Author: Mandala

Question: What is the distinction between atma-tattva-avalokanam and ishvara- pranidhana. Is it a matter of perspectives?

Stoma: The distinction is really just the words. Ishvara pranidhana is a particular aspect of it. If you are watching for the essence of atman everywhere around you, of course you are going to be placing your mind close to divinity which is the real definition of ishvara pranidhana. And in response to that meditation on your part, Patañjali says or Vyasa says ishvara does its abhidhyana, its responsive meditation, in your mind. So it isn’t that we do meditation, we prepare the seat, and then the Guru comes and meditates our mind. That is really how it goes most of the time, at least for me.

Question: You said something about going from vibration into pulsation into point and silence and beyond. How is that connected to this time lapse, this time sensation becoming very slow? How does the process of making japa subtle relate to the perception of time slowing down?

Stoma: Any time you concentrate your mind, your perception of time changes. This is something that we play with all the time during hypnosis with therapy clients for example. When I have done a process with someone in hypnosis, towards the end of the session, as it is getting time to wrap up, I will say to them in a trance state, “Take all the time you need in the next two minutes to understand this in your own unique way to take it forward in your life.” Because they are in a state where their processing is happening at a different rate than it does when they are conscious, and they are able to do a great deal more in a short period of time and that really changes your perception of time. Time is really pretty flexible thing. It is not real, and it is something that our mind can alter by how concentrated it becomes. And the more scattered it becomes, the more the time drags. Sometimes you concentrate in your mind and when you are really enjoying yourself, “time flies when you are having fun,” as we say, so it can go both ways. But it does tend to get longer when you are suffering. When your mind is more distracted, when you have difficulty maintaining your concentration for whatever reason, time seems to drag and drag and drag. I think as you make progress, all of a sudden, it starts to feel like life is moving along at such a pace that there will never be enough time to do everything that you want to do. I am starting to feel that now as I get a little closer to seventy. There is still a lot left to be done. I don’t know the neural mechanisms of it.

Question: You said that Kashmir Shaivism answered all your questions. Why then were you told to wait decades before you should have a class on it?

Stoma: Great question! I always tell the story of coming to India for the first time in 1974. I was a Sanskrit student at that time. I had this odd sense that this was my home. Not this place, but the country and the culture. Of course, I explained this to myself at that time as just being a function of being a Sanskrit student. Here you are in India, the motherland of Sanskrit, and of course, you are going to feel this way. Except when I came back twenty-two years later, it was five times stronger, and I hadn’t done much with my Sanskrit for quite a while. During that first trip, I went to the great book store in old Delhi at Motilal Banarsidass. It is a scholars’ dream. Books everywhere. And at that time, they had the back rooms full of all kinds of old books that hadn’t sold or were just kind of hanging around for years and years and years. So, I went digging through there. And I found an almost complete series of the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies that were published by the government of Jammu and Kashmir back between about 1918 and 1930. And I bought the whole lot because they were very inexpensive at that time. I got this great big duffle bag to carry them back and lugged them all the back to the United States.

So, I had all these books about Kashmir Shaivism. In the department that I was studying, all the PhD students were doing dissertations on Kashmir Shaivism, and they were all trying to find time to go over and study with Lakshman Joo in Kashmir. So, I went to Swami Veda at one point when it was time for me to write my final paper. I said to him, “Should I write something about Kashmir Shaivism? That is what everybody else seems to be doing.” And he said, “Don’t do it.” In fact, he said don’t touch those books for twenty or thirty years. Wait until you have twenty years of experience under your belt with meditation then they will mean something to you. So, I left them alone, there was plenty of other stuff to study.

In 2009, we were sitting around with Swamiji at dinner one night and he asked some of us at the table, “I need to give a seminar next fall. What shall I do a seminar on?” And so, all of a sudden it popped up in my mind: Shiva Sutras! I said, “Swamiji, you never talked about Kashmir Shaivism at all. How about doing a seminar on the Shiva Sutras?” And he said, “Oh no, that is too hard for people. They will never get it. It’s too much. I think I’ll just do something on Prashna Upanishad.” And he left it at that, so I dropped it. About two months later, I’m sitting at home and I get an email one day announcing a workshop on Shiva Sutras so I thought “Oh, boy, he took my suggestion! Great!” And sure enough in fall 2010, we had this really, really wonderful seminar.

