|
Swamiji holds question and answer sessions at the Saturday night Satsangs that continue the tradition established by Baba Muktananda in the 1970s. These sessions are an opportunity for people to ask philosophical and practical questions related to their sadhana (spiritual practice).
These extracts are taken from Swamiji’s book Carrot in My Ear: Questions and answers with Swami Shankarananda on living with awareness. for how to order this book click here
Index of Questions:
Q1. I have tried to mediate but have found it quite hard to get used to and therefore I haven’t continued with it. How do I make meditation a part of my life without resisting? (p.63)
Q2. How does one regain one’s interest, motivation and energy in life? (p.60)
Q3. Is this path you teach Buddhism, Hinduism or what? (p.21)
Q4. You often talk about Self-realisation. What does this mean and how do I know when I have found it? (p.33)
Q5. Do I need a Guru for spiritual life? (p.83)
Q1. I have tried to mediate but have found it quite hard to get used to and therefore I haven’t continued with it. How do I make meditation a part of my life without resisting?
S: Well, I am from New York, and what we say in New York is, ‘Get over it!’ So get used to it! Get used to it, just get used to it! Make a strong commitment to it. Eventually you become addicted to meditation, then it won’t let you go and you won’t feel right unless you meditate every day. A subtle cleansing, a subtle connectedness happens when you do it. At the beginning, though, you mind is recalcitrant. It can be difficult to establish a practice.
When you plant a tree you have to be careful that it doesn’t get uprooted or run over. You protect it in its early stages. Similarly, a new meditator is tender and has to be encouraged. Eventually you will become strongly connected with meditation and you won’t let it go. Keep at it and you will get tremendous rewards. I can only encourage you. Keep coming back every week and I will harangue you some more. It is important to make an extra effort to establish yourself in meditation.
Certain people love to make checklists of what they have to do today: ‘I have to do this, then I will do that’. Everything on their list is a doing, but meditation is a non-doing. You sit there and try not to think. You are not producing anything of worth – not increasing your wealth, nor increasing your reputation. It flies in the face of every cultural presupposition that we have here in the West. So it is easy to overlook because it is a nothing. It is a non-thing. But of course, when we do that, we make a big mistake. Meditation is really a subtle and high-class doing. It gives us a lot but you have to have the eye of knowledge. So get used to it.
Q2. How does one regain one’s interest, motivation and energy in life?
S: Meditation! You guessed my answer? The Self is full of enthusiasm, boundless enthusiasm, boundless joy, optimism, desire to explore and experience – that is the Self. That is who we really are. The reason we have lost that is because we have done a number on ourselves. We have put ourselves in straightjackets. Because of a sense of imagined duty or some belief system, we have put ourselves in situations we hate. And we have done it to ourselves because of our conditioning, because we haven’t examined deeply enough. But when we go deeper, the stagnant pond starts to move and clear – we find joy and interest. We should explore our enthusiasms and our interests, and honour them.
Enthusiasm and interest are close to God. Often we are psychically at war with ourselves. Our interest comes up and then another part of us says: ‘Not good. Bad’. Interest is not something you invent, it is something you discover. Look first for your natural interest and your natural enthusiasm. They will teach you something. Discover and honour your natural inclinations when they are not harmful. As time goes by, without even knowing it, a bounce will come into your step and a new enthusiasm will come. And you will see how you have been in a struggle with yourself.
Say to yourself, ‘Infinite inspiration is inside me, as well as interest and joy. How have I blocked that? Where have I blocked that?’ Look within, and see if there are pinpoints of light inside; the heart swells a bit, a little interest, a little movement. Look for it. Any effort you make in that direction is rewarded. It is so fascinating, this quest. It is so rewarding.
Q3. Is this path you teach Buddhism, Hinduism or what?
S: I think that the Buddha is one of the greatest human beings that ever lived. His teachings are so beautiful, so grand. I would love – if I could time travel – to spend time with him for a little while. But I more naturally relate to the Hindu view of things particularly to the vision of Kashmir Shaivism. Kashmir Shaivism offers not only a philosophy but also a yoga, a practical method to experience the truth. Yoga means union, so whatever you do, wether it is psychoanalysis or increasing your vocabulary, anything that you do to grow, to transform yourself, to get closer to your essence – I don’t know if leaning new vocabulary does that – could be considered a yoga.
