Nowadays meditation is becoming very popular. Everyone is talking about being centered. If you’re right in the center of yourself, you don’t hear any of the noise or activity. You’re just peaceful within yourself. It’s only when we come into the cross-section, the cross-fire of life, that we feel we’re not all right. Then we begin living in the great lie of the universe, the great fear that if we die we might be gone forever. We forget all of the wonderful philosophy and beautiful teachings that we’ve been studying, and we’re just not all right. ¶My satguru, Yogaswami, made the very bold statement once, “There is not even one thing in this world that is not perfect!” You have to take a master like that very seriously. He was satguru for over fifty years in a very orthodox area of the world. “There is not even one thing in this world that is not perfect,” he said. Some of us look around at the world, and we find plenty of things that are wrong with it. I never have. I have always thought this is a wonderful planet—wouldn’t have missed it for anything. It is a great time now to be alive, even though some of us don’t think so, even though the planet is somewhat polluted, and some people have myriad complaints. ¶Meditation is not an escape from the exterior world. We have to straighten ourselves out in the exterior world first before meditation and inner life can really be successful. Sometimes we worry about our job, our business, our family or even that we are not living as spiritually as we think we should. ¶This is my advice: gain the perspective first that it is a wonderful world, that there is nothing wrong in the world at all. Then ask yourself this question: “Am I not all right, right now, right this instant?” And answer, “I’m all right, right now.” Declare that. Then a minute later in another now ask again, “Am I all right, right now?” Just keep asking this one question for the rest of your life, and you will always feel positive, self-assured and fine. This attitude eliminates fear, worry and doubt. ¶I discovered this formula when I was seven years of age. It came to me from the inside one day when I was worried about missing my favorite radio program. We were on our way home in a snow storm at Lake Tahoe, and I was afraid we might get stuck and I’d miss the program. I saw my mind, awareness, go off into the future, and I brought it back by telling myself, “I’m all right, right now. It hasn’t happened yet.” As it turned out, we didn’t get stuck in the snow and I did get to listen to Captain Midnight. After that, I would say to myself, “I’m all right, right now,” every time something came up that stretched my imagination into the future, into worry, or into the past when something disturbing lingered in my memory patterns that I did yesterday that maybe I shouldn’t have done. Each time that happened I would say, “I’m all right, right now, am I not?” And I would have to always answer, “Of course, yes.” I started doing this at the age of seven, and still today I am convinced that I am all right, right now!§
How can we stabilize the path on those days when it’s just plain rough? The first thing to do on the path is to change our perspective of looking at life. Initially, as we come onto the inner path, we look at the map of the journey—we read books. A book is a map. We then make up our mind whether or not we want to make a change in our lifestyle and our perspective. Once we decide that we do wish to go on, a good way to begin is to reprogram the clay-like subconscious mind. Reprogram the negative habit patterns by firmly believing that you’re really all right. ¶The second thing to accomplish is to learn to lean on your own spine. Everyone nowadays wants to lean on someone else. We lean on our families until they push us out into the world. Then we lean on our friends until they can’t help us anymore. But still we keep on leaning. Then we lean on our therapist until we run out of money. This attitude of leaning on another is not the foundation needed for the delicate states of deep meditation to be sustained. ¶We have to lean on our own spine. But first we have to claim our spiritual heritage and feel “I’m all right, right now.” By saying this and believing it, we pull the energies in just a little and become centered again. When we ask ourselves point blank, “Am I all right, right now?” we have to come up with a “Yes.” Lean on your own spine. Feel the power in the spine. Feel the energy in the spine. The energy in the spine is not concerned with any fear or worry or doubt—not at all. It is a pure, powerful, blissful energy. Lean on it, and you will go crashing through into inner states of meditation. Things in the world will also work out right for you. You will be in the flow of life. You will have perfect timing. Beautiful things will begin to happen to you in the exterior world. Opportunities will open up for you where there were no opportunities before. People will become nice to you who ordinarily would not. All this and more begins to happen because mentally you are leaning on yourself, and people in general like you to do this. ¶Don’t lean on a philosophy. Don’t lean on a guru. Don’t lean on a teacher. Lean on your own spine and that power within it. Then the guru can be some help to you, for you will obey his directions when he speaks. The philosophy begins to come alive in you, for you can complement it with your own inner knowing. §