Again it was one of those guiding hand of the Guru situations. I went to Hungary before I came to India and my friend Laszlo handed me this bio and CV for Bettina Bäumer and said, “Do you know this Bettina Bäumer who teaches Kashmir Shaivism?” So I looked at the CV, and it was very impressive. I said, “No. I don’t know her but she certainly is interesting and I’d like to meet her someday.” And that was that. From there I came to Innsbruck, and I was sitting around with Michael Kissener in the office one day, and he comes to me with the same CV and hands it to me and says, “Do you know Bettina Bäumer?” and I said, “No, but I get the idea that I might be about to meet her because this is the second time in two weeks somebody has said this to me.” Then, when I got to Sadhaka Grama and went up to pay my respects to Swamiji, it happened to be dinner time, so I came and sat down at the table and he came into the room with this CV in his hand, and before he even says hello, he hands me the CV and he says, “Do you know Bettina Bäumer?” and I said “No, Swamiji, but when is she coming?” He said, “She is coming tomorrow and I’d like you to introduce her from this CV, so take a look at it and say a few words.” So I said “OK, fine.”

The next day, Bettina came for the first time here and I gave a little five minute talk about her CV. She is really an extraordinary woman. She was the first woman ever to be granted a PhD in Theology by University of Salzburg. That is a pretty big accomplishment right there. But her work in scholarship in the Indian traditions is not even just on Kashmir Shaivism. She is a real expert on the Hindu temple, an expert on several aspects of Indian art, really a very deep scholar. I gave a nice little five-minute introduction, and then Swami Veda took over and he talked for another thirty-five minutes because he was so excited to see her. He had wanted to meet her for forty years, and this was his first opportunity, so he gave this flowery, way-over-the-top introduction that I’m sure embarrassed her. She sat there, listening to all of this, and when he finally gave the floor to her, she just looked out at the audience quietly for a moment and said, “Our only qualification is our master.” Perfect! It was just beautiful. And as Swamiji lectured on the Shiva Sutras, it was as if with every paragraph there were some little light coming on in my mind about something that was relevant to my experience in meditation. At that moment I understood why he said wait twenty years. So it’s been exciting to go a little deeper into those things with Bettina and with people at The Meditation Center. It’s been a real opportunity to learn especially how much our tradition is from that tradition. I don’t know if I am somehow breaking some kind of a rule that Swamiji had about this, but nobody has poked me yet for saying so. So I guess I’ll keep saying it.

This fall I was doing a program at Loyola Marymount University in California; they have a wonderful graduate studies program in yoga, in the Theology Department at a Catholic University, which I think is a great thing. One of the students is an initiate of the Yogananda tradition, and I have been to some of the Yogananda places in California, but I had never been to their headquarters at Mount Washington Estates. He agreed to take me and showed me around. We had a lovely tour with the assistant to the current head of the order. We sat down afterwards in the garden, and he said, “You know, I was actually sitting on this spot the first time I came here after I had my tour of the place, and I was just kind of a rebellious kid at that time, and I did not think too highly of it. So, a friend of mine called me, and he asked, “How did you like Mount Washington Estates?” and I said, “Well, I don’t know. It does not look like a very good organisation to me,” and he made some other critical comment. The moment he said those critical things, something or somebody out of empty space slapped him and knocked him out of the chair. So be careful what you say. Sometimes you might get a slap.

(Observing the audience) Just that lovely natural silence.

Question: You lecture on something and then time goes by and you lecture on it again later, and you have a whole different perspective. How is that?

Stoma: I change. You know that is really an interesting point. Because I find myself saying to people some of the same things Swami Veda used to say. I’ll start telling a story, and I know this is something I have told a million times before, and I’ll say “You know, I have told this story a million times before, do I really need to say it again?” People always say, “Oh. yeah, please. please tell the story!” and we used to do this with Swami Veda. He would start telling a story out of the Mahabharata or something, and he’d ask us if we have heard it before, and we had a policy to always say “No, Swamiji. I don’t think you ever told that before.” Because each time, it comes out in a little different way. And you are right, things do change over time. I think that is a good thing because otherwise I might get bored. And, frankly, I think it is a sin to be bored.

