Intensive Meditation Retreat with Swami Ritavan Bharati
Yoga Meditation Identifies You as a Spiritual Seeker
These things are absolutely necessary to be a spiritual seeker:
-
- to be ever wakeful and constantly aware of realizing one’s aim.
- to be careful about the right use of time.
- to make the right use of every situation and circumstance in life.
- to regulate the breath to easily attain control of the modifications of the mind.
- to establish control and mastery over oneself and attain a state of equanimity.
Summary: One who does not follow the path of yoga but instead seeks to enjoy the fruits of his actions is subject to birth and death. It is as though he is born and dies without any purpose.
The purpose of life and the purpose of yoga is to lead you within to the highest state of tranquillity, wisdom, and bliss, in which you remain fully conscious and aware of reality, and one’s true nature. Yoga teaches you how to see within. If you remain an outsider, your mind will continue to be influenced by the senses and ego’s desires and you will not understand why you have come to this world.
The main thing that one should learn in life is self-observation. If we want to understand ourselves, we can analyse our personality by understanding our habit patterns. When we remain vigilant and consciously aware of every action we perform, we realize that our actions arise from our unconscious mind. All thoughts, sensations, associations, and desires arise from the subtle levels of our unconscious mind where we store impressions. You know them when they come to the conscious level but you are not observing and discerning the force of their patterns that lead to disturbance.
When you apply self-observation and slowly learn the art of self-control through yoga’s introspective methods of meditation you first, learn to relax, and withdraw your senses voluntarily from the world of disturbance. When memories arise, you simply observe and maintain the witness. What you observe are the suppressions and repressions that come forward. These deep mental impressions called samskaras come forward and disturb you because they reflect your unfulfilled desires and attachments. You are observing yourself through this identity with your mental states.
Only a profound method of meditation can help you to purify the ego. A purified ego does not create barriers, conflicts, or any disturbance. By practicing diligently, you learn to coordinate