we go within, deep within. We say we come out into outer consciousness. We say there is no good, there is no bad, there is just experience, and within each experience there is a lesson."
So my commentary:
Gurudeva is advising us not to label an experience good or bad but just label it an experience, neutral. Labeling it bad can make it more difficult to handle. I make a similar statement about avoiding to call a situation a problem. Calling a situation a problem can make it harder to face and resolve. I have a big problem. You want to procrastinate, right? So we've made it harder to handle by calling it a big problem. (Find my place here.) Instead look at situations simply as the next thing to do. So every situation is simply the next thing to do. We don't want to label it a problem. Some next things to do are quite easy. Some next things to do can be quite difficult. But they're all the next thing to do so we just do them.
So back to the text:
"Some experiences might make our nervous system react so strongly that it may take hours to pull ourselves together.
"But once we pull ourselves together, that exercise evolves the body of the soul that much more. We have transmuted tremendous instinctive and intellectual energies into this body of the soul. We have fed it. We have given it a good meal. And we never face that same experience again, nor react the same way."
So, commentary:
Gurudeva has made an important statement here about how we evolve the body of the soul. We evolve the soul body by pulling ourselves together after getting seriously upset by a challenging experience. Therefore what do we want? Challenging experiences, right? So we can pull ourselves together more often and evolve the soul body more quickly.
Thank you very much. Have a wonderful day.