There is a way that how I am talking to people these days is so different from before. Back in the days when I was first coming to Sadhaka Grama, I would  come in here with a pile of papers and a pile of books, and everybody would go, “Oh no… What’s going to happen now?” I find these days that if I pay attention to the people in the audience, if I really pay attention to my connection with people, then whatever needs to be said comes out of me somehow. Very often it is completely different than I planned. And I can tell you this is a different talk from the one I had in my mind coming in the door tonight, and that is just fine. I think that is a really important part of the process. For those of you who are teachers, it takes a while to learn that skill, but if you really pay attention to your connection with the students, it changes what you have to say and how you say it and it selects the right material. Sometimes you even end up saying things you didn’t even know you knew, which is always really interesting.

So it is one of the ways which the Guru teaches you. And I love that process because when it is really goes flowing sometimes, both my nostrils open up, sushumna is open, and I just float on a cloud. A lot of times I am in countries where I don’t speak the language so I very often have an interpreter. And there is also a process that goes on with an interpreter, a kind of sharing a common mind. And so very often that wave that comes in a seminar when it is really flowing beautifully carries us both along. I always make sure I check with the interpreter afterwards to see what their experience was because that is often really interesting. So yes, it really does change from time to time, and I thank God for that, for everybody’s sake.

The most important thing is this is what we all love about Swami Veda. He said marvellous things, absolutely, and we make beautiful books. But what was really remarkable and miraculous about him was his presence, with the quality of his lovingness in how he spoke to people, and so for all of you who are teachers, that is the thing to shoot for. The minute I start worrying about the content of what I have to say, it all falls apart, it is terrible. Obviously, if you have been teaching for a while, and you have some experience, you know the material, so let it kind of sink down into you and then arise in this wonderful organic way based on how you relate to the people in front of you. That is what I think really makes the difference there. If we were a different group of people tomorrow night, it probably would be a different lecture even on the same topic.

(Observing the audience again) And in between there is just this lovely silence.

Let’s leave it there. Let’s leave it in a natural place. So, thank you all for paying attention, that was a beautiful evening, and of course, we will have some opportunities to talk in other ways as the week goes along and I look forward to that.

Editor’s Note:

This is from a transcript of a session with Stephen Parker (Stoma) at the 2019 Sangha Gathering at Swami Rama Sadhaka Grama. This is Part 4 of 4 parts. To read Parts 1, 2 or 3, please click on the appropriate link: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

I remember when I was for a few years on the board of The Meditation Center in Minneapolis. One of the things that is important to remember about Swami Veda’s organizations is that they always ran rough. Always. No such thing as a smoothly running organization with Swami Veda. There is always lots of back and forth and contention about stuff. Being a well-trained therapist for a long time and an organisational consultant, I ran around trying to fix it. Then one day I was sitting and watching some kind of conflict go on between two people and the thought suddenly came in my mind, “Stoma, it is not supposed to get fixed. It is supposed to be this way. This is how he facilitates emotional purification in people.” And if there wasn’t enough rough running going on, he would create it! He’d give a job to somebody and then two minutes later, after that person had left, he’d call in somebody else and give him the same job. And he usually picked two people who didn’t like each other. He’d set up a big conflict about it.

Ashutosh [Sharma] has some beautiful stories about this. In his early days with Swami Veda, he would go through the roof: “I can’t stand that person, he is driving me crazy!” And Swami Ji would say, “Ashutosh, they are just holding up a mirror to your own mind. They don’t make you angry. They only show you your anger that is already there.” And for most of us, this is such an important lesson to learn. It really helps learning to dance with these kinds of situations, and it frees you up from having to get stressed out about them. Obviously, you do the best you can, especially those of you that are teachers and center leaders to facilitate a good outcome. And in the long run, we get those good outcomes.

I was just in Hungary, and in addition to teacher training stuff, we did a couple of events to release the Hungarian translation of my book on emotional purification. In the last event that happened just before I left, somebody came to that event that I and several other people have had some real difficulty with. We had a wonderful conversation that just made all of that go into the past. And I actually have heard a whole bunch of stories of that nature in that last week which has been really good to hear. And that was how it was with Swami Veda. Things will always come around in the long run.

Take me for example. I ran away from the tradition four or five times for one reason or another. And every time something brought me back. Different things at different times. Very often, it was my showing up at some event, and Swami Ritavan was there to say, “Welcome home.” He always said this to me. And I really needed to hear that at those times. It made all the difference in the world. Even in those times when people feel like they have to take some distance from their practice or from the organisation for a while, this is only temporary.

