The youth of today who attain the inner experience of the clear white light will influence the world in a compassionate, ecologically sound, mystically profound direction. Each generation brings change. Maintain a disciplined life: remold the subconscious mind. Perform vasana daha tantra and then, with clear visualization and precise affirmation, create success in both outer life and inner striving.

Master Course, Merging with Siva, Lesson 54.

Unedited Transcript:

Good morning everyone.

This morning we're focusing on a recent lesson from Merging with Siva, Lesson 54, The Leaders of Tomorrow.

"Those among the youth of today who have had some measure of attainment, of which there are many, will be the leaders, businessmen, politicians and educators of tomorrow. As the New Age comes more into fulfillment, they will be able to work effectively in all states of mind, consciously identified with the overshadowing power of the clearness of perceptive vision of visible white light within the body and through the mind. (Read that again, that's a, very deep statement.) As the New Age comes more into fulfillment, they will be able to work effectively in all states of the mind, consciously identified with the overshadowing power of the clearness of perceptive vision of visible white light within the body and through the mind. Still others--disciplined beings of a vaster vision and more profound purpose--will become the mendicant sannyasin, the sage, the catalyst teacher, the pandit philosopher, all working as individuals together to keep the teaching of the classical yoga path to enlightenment alive and vibrant on planet Earth yet another six thousand years."

So we can see, it's a trend that Gurudeva saw happening, and it's not everyone as he says: "Those among the youth...who have had some measure of attainment..." So it's not all the youth, those among the youth who have had some measure of attainment, meaning inner experience. Inner experience, specifically here he's talking about the clear white light and the perceptive vision that comes from that, will be the leaders, politicians and educators of tomorrow as the New Age comes up. So he's seeing that the youth would be influencing the world in a positive direction, a more new age or compassionate, ecologically sound, mystically profound direction.

But, it's gradual and some are going into the world as leaders, fewer, of course, would be standing apart as teachers, be it as sannyasins, sages, catalysts or pundits. And all of them would be working together.

Sometimes individuals get discouraged by certain conditions in the world such as frictions and fighting between countries and all that definitely exist. We want the world to change. Well the world is changing and one of the simplest ways of looking at it is: Each new generation brings a change. And, those who stick around for two or three generations, they'll see a major change. But it does take that because individuals are definitely impressed with what they encounter in the first say sixteen years of life. What they encounter shapes the rest of their life.

So for example, people that grew up in the south, before there was desegregation, are, have strong impressions about how it was back then, whereas, people that grew up in the south, say born 10-15 years ago have no sense of that. So it definitely creates a difference in what we experience when we're growing up, those create our basic beliefs, attitudes, actions as we all know. So it's a gradual change taking place and Gurudeva sees a mystical influence based upon attainment becoming more dominant shall we say. A more dominant feeling.

"Remember, when the seal is broken and clear white light has flooded the mind, there is no more a gap between the inner and the outer. Even uncomplimentary states of consciousness can be dissolved through meditation and seeking the light again. The aspirant can be aware that in having a newfound freedom internally and externally there will be a strong tendency for the mind to reconstruct for itself a new congested subconscious by reacting strongly to happenings during daily experiences. Even though one plays the game, having once seen it as a game, there is a tendency of the instinctive phases of nature to fall prey to the accumulative reactions caused by entering into the game.

"Therefore, the experience of inner light is not a solution; one or two bursts of clear white light are only a door-opener to transcendental possibilities. The young aspirant must become the experiencer, not the one who has experienced and basks in the memory patterns it caused..."

Read that again; it's important. In other words, it's not enough to have an experience twenty years ago and think about it. We need to be having that experience in the present as well.

"...The young aspirant must become the experiencer, not the one who has experienced and basks in the memory patterns it caused. This is where the not-too-sought-after word discipline enters into the life and vocabulary of this blooming flower, accounting for the reason why ashrams house students apart for a time. Under discipline, they become experiencers, fragmenting their entanglements before their vision daily while doing some mundane chore and mastering each test and task their guru sets before them..."

I remember talking a few years ago to a gentleman who, when he was say in his late teens, spent some time with Gurudeva. And one day he had a very profound mystical experience in Gurudeva's presence. And he asked me that a few years ago: "Well I had this experience, you know. Why isn't that enough? Why am I not in a certain state of consciousness today?"

And I asked him the question: "Well, what have you done with your life since then?"

And indeed, he knew the problem. He hadn't been living a very disciplined life at all. And, as Gurudeva says in this text, you know, we have an experience, and then we have to maintain a disciplined life and then we'll have the experience again. And we still need to maintain that disciplined life and then we'll have the experience again. So, disciplined life is what's necessary to repeat it and we want to be able to repeat it frequently and then eventually daily. That would be a reasonable goal, that any peak experience we had, the long term goal should be, well, should be able to do that every day. We did it once so let's work on our disciplines, get ourselves up to the point where we can experience it daily.