What does it mean to “get centered” and to “be centered”? Actually, what it means is to feel the primal source within, to feel so centered that you are the center. And we always are something of what we feel, our hands or our legs or our bodies or our emotions or our desires. Most people on the path have the desire to get rid of their desires. It’s an impossible battle. Have you ever tried to get rid of your desires? If you would stop trying to get rid of your desires, then you would be centered, because you then take the energy out of desire. You take awareness away from that world of desire, and you get right in the primal source of the energy which flows through the physical body. It flows through the emotional network, right through the intellectual mind. That primal source of energy is flowing through the spine in each and every one of us this very moment. Feel it? ¶The entire spiritual unfoldment process, oddly enough, is designed to throw you off center so that you have to work to pull yourself on center. First life throws you off center. You have all kinds of experiences. You make mistakes and, with your indomitable will, have to control that fluctuating awareness to get it right on center and be all right, right now. Feel that powerful energy flowing through every nerve current and be that energy rather than the fluctuating nerve current. Then, one day, when you really get good at it, you find a guru. You are firmly on center, and he tries to throw you off. ¶My guru, Yogaswami, would always throw his disciples off center and set them spinning. They had to work hard with themselves to get on center again. That strengthens the sinews and the muscles of man’s becoming himself, becoming totally aware that he is aware and then controlling his mind by not allowing his awareness to get caught up in the vast illusion of the externalities of the mind. How’s that? That’s a good one—the vast illusion of the externalities of the mind! ¶What is this center? Well, it’s like the inside of an empty glass. You know something is there, and when you’re aware of it, you know that you’re aware inside that empty glass. However, when you’re aware of the glass itself, that’s something else. When you’re aware of the outside of the glass, that’s something else again. When you’re aware of the table the glass is sitting on, again that’s something else. Now imagine you are like the glass. Become aware of the space inside. That is the tangible intangible you have to grasp. ¶The best way to work this is a very simple way. Let’s try it now. Just open and close your hands and feel the muscles and the bones. Now feel an intangible something, an intangible energy, which is that life force, and soon you will feel a force within that. That is your force of awareness that gives the command to the life forces, to the muscles and sinews which open and close your hand. So, be that intangible force rather than the hand. Be the commander who commands the muscles to relax and tense, to open and close. It’s an intangible reality. This you realize. You don’t think about it. Your intellect cannot give it to you. Your instinct and emotions cannot give it to you. It’s something you have to realize. When you grasp it, you start to unfold and awaken spiritually. It comes from the deeper chakras, the higher chakras. And it’s very easy. You either have grasped it or you haven’t grasped it. So, work with that and grasp that. Then the unfoldment process begins. Finally you begin to see light within the head, light within the body. You begin to have beautiful, beautiful inner experiences. Everybody these days wants to have profound inner experiences without the use of drugs, or without the use of anything but their own positive willpower. That’s the goal of the unfoldment of the people of all nations today, according to my own poll. And it is the right and mature goal. §
Someone asked, “What happens in a person’s daily life when he first starts to meditate?” Many things can and do happen to you when you first start to meditate. For instance, your friends may think that you’re withdrawing from them. They’ll say you’re afraid of the world so you’re trying to get away from it all by meditating. Other people will quickly congratulate you and say, “You’re finally on the path. We’ve waited a long time for you to find the path.” Then you’re taken into a certain social group who are also on the path, who have long since stopped meditating but do appreciate it when you do! They will talk to you so much about the path, they will finally get you to stop meditating, too. All sorts of things will happen to you. ¶The best thing to do when you begin meditation is to live in a good environment, among good people. Meditate alone and don’t talk about it to anyone except the person who is helping you on the path. Do it inconspicuously, privately. It’s an inner process, so it should be performed alone. Then only inner things will happen to you, and your outer life will become better and better and better. You’ll get into a blissful flow with life—a perfect timing in your outer life. You will find yourself standing in the right place at the right time, every day. You will be in the energy flow with life, guided by your intuition. All the wonderful things that you should be experiencing on this planet will begin to come to you. ¶By changing yourself, you don’t necessarily outwardly alter world events. But you do find where the world is and that it is functioning just as it should be, in a perfect balance of adjusting forces. From his position at the pinnacle of consciousness, my guru, Yogaswami, saw the harmony of life. From the top of the mountain looking down, you see the natural role of a raging ocean and the steep cliffs below—they are beautiful. From the bottom of the mountain, the ocean can appear ominous and the cliffs treacherous. Yogaswami looked at the universe from the inside out and saw that there is not one thing out of place or wrong. You can gain that perspective through meditation, which releases the human concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, easy and difficult. This is the perspective you find on the inside of yourself. ¶Man is in a perfect state of being right now. The great sages and ṛishis found this truth. They were not more perfect than their contemporaries, just more aware. You are perfect this very moment. You are all that you will ever be. If you don’t see it that way, then you live in a difficult state of affairs, striving toward perfection and being imperfect along the way. ¶Awareness of perfection is attained by sitting down and arriving at the state of expanded cosmic consciousness inside yourself. It’s there, only to be discovered. You can do that in nine minutes, nine hours, nine days or nine years. Take as long as you like. The fact remains that deep inside you is perfection. So, you see, you have a choice. You can remain in the valley, live in fear of the stormy ocean of life and death, or you can scale the nearby mountain and see from the top how it is from that perspective. Either way, you and everyone in the world are all right in the now. §