Once you are linked by that initiation, the Guru’s got you. You can’t get away. You will come back. Sooner or later–maybe not even in this lifetime, but it will happen. Absolutely it will happen. And I have the most beautiful gift of being able to go from place to place and see what this family is like in the whole world. I wish I could just transplant that experience into your mind to see how lovely that is. It is so lovely that it just made my mind go quiet. But it is a wonderful gift to be able to see this in people. Often when I go to a new place, I will almost always meet somebody I recognise, but do not know. And these experiences are just bizarre because sometimes the feelings are just so deep and so strong.

I can remember one person again in Hungary that I met some years ago. He had come for mantra initiation, and there was just this intense love between us, unbelievable. And the problem was I spoke no Hungarian and he spoke no English so we just sat across the room from each other, looking at each other with all of this stuff to say and no way to say it. But I know when those things happen that I am meeting somebody who is coming back. I am meeting someone who has been drawn back into relationship by the Guru somehow for some reason. And that is a really beautiful thing that gives me a really solid sense of faith in how the Guru does its work, especially at the times when the Guru’s work seems to be disruptive. And the thing that gets you through this is deepening this threefold process of japa, silence and atma-tattva-avalokanam.

If you really do that, you cultivate these beautiful qualities that are described in Sutra 33 of Chapter 1 of the Yoga Sutras: friendliness, compassion, joyful mindedness. In some ways, I think that is the best one. It is what the Dalai Lama means when he talks about people seeking happiness. It is not ordinary happiness. It is joy. It is not happiness that comes from the satisfaction of desires. It is happiness that comes from selfless love, from feeling what other people feel, from knowing what the lives of other people are like on the inside. And it is a wonderful thing even if what is inside is painful. It is also what we feel when we grow.

For dealing with the rough spots in life, however, the most important attitude is the last one, upeksha, non-reactivity, the ability to overlook people’s shortcomings. As Swami Rama used to say, ‘Don’t respond to how the person is acting now. Respond to the person that you know they can become.’ That is such a beautiful attitude. What results from that is the ability to have a sense of presence from people that can withstand some of this rough running that we encounter from time to time. And as you go deeper and deeper into that attitude, into your ‘lazy person’s yoga’, even just watching your breath, every once in a while, I just close my eyes, and the feeling of the breath just says to me ‘You are alive! There you are.’ Just like you would say it to a new born. You get the childlike sense of presence, and it is as important for you to be able to have that with yourself as it is to have with other people. It is wonderful to just feel your breath and know that is what it is to be alive. So, practice lazy man’s yoga, make the effort you need to make to learn the basic skills but then work on letting go, letting go, letting go.

I’ve watched Ashutosh teaching now for twenty-three years, and in the beginning, he used to say, ‘Stoma, tomorrow I am going to bring my stick.’ In some ways he was just like the same old Ashutosh: First, we would start our class at 4:30 PM, and the dinner bell at Sadhana Mandir would ring at 7 PM, so we would finish our class when the dinner bell rang. So, we thought maybe we should start a little earlier so we can have a little time before dinner. So we started at 4 o’clock, and we went all the way to the dinner bell. Then we started at 3.30 PM, and, again, all the way to the dinner bell. And over time, especially in the last six to seven years, there is such a deepening in his teaching about this whole issue of learning hatha yoga as this process of really being able to let go, of being able to allow the natural person in you to express itself.

If you listen carefully to his language, he says, ‘Allow your breath to flow’. He doesn’t say breathe diaphragmatically. Because when you say that to people, they start to do all kinds of artificial stuff. And what we are really after is to help people recover the memory you have from being an infant of how to breathe correctly. Your body already knows how to do this. It is there in your memory, and it is a question of getting the rest of the disturbances out of the way enough for that to come forward. And when you begin to get skillful at doing that, then you naturally are also able to relax.

So, we have a whole week to play with lazy person’s yoga. It should be fun. That is the other thing. It really should be fun. It should be child’s play. As much as possible. We love as adults to make work out of it, but never forget that work is really a waste of time. Work is waste of energy. I worked as a child therapist for five or six years. Watching how efficiently they heal themselves in imaginative play and how quickly they learn things in imaginative play, it is so much more powerful than working at these things. So, learn to play with your life as much as you can. We have a wonderful opportunity to play together for a while here in a very good way; I think that helps us to come to a more natural state of relationship with each other. And I think that is the most important thing we can do during the time that we are together here.