"...The chela is taught to dissolve his reactionary habit patterns in the clear white light each evening in contemplative states. Reactionary conditions that inevitably occur during the day he clears with actinic love and understanding so that they do not congest or condense in his subconscious mind, building a new set of confused, congested forces that would propel him into outer states of consciousness, leaving his vision of the clear white light as an experience in memory patterns retreating into the past.

"The young aspirant can use this elementary classical yoga technique of going back over the day at the end of the day in an internal concentration period, holding the thought flow on just the current daily experience, not allowing unrelated thoughts from other days to enter. When a reactionary condition appears that was not resolved during the day with love and understanding, in turning to the inner light it will melt away, usually under the power of a perceptive flash of understanding."

This was something Gurudeva emphasized. I think it was emphasized a little bit more in earlier versions of the Master Course than in the current one but was this reviewing the day. And it's particularly useful to someone whose just developing disciplined habit patterns of a spiritual life. If you've developed them strongly then it's not as important but when we're in the first few years of developing disciplined habit patterns for a spiritual life the undisciplined patterns of the past are still there. So it takes a while to change, the habit mind changes but it's very slow to change. Therefore, it's very prudent on a daily basis to look back and see if there's anything that happened during the day that we didn't resolve.

Resolve means, when we look at it there's no emotion attached to it; that's what resolve means. If we look at it and it brings up emotion within us then we haven't resolved it. Very simple to know if something's resolved or not. If it brings up emotion, what do we do? So we have to accept it as our karma, we have to forgive the person, resolve it in love and understanding. We have to do something appropriate to what it was and as I suggested in my talk on responses to making a mistake we may have to actually apologize to a person. It may have been significant upset that just doing it in our own mind isn't sufficient; we have to actually say something to somebody else or give them a gift, indirectly apologize.

Anyway, we want to clear it while it's still there. Because otherwise what happens? Your subconscious is going to suppress it. In other words, the mind would go crazy if every unresolved reactionary condition was in our consciousness. We wouldn't be able to even drive a car, you know, all we're doing is thinking about all these reactions that have happened the past two years that didn't resolve. So we can function, it gives a few days. And then, if we don't resolve it, it'll say: "Okay, guess you don't want to resolve it so I'll suppress it." Cause we gotta go on with life here. We have to be able to drive a car. So very important.

Had an interesting discussion some time in the past few years with a gentleman from Oregon. He was talking to me after the morning puja as happens regularly and explaining his practice. It's called "Sahaj Marga." Anybody heard about sahaj marga? A few. Okay, very good. It's not that widely known. And he was explaining their practices. And what caught me at the time was he used the word "abhyasi." And I had been working on the word "abhyasa" in my talks because it's in Patanjali. It says: We make progress in meditation because of two things, abhyasa and vairagya. Remember? Abhyasa is just another word for sadhana. So abhyasi is someone who's doing daily sadhana. So they call themselves abhyasis, individuals who are doing daily sadhana.

He was explaining what he was supposed to do, something in the morning and something in the evening and he was admitting that he didn't do too regularly cause he didn't have enough time. So, his practice exceeded his time availability. But it was an interesting practice. And, it had two elements for daily practice. Basic one of course, would be a morning meditation. And then the second one is an evening cleaning. So, that relates, it's their concept of what we were just talking about: Concentration playback at the end of the day.

So, I thought it'd be interesting to read that, we can see how another group does the same thing--a slightly different process of resolving things but the same goal. They're sitting and looking at what's unresolved and trying to clear it out on a daily basis.

"One of the main elements of the sahaj marg practice is cleaning, a companion practice to the morning meditation. All of our experiences, actions and reactions, thoughts and emotions leave impressions. These impressions, called samskaras, accumulate over time influencing our view of reality and consequently our behavior. Habit patterns emerge and solidify. We continue to react in the present as we have in the past setting the blueprint for future actions. In this way we become, in a real sense, slaves to our past experience. Imagine the soul inside a cocoon wrapped around and around by impression upon impression. As these layers accumulate it becomes more difficult to experience our essence, the soul within. The practice of cleaning is a process whereby we direct our thought in combination with our will to remove or clean away these impressions so the light of the soul can shine. Once these impressions are removed the root causes of behavior patterns which keep us bound to the past will gently and naturally fall away.