The mystic lives within himself and deals positively with the events and forces outside himself. He is always consciously striving to realize that limitless Reality within him. That is his practice. Yet he welcomes the challenges of the world, not as a karma forced upon him against his will but as his own self-created dharma. If he is really a mystic, he doesn’t run away from these challenges. He inwardly knows that life’s daily difficulties bring forth his inner strength in response to them. He sees the underlying purpose of life. He accepts and doesn’t reject. He searches for understanding, for the lesson that lies behind each experience instead of resenting the experience, which then creates another subconscious barrier for him. He knows that most problems are with man and the way he looks at things. ¶So, the mystic doesn’t need to retreat from the world. The same process continues regardless of where he goes. He can be as peaceful or as disturbed in New York City as in a secluded Himalayan valley. It all depends on what goes on within him. Nor should he be emotionally concerned with the problems of the world in which he finds himself. A concert sitārist is doing himself and his fellow man no good by saying, “How can I play so beautifully when everyone else plays so poorly?” Similarly, the mystic cannot take the attitude, “How can I be peaceful and content when the world is in such a mess?” We need beautiful music and we need beautiful, peaceful beings. ¶Actually, the mystic sees the world as a conglomerate of adjusting forces, and through this perspective he is not emotionally involved in these forces. The world is a mirror of ourselves and is perfectly all right to the man who is content within himself. But you have to find this out for yourself, because unless you experience it, nothing I say will convince you that everything you have been through and are going through is wonderful and a fulfillment of the great pattern of your life. ¶Even a great soul faces difficulties, but he does not take them personally. Generally people take problems too personally by identifying closely with them. When they experience anger, they are angry. When they experience bliss, they are blissful. The mystic identifies with the experiencer instead of the experience. He sees himself as pure awareness that travels in the mind. When he is in San Francisco, he is not San Francisco. Similarly, when he is in anger, he is not anger. He says to himself, “I am pure energy. I am the spiritual energy that floods through mind and body. I am not the body, the mind or the emotions. I am not the thoughts I think or the experiences I experience.” Thus, he molds a new identity of himself as a free being who can travel anywhere in the mind. Such a person is always at the top of the mountain. ¶We have to examine this concept of who we are. When we begin to totally feel all right about ourself, the meaning of the word I begins to change. I no longer means the body of us. I means energy, awareness and willpower. Soon we gain the total truth that we are living in the body, but we are not the body we live in. Examine the word I and honestly see what it means to you. Does it mean the physical body? Does it mean the emotions? Does it mean the intellect? Does it mean the spiritual energy? §
When we forget who we are, who we really are, we live in a consciousness of time and space, and we relate to the future, to the external us, to the past, and to our subconscious internal us. This can be rather confusing. Most people are therefore confused and seek to distract themselves in an effort to find peace. A conscious awareness of now only comes when we remember who we really are. This doesn’t mean we cannot plan for the future or benefit ourselves by reviewing experiences of the past. It simply means that we always remember that we are the essence of all energy, the source. ¶Return to the source. Merge with Śiva. At the source there is always peace. The key to this entire practice is to become consciously aware of energy. In this constant remembering we have the feeling of being the center of the universe, with the whole world functioning around us. To be fully anchored in the knowledge of the source of our being, the eternal now can and must be a constant experience. It’s easy to live in the now if you work with yourself a little every day and concentrate on what you are doing each moment. To begin to work toward establishing yourself in the eternal now, first limit time and space by not thinking about or discussing events that happened more than four days past or will happen more than four days in the future. This keeps awareness reined in, focused. Be aware. Ask yourself, “Am I fully aware of myself and what I’m doing right now?” ¶Once you have gained a little control of awareness in this way, try to sit quietly each day and just be. Don’t think. Don’t plan. Don’t remember. Just sit and be in the now. That’s not as simple as it sounds, for we are accustomed to novelty and constant activity in the mind and not to the simplicity of being. Just sit and be the energy in your spine and head. Feel the simplicity of this energy in every atom of yourself. Think energy. Don’t think body. Don’t