Editor’s Note:

This is from a transcript of a session with Stephen Parker (Stoma) at the 2019 Sangha Gathering at Swami Rama Sadhaka Grama. This is Part 3 of 4 parts. To read Parts 1, 2 and 4, please click on the appropriate link: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4.

I used to crack a joke that by the completion of the HYT Teacher Training Program the students are expected to attain samadhi. Now I’m not so sure it is a joke.

There is the pedagogical side of the course where you are taught how to teach and there is the more subtle aspect of adhikari which teaches self-criticism and to know what you know clearly so you can communicate it both rationally and intuitively. There are levels of adhikari all the way from developing confidence in oneself as a teacher to communicating from mahat. So the TTP does more than teaching how to teach, it teaches adhikari by the development of sadhana for personal transformation. This adhikari is given a boost on one’s own in silence practice.

I had spent twenty days silence under the direction of Swami Ma Radha and a further twenty days left to my own devices. I was busy: three meditations; a purashcharana of 125 000 japa; Joints and Glands; relaxation exercises; Yoga Sutras study.  I had read the Samadhi Pada commentary by Swami Veda previously and listened to the recordings of his lectures. Reading it again in the ashram was quite different as I had no interruptions and with the support of the other practices it spoke to me a bit more clearly.

I have a history of trying to understand the Yoga Sutras. I had read several commentaries and settled on the commentary by Swami Hariharananda Aranya (HA). It turns out I was in good hands, Swami Veda says of him in the introduction to his commentary on the Sadhana Pada, ‘Our work is complementary to HA whom we know almost next to Vyasa because he wrote in his meditation cave from the clarity of experience.’

Reading HA I came to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that Sutra 1:17 is the key as it deals with the levels of samadhi so I was excited as I reached that sutra in the recorded lectures by Swami Veda. But then Swami Ji says that he would pass over it together with the following two sutras as they are too difficult.* When the Indians invented Snakes and Ladders I’m sure they had such trials and tribulations in mind. It’s like a Himalayan mountain with yet another failed attempt. I got snowed off, there was an avalanche, I fell down, I got tired, I got lost, I got chased by a Yeti. All these failures over the years were to some extent at least an exercise in tapas. And it occurs to me that tapas rests on the belief and faith that something will come out of it. Such faith is shradda. However it is more than self-belief. In the commentary to 1:20 we read: ‘It (shradda) is the happy and pleasant feeling that comes with the intention to achieve discernment (HA)…Shradda is a feminine word, expressive of a gentle quality, associated with humility and reverence, and not over-assertiveness or fanaticism.’

I had a plan during the silence which was to read the entirety of the Samadhi Pada with the exception of 1:33 to 1:41 which did not explain the levels of samadhi which was so important to me from my earlier trials. Then back home I studied the parts I had missed. These discuss the attainment of stability of mind, rather like keeping a firm footing on a rock face, mindful of the breath to keep steady. Now I am drawn to these sutras.

Japa was an important part of learning to appreciate stability of mind. The habitual practice for forty days pushed the mind back into itself. Everything else would be moving and the mind still. I had great fun sitting in the dining hall and doing a practice similar to what you can find in the Vijnāna Bhairava Tantra whereby I would notice something and then watch my mind being drawn to it. Because my mind had got used to sitting at the back as it were I was able to stop the thought in its tracks and notice the energy of what might have been a thought rising in its absence. In the commentary to 1:41 Swami Veda says: ‘One whose mind is trained through abhyasa, purified through vairagya, and brought to stability through chitta-parikarmas (1:33) now begins to view not the objects as the principal constituent of a cognition but rather the cogniser as the principal constituent.’ So I was playing about with that.

Silence, japa, study and finding steadiness of mind all combine to create a different awareness. This is the really interesting part of yoga where the practice opens up a new vista as happens when you get to the top of a mountain and can look around.

And this is where steadiness of mind comes in – there are words, there are commentaries, there are experiences and there is a mind which remains watchful. Watchful of doubts, maybes, hopes and frustrations and that mind is always there. What is interesting is that that same mind reaches a point where it comes to itself in itself and crosses from the variety of uncertainties to be sure of itself in itself regardless of thoughts.

