Asilomar-Contemplative Alliance Conference
Monterey, California
October 11, 2010
by Swami Veda Bharati
Guided meditation:
Once more, with a little method to the silence approach, if you would join me in balancing your body first. Placing both feet on the ground, hands apart, shoulders balanced, the mind drawn to the temple of God that is your body. Un-wrinkle the mind.
Relax the forehead. Choose one name of God or a sacred phrase. Feel the flow and the touch of your breath in your nostrils. The divine breath flowing as a grace through you. Breathing gently, slowly, smoothly.
Exhale and inhale with the one thought, the thought of the divine name or a sacred phrase. No break between the breaths. No break in the cycle in the thought of the divine name. Vocal organs silent.
All the bubbles, all the other bubbles of the mind subsiding and merging into this smooth stream of consciousness.
Now cease even this process and mind becomes a chamber of silence. From that chamber again the word thought, the mind and the breath flowing as a quiet unified stream.
Without breaking this stream of consciousness, gently open your eyes but let the silent stream continue even with your eyes open.
Comment:
In such silence a field of divine unity is experienced which is not a unification of many parts but parts exist in that one infinite field. For thousands of years many traditions have taught systematic methods as to how to enter this interior ekanta silence.
In my ashram we have people who do ten days of silence, forty days of silence, ninety days of silence but it is done methodically, and scientifically guided. In that silence sooner or later the true face of God becomes apparent, makes its appearance. It is not a face with features. It may be, as described by Arjuna, light of ten thousand suns shining simultaneously in the sky. In our interior sky which is more minute than the minutest atomic particle, and, which is more expansive than all the expansive space.
All within us becomes filled with that light, with that noor, with that jyotih of which the Vedas have sung, of which the Koran has spoken, of which the Christian saints have sung hymns and psalms.
On the other hand it may not even be the proverbial light. Just a field of infinity in which all sciences become one, all philosophies become one. From the mineral through the plant through the animal to human and super-human, angelic, all mind is experienced in one simultaneous oneness and then one walks in that awareness. One walks in that union and then such a one’s words and actions become the guide to others and his voice is heard deep in the interior of the heart of many.
It is that one, that taj jalaan iti shaanta upaaseeta (Upanishad). When one has reached the shanta, pacific stillness, one sits together with that one from whom the entire universe is created, in whom it is sustained, into whom it dissolves. It is the One from whom our minds have emerged, in whom our minds are sustained, into whom the minds merge and become only pure consciousness.
Whether we believe in a God or do not believe in a God, whether we call it God or not, whether we call it paramaartha-shunya, paramaartha=satya, there is this transcendent experience of being that God that the highest contemplative sage experiences, sees, realizes. One to whom such transcendence becomes not an intellectual pursuit – not something to be imagined, but becomes real.
To such a one in that moment of realization God is not how God has been described in words. One knows that reality beyond words, beyond name, where even the divine name falls silent.
What is it like then if it’s not the way it is described in words? [here, the speaker went into silence for a few moments, then continued] Only silence can convey it or personal experience of contemplative heights and depths which then create a planet wide field. Not in just one nation because there are no nations. There are no countries. These are all artificial imaginations. Even not many religions but the religion of transcendent reality. When we dwell in that reality at all hours we become the vehicle for what needs to be altered in humanity and through that power of silence, collective silence of many, many, many going deep into their practice these generated fields, all unified united consciousness will become more and more intense and the true golden age of interior peace will dawn.
May we realize that God who is beyond verbal descriptions. Who is only in his silent, brilliant light.
Thank you.