"The cleaning is done each evening when the day's work is over. To clean, sit comfortably in the same posture for half an hour with the suggestion to yourself that all complexities and impurities including grossness, darkness, etcetera are going out of the whole system through the back in the form of smoke or vapor and that in their place the sacred current of the divine is entering into your heart, filling the vacuum left by the outgoing impressions. Do not meditate on those things which you want to get rid of. Simply brush them off. Finish with the conviction that the cleaning was completely effective. Feeling of lightness is a sure sign that the weight of the days impressions has been lifted. While the evening cleaning effectively removes the day's impressions, deeper cleaning is essential to reach deep seated samskaras. Fortunately, the Master has prepared prefects to other individual sittings accelerating the removal of long-standing impressions. The deepest cleaning of all is done by the Master himself. This is one of the reasons why it is important to visit him whenever we have the opportunity."

Oh, it's interesting in a number of ways. Of course, obvious one is doing the same thing. Internal concentration playback is in our system going back over the day, though we certainly don't suggest half an hour. That makes it hard to do if you feel you have to spend half an hour just cleaning yourself out.

But, it's also talking about samskaras. What does that mean? It's meaning it's talking about the subconscious mind and the need to restructure the subconscious mind. In other words, in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the principles of which Gurudeva expounds in the Master Course Trilogy, it's not only a question of controlling mental activity or controlling our conscious mind thoughts, it's also a question of remolding the subconscious mind. The two things go together. Remolding the subconscious mind is not as exciting a topic as enlightenment or something, you know, and it generally gets skipped by lots of yoga teachers. It's a lot of work, it takes time, it just, it doesn't sound like something we want to do: Root around in the subconscious and face our past. But it's important and sahaj marg is obviously being traditional in that way and saying: Well you got to get in there and not only clear out the day but clear out the deep rooted impressions. To restructure the subconscious mind.

So Gurudeva gives us a two step process for what he called remolding the subconscious. So, I won't ask anyone to answer but just think for a moment. What is the two step process? See if you can come up with the answer. What is the two step process Gurudeva gives us in the Nandinatha Sutras for remolding the subconscious mind? First we do this, then we do that.

I'll read the sutra: "My devotees succeed by remolding subconscious magnetic forces. They purge the dross through vasana daha tantra, writing and burning past transgressions and current problems, then use positive affirmations."

So, two step process. Vasana daha tantra comes first and then positive affirmations come second. Well, why is that? Well if we imagine the subconscious as clay and what we've experienced so far in this life creates impressions or shapes in the clay, some of the things we've experienced didn't create very pleasant shapes. Got all these different shapes in there then trying to work with them. So instead of trying to put in the affirmations on top of shapes that are a mixture of positive and negative, we take out the negative ones first. So, it's kind of like we smooth out the clay. And then when we put in the affirmations it works better, right? Obviously, if you have a smooth clay and you put in an affirmation it creates something much more easily than clay that has all these crazy shapes in it. That's a simple way of visualizing the process. So, we clear it out through vasana daha tantra and then remold it through affirmations. Two step process. And affirmations create success. Both success in our outer life and in our inner striving. Both kinds of success are enhanced by the use of affirmations. And affirmations take time. Sometimes people, they don't give it long enough. It's also not precise enought. Affirmation has to be precise. You need a good visualization of what you really want to happen. Clear visualization is important.

One difference here, just to mention it, between the sahaj marg approach and Gurudeva's approach is sahaj marg is relying on what? The master or master teacher. You're interaction with the master teacher to clear out these past impressions. So Gurudeva did that for many years and I think he felt it was rather hit and miss. You know, that certain things were getting cleared out but other things weren't. That's when he came up with the, the structure of the maha vasana daha tantra. Very systematic way, you know, ten pages for each year. And I'm sure Gurudeva was the only one who could write ten pages about his first year of life, but, but he'd remember things, maybe not ten pages, but he got more pages on his first year of life than any of us did. So, came up with that structure of going through it, you know, ten, ten pages per year and then different aspects of the relationships and so forth that happened and then even for certain types of actions a physical prayaschitta. Something whereby just writing it down, burning it up wouldn't heal the subconscious. In other words, if our conscience feels something was really wrong, just writing it down and burning it up isn't going to fix the conscience. We're gonna still think it was wrong. We have to do something or a number of things to help the conscience feel okay. I made a mistake, I certainly won't do that again and I did penance for it so we can move on here.

So he created a very structured one time experience and I remember when he was doing it himself. You smell smoke in his room there every morning. He was writing down his pages every, every morning before the morning pujas and he got through it. So, very effective one time thing and then following it up with the annual vasana daha tantra is also good. We don't want to neglect that. It's easy to do, we feel we've done it but things can build up without our realizing it all over again. So we don't want that. So clearing the subconscious mind, keeping it clear is an important part of the practice of meditation.

Thank you very much.

Aum Namah Sivaya