The silence practice made all the difference as I followed the suggestion of Swami Ritavan that I study the Yoga Sūtras in the second part of the silence practice. Here I was practising Svadhyaya as I had read about, but never had the opportunity to do so. Japa, study of texts and self- study and the ever-present reminder at the ashram to practise Atma Tattva Avalokanam. As a result I came away with a different awareness, a steadiness in yoga that I can build on hopefully.

The teachers and the ashram provide this wonderful opportunity. And all those that help with seva and the staff cannot be forgotten. The gardeners work so hard to make the place so pleasant. I kept an eye on them moving a huge bank of earth in front of the Shankaracharya statue with just shovels and a barrow. Gardening is a good yoga exercise as it reduces the mind to the activity alone. The gardens around the ashram are a special care.

Editor’s Note:

Jim teaches yoga in Scotland.

So, we take our meditation back to that level and then things really begin to change; we begin to make contact with the deep silence. The natural state of the mind can also be described as a state of silence. Swami Veda often said, ‘The deepest meditation has no experiences. As long as you are having experiences, you are not there yet.’ And when you get to that great silence of asamprajñāta samadhi that is when you are really reaching the goal. And so we do these practices of silence which are one of the really characteristic things that distinguish our tradition from many other traditions. It certainly is our speciality here. It is such a wonderful experience. I think of it as my home. I think of it also as heaven even though sometimes in the process of getting to heaven you have to go through a little hell. Anybody who has been on a longer silence retreat will understand that period of cleansing that goes on in your mind, in your emotions. But eventually you reach a place that is just extraordinary.

I had the chance to really dive into those depths ten or eleven years ago with a number of other people, a bunch of us in a group, and that was so extraordinary when it came to the completion of the practice, every one left the retreat at a different time. Each time somebody left, it was as though they had died. There was a real sense of grief about having to leave this beautiful relationship. It is even hard to articulate how that felt. But we knew that we would probably never be this way with each other again, at this level, at this depth. It was so wonderful. And in the process of going through that gradual refining of our physical and mental and emotional silence for three months, we got to a place where we had let go of an awful lot. And it gives you a little taste of that natural human being and the kind of heart that grows in you when you are approaching that sense of being a natural human being.

As you grow in that direction, I think some people who have been practicing for some time may recognise walking around the world sometimes and feeling like divinity is kind of hiding out there somewhere, and you start wondering where is it. It is as if it could jump out from behind a bush any minute and surprise you somehow.

There is an English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote a beautiful poem about this called “God’s Grandeur”. The first line is “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” He takes this picture of a taking a piece of foil and shaking it in the sunshine. And the light of Brahman comes in a flash at first. This is another thing I really like about the Kashmir Shaiva tradition; they talk about these things experientially and it gives you a clear sense of what to look for.

One of the things that they describe is the flash of atman that occurs whenever you change your state of consciousness. Their idea of states of consciousness is a little different from yoga tradition. We talk about waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and turiya. In the Kashmir Shaiva tradition, they say all of those states also exist within each other. So they have waking waking, waking dreaming, waking deep sleep, dreaming dreaming, dreaming waking, dreaming deep sleep and so on—nine states of consciousness. It is a really interesting way to think about states of consciousness because you can see how you go through these states during the day, and each time you make a transition from one to the next, there is a flash of atman, every time. We miss it almost all the time because of having busy, busy minds full of effort. And gradually, gradually you begin to watch, your mindfulness begins to suffuse your whole mind field, in a way that you can begin to catch those flashes, and they talk about first just being able to catch the flash, then being able to carry it into the middle of the next state of consciousness so that you gradually begin to suffuse all of your states of consciousness with this deep deep mindfulness that comes from the cultivation of your relationship with your mantra and japa. And that develops over time into this attitude of ātma-tattva-avalokanam, of avalokana, looking around for the tattva, the essence of atman, everywhere around you. As you gradually begin to get a sense of the presence of that, through the sense of presence in your own mind, it is a really joyful feeling. It is not an intensely joyful feeling; it is very light, very sattvic kind of joy. But even just making an experiment in that direction brings that sense of joyfulness even if you don’t catch the flash the first time.

