• Table of Contents
  • Live Positively and Joyfully by Swami Rama
  • Love in Stillness by Swami Veda Bharati
  • Dear Yoga Mentor, My Question Is… by Swami Veda Bharati
  • Thai TTP Group At SRSG
  • Kumbha Mela by Pierre Lefebvre
  • An Interview with Pandit Dabral
  • Non-violence in a Violent World by Randall Krause
  • We Are Not the Body by Daniel Hertz
  • Two Wings to Fly by Ilyaz Nasrullah
  • Meditation in Embroidery by Swami Veda Bharati
  • Gratitude for Spoken Words
  • Introduction to Bali by Swami Veda Bharati
  • The Hour of The Goddess by Karin Fiedler
  • Notes on 2013 Sangha by Rajini Prakash
  • Gendercide: Daughters of the Goddess by Swami Nitya
  • 2013 Events and Beyond
  • Full Moon Meditation Dates
  • Location of the SRSG ashram
• AHYMSIN Newsletter Archive

Love in Stillness

by Swami Veda Bharati

One of a series of contemplations guided at The Meditation Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Let me but once still myself.  When I am still, will my senses become inoperative?  Will my activity all cease?  Is that a state, something, to aspire for?  Only that stillness, which at present lies occluded, will be experienced and it will become known that stillness is not absence of activity, it is the only source of activity.  That, silence is not an absence of speech; silence is the source of speech.  It will be known that non-violence is not an absence of violent action; it is overflowing love in which there is no other.

Love ceases when love exists.  There shall be no more love, for another.  There shall be no more love towards an alien.  When I have ceased the otherness, I cannot love another.  When there is no alien, there is no hate.  When love is, love ceases.  When love ceases, then love is.  If love is between two, the ‘two’ ceases, so love ceases.  God, give me that love, that by its very existence ceases and I fail to say ‘I love another’.  For, I look around and I find no other.  Whom shall I love?  Then love becomes my own Self, filled with the Self to the brim.

When I put a sword through an ‘enemy’, if I have love, it is through myself that that sword has pierced.  Whom shall I see with my eyes, when there is no ‘other’ to see. For my own Self to see, I need no eyes.

In the stillness of consciousness within you, within me, who am one, one hears the still and the silent voice, and slowly that voice too trails off.  And, in that dimension, which is no dimension, in the deep heart of a living sun, I and the light are one.  “I and my Father are one” – said Jesus.  I am the light.  I am all the ways.  I am the life force.  Whether the Father speaks or the son speaks, it is I who speak.  In the son the Father speaks.  In the Father the son speaks.

When you meditate, let your senses still themselves and it is in that stillness that the apex of all energy will be reached.  It is in that stillness that all will be energized.  It is in that stillness of the mind that the mind will be filled.  It will be so filled that the whole universe may come and each entity and each one who has assumed a separateness of being may come and dip their vessel in your mind and go away, filling their vessel.  You will know that nothing empty came.  Nothing full returned.  There is only a force known as consciousness, as life ----I am that.

Thus, we contemplate on the great sentences of Vedanta.

Sarvam khalv-idam brahma: 
All this (world of phenomena) is Brahman.

Ekam-evadvitiyam:
There is only one Brahman, without a second.

Mrtyoh sa mrtyum apnoti, Ya iha naneva pashyati: 
From death to death he proceeds who sees as though there were many (phenomena) here.

Prajnanam brahma:
Brahman is pure consciousness.

Tat tvam asi:
You are that.

Aham brahma-asmi: 
I am Brahman.

Ayam atma brahma: 
This self is Brahman.

Brahman alone is truth, is real.  The universe is a myth.  Jiva, that which you call the individual soul, is itself Brahman.  It is no other.

It is unbound.

How can a river’s soaking lips be parched? 
How the flowing stream tongue feel dry? 
How the Lord of Free Will be
by slender fibres bound? 
How can our solar soul ever wilt or die?

Death liberates me from bondage of life
Liberation frees me from fetters of death. 
When thus I am returned to life’s Freedom City
without any of enfleshment’s confining idiom,
Freedom sings to me a fairy song that says:

All in the all sans ‘was,’ ‘will be,’ ‘shall cease,’
is ever pure ever wise unbound ever free.

Soar, soar, soar from every luminous pore
of mine, O lightning, to sky’s farthest shore. 
Roar, roar, roar, from woods that minds explore,
O Silences, to suns and suns yonder more,
Yea, to every distant sun’s
deep fathomless fire core.