think about yesterday or tomorrow. They don’t exist, except in your ability to reconstruct the yesterdays and to create the tomorrows. Now is the only time. This simple exercise of sitting and being is a wonderful way to wash away the past, but it requires a little discipline. You have to discipline every fiber of your nerve system, work with yourself to keep the power of awareness expanded. Regular practice of meditation will bring you intensely into the eternity of the moment. Practice supersedes philosophy, advice, psychology and all pacifiers of the intellect. We have to practice to keep awareness here and now. If you find yourself disturbed, sit down and consciously quiet the forces in yourself. Don’t get up until you have completely quieted your mind and emotions through regulating the breath, through looking out at a peaceful landscape, through seeking and finding understanding of the situation. This is the real work of meditation that is not written much about in books. If you can live in the eternity of now, your life will be one of peace and fulfillment. ¶Visualize yourself sitting on top of a mountain. There is no place to go except inside yourself. If you were to go down the northern side of the mountain, you would be going into the future and its ramifications, which are only conceptual. If you were to go down the southern side, you would be going into the past and its similar recorded ramifications. So, you stay where you are, at the pinnacle of consciousness, well balanced between past and future. Everything is in its rightful place in the master plan of evolution, so you sit, just watching, sensing the clarity of your own perfect being, learning to live in spiritual consciousness every day. That is your heritage on this Earth.§
Last night we drove past Lake Tahoe and the lake was calm. That calmness is what you see within your mind when your problems are solved within you. If you were to look down in the bottom of the lake, you would see old tree trunks, tin cans, garbage and other things, which can be compared to unsolved problems. When the bottom of the lake is sandy, that is like the lake of your consciousness after all your problems are solved. As you know, there are three types of people: the ignorant man laughs and makes fun of things he does not understand; the intellectual man smiles condescendingly and criticizes, using other’s opinions he has read or heard in the past; the wise man will look at what he understands, try to understand it further and later explain it so others can understand it. ¶As you evolve spiritually, you go through these various states of unfoldment. You never know what state of consciousness you will come into next, since you have never evolved spiritually before. In schooling yourself to live in the eternal now, you overcome anticipated reactions of the subconscious mind, the mind of feeling and habit patterns. Many people have two conflicting approaches to the same problem: one a state of understanding, and the other born of habits of the past. Clear that situation, so that when it comes up you will not have an anticipated reaction; you will cancel it ahead of time. Remain quiet and do not allow your emotional mind to talk to you. You are lost if it does, from reactionary habit patterns of the past, if you listen. As you pray each day, learn to concentrate, meditate and demonstrate your will over your mind. Demonstrate to yourself, and everybody else will see the result. Subdue ancient habit patterns latent in the subconscious mind. Then you will react not from anticipated reaction but from an action born of your intuitive nature. That is how to accomplish understanding. ¶Let us watch an anticipated reaction—an example of how we think we are going to react. “I am going to be tired tonight,” we say, for instance, after a hard day’s work. You are anticipating a reaction. What are you doing? You are setting up a vibration to be tired when you get home. Instead, you can forget about being tired and jump into a very interesting situation without getting tired by living in the inspiration of the moment. ¶Remember one thing, we have to get our joy out of the doing, not the result. That is the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental. The Oriental receives his joy in the doing, not the result. The American rushes through his doing, thinking he will get his joy from the result, so is in a state of tension all the time. Life is a constant state of joy in doing. We will have mixed results if we look for joy in results, and our subconscious mind will be frustrated. Receive joy in everything you do. ¶You have a greater understanding to apply to your life today. In application you set up new habit patterns—the clear, calm sort which allow you to look in the lake and see the sandy bottom. Don’t look for your reactions experienced in the past, and life will hold continuous, joyous surprises. You will hold yourself in sufficient control so that you can concentrate, meditate and contemplate. The study of yoga is a full-time job, started on Monday and carried out twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to see results. ¶If you are not peaceful, you are still reacting to past habit patterns. If you don’t feel peaceful, pretend that you do. Feel peace. Feel everybody feeling that same calmness right now. Feelings rub off on other people. If you can demonstrate a constant, consistent peace, get acquainted with peace, the chemical ingredients carried with you all day long, and make others feel peaceful, you will be doing something very fine for world peace, because the world starts with you. The little that you do is important, and it will ramify and expand your consciousness and the consciousness of everybody around you. Try it and see. Hold the consciousness of peace within you. The instinctive nature of man does not want to do that. Conquer that, and that promotes peace in itself. §