Once I was asked to lecture about atma-tattva-avalokanam at a silent retreat. One of my curses in life is I have to give lectures at silent retreats. And I thought, “Oh, gosh, I have talked about this so many times! How can I do something different, something better?” So, I thought would try something experiential. So, I talked about some of the usual ideas for a few minutes, and I said, “OK, everybody, let’s just sit in meditation for a few moments,” and we went into meditation for five or ten minutes. And then as people were coming out of their meditation, I said, “Now before you open your eyes, before you turn your mind outside, ask your mind the question, ‘Who breathes?’, and let your eyes gently open.”

And like it’s happening in the room right now, everybody went into this really deep silence suddenly after just a few minutes. I told them it was like sitting in a forest of old growth trees! It was as though people have been practicing for three or four days. The room was so still. Now, of course, as a lecture this was kind of a problem for me, so I did the usual professor thing, and I asked if anybody had any experiences they wanted to talk about or questions or comments. This was a dumb thing to say—really dumb—and everybody just sat there in their silence. And then I looked again and then I realised, ‘Stoma, don’t disturb them.’ And I just said, “OK, we’ll just sit here.” And we sat for about half an hour, just beautiful.

So it becomes a matter of looking out from an inner stillness. The more I think and the more I teach about meditation practice and particularly about the emotional purification part, the more impressed I am at the central importance of just cultivating a mindful attitude and forgetting making time for all these other practices. Forget all about them! If you do that, you will never stop practicing. You will be practicing 24 hours a day whatever you do. You will sit here in a lecture, aware of your body from head to toe, and you will be practicing asana. You will be sitting and listening to a lecture, and all of a sudden you become  aware of one of the deeper layers of chitta doing some little japa. It begins to come naturally; it begins to flow in a way that it becomes your natural habit and your natural state of mind. And that is what really is the most beautiful thing about meditation. The basics are so simple. Often not easy as we all know, but they are simple.

There is a beautiful little passage in Swami Lakshman Joo’s commentary on the Vijñāna Bhairava where he talks about cultivating this attitude of constant mindfulness, and he suddenly gets very vehement about it and says, ‘Just do it, just do it now. Do it ten times. Do it for a day. Do it for a month. Do it for ten years. Do it for full life time, just do it. It starts now.’ And he just goes on and on like this. But that is really the truth. And every time you come back to that, every time you come back to your breath, every time you come back to your mantra, that is a lovely homecoming.

The more you do it, the stronger that habit of mind becomes. And after a while, you begin to see some changes in your personality. And effortful mind that is constantly striving all the time and creating all of these obstacles is a mind that tends to be a little impatient. So, when you begin to let go of that, your patience grows enormously.

I have a number of very difficult friends for whom I have learnt to be very grateful because they really teach me about patience, and I can see the difference it has made over time so I don’t shy away from difficult relationships. I think of them as an assistance on the path at this point in my life. It wasn’t always that way. But it is an attitude that grows as you deepen this habit of maintaining this mindful and joyful mindfield in the process of looking for the Self everywhere you look. And the most beautiful thing about it is that you start to look around in the people around you. And you begin to see the beauty in them even when they are being obnoxious. Even when their energy is opposing you, and it makes you more able to do some Aikido with them.

Aikido is a wonderful discipline. People often think of it as a martial art, but it is not really a martial art. It is learning to dance. The founder of Aikido has a saying that I just love, ‘There are no attacks; there are only invitations to dance.’ And if you have ever danced with Swami Tat Sat, you know how that goes.

The couple of times that I participated in his workshops, I’d be trying this with somebody and the minute I try to stand my ground and fight, the whole thing would fall completely apart. It was just amazing. And of course, whenever I interacted with Swami Tat Sat I always ended up on the floor, as we all do. But it really teaches you something about how to engage with people. And I think that is one of the things that folks struggle with so much in our personal lives, in our family lives, in our life together as a sangha. There is lots of that sort of wrestling that goes on and the more you take this awareness deep, the more able you are to begin to see how to dance with it. And it is wonderful when you finally begin to get that because then all of a sudden all kinds of stress leaves you. You cease to take things so personally.

To be continued….

Editor’s Note:

This is from a transcript of a session with Stephen Parker (Stoma) at the 2019 Sangha Gathering at Swami Rama Sadhaka Grama. This is Part 2 of 4 parts. To read Parts 1, 3 and 4, please click on the appropriate link: Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4.