One sage calls this the Great Tradition. He means that if you took Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Yoga, Sufism and put them all in a big pot and boiled it, the distillation of it would be the Great Tradition. You could draw on the wisdom of all those traditions and get to the essence of what they are all about, and that is what we practice here. It is the essence. The essence of all those paths and philosophies is to know the Self, to know the truth. So if this is Hinduism I like to think it is the real essence of Hinduism.
Q4. You often talk about Self-realisation. What does this mean and how do I know when I have found it?
S: Well, who will know it if you don’t? From the highest perspective, the state of the inner Self is our birthright. It is not something that is foreign to us. Just think of yourself at your best, when you are in a state of peace, a state of joy, a state of love, a state of wisdom, when you know what to do and what the right answers are – an empowered state. Everybody has at least some experience of that. Other times we experience disempowerment: We are confused, we are upset, we can’t function, we have a paralysis of will. Those are states of asat, or non-truth, when we are not in touch with the Self. But since the teaching says that our real nature is the Self, we should adopt a new model.
Instead of thinking of Self-realisation as something far away that we have to attain in some unknown land after some unknown travail, assume that it is close at hand, and what we have to do is get rid of the blocks to it. Whenever we move away from the Self into negative states, agitated mind states, we just have to stop. It is not that ignorance is our natural condition and we have to teach ourselves to know the Self. In this model, the Self is our natural condition, however, we have taught ourselves not to be Self-realised. We have to unlearn that false teaching.
You will discover that when you handle your agitated mind state, the Self shines forth. When the mind is calm, the Self shines forth. That state of peace, that state of contact with the Self, is you at your most functional. You can make good decisions and communicate effectively in that state. When you communicate out of an agitated mind state, you communicate agitation, and endless misunderstandings arise; you make bad decisions and screw up. When you act and communicate from the centre of peace there is effective action and communication.
The tendency is that if anger comes up, you want to lash out. If fear comes up, the tendency is to want to run away. Don’t do it. Sit down. The very time that you want to spring into action, sit down in that moment and let the experience happen. Be with the feeling and just let it be. Then gradually go to the core of it, the centre of it, and return to peace. Whatever you do out of negative space is going to have a negative result. Don’t take my word for it. Act out of anger and fear for a while and see where you get. Then try acting out of the centre. It is a hard lesson to learn, but a most important one. Be suspicious of conclusions you come to in states of anger and fear. Be suspicious of what your mind tells you when the energy is anger and fear. Good. Get self-realised.
Q5. Do I need a Guru for spiritual life?
S: Speaking from my own experience, the Guru was the key thing in my spiritual development. The Shaivite sage, Kshemaraja, says, Gururva parameshvari anugrahika shaktih. The Guru is the grace-bestowing power of God. The Guru awakens the sleeping Shakti of the disciple and also embodies the shakti tattva, that is, he becomes a homing device as the seeker tries to expand his Shakti.
The Shiva Sutras (II.6) say, Gururupaya, the Guru is the means. For me, Baba was the means because I meditated on him, his every word and gesture, and tried somehow to install him deeply within myself. I tried to become him. I felt like I was being pulled into him like a moth to a flame.
In this light, all the techniques of mantra and meditation are secondary. Just in mundane terms, the mind loves novelty and is always looking to be entertained. A person without a Guru, but who is serious about his sadhana, might jump from book to book, from path to path trying many different things, ‘Look the Sufis do this, isn’t that interesting.’ After a week, the mind becomes bored with that technique then it’s, ‘Look, the Tibetan Buddhists visualize such and such, isn’t that fascinating’. That is the nature of the mind.
Take the case of mantra. I have always been fascinated by the practice of mantra and I would be always moving from a breath mantra, to a Shiva mantra, to a Ram mantra, to a Devi mantra, to a Jesus mantra, wondering which was the most powerful. But because Baba initiated me into Om Namah Shivaya with such force, the temptation did not arise. Following our minds keeps us in the realm of ego, personality, taste and whim. Following the Guru connects us with an ancient tradition that is solid and impersonal.
I know it is a New Age shibboleth to say that the Guru is passé or that in the Aquarian Age you don’t need a Guru, but I am convinced that such thinking limits your spiritual potential. Having a Guru opens up the higher worlds to you. Even today, if I simply think of my Guru, I am flooded with Shakti. My answer to that question is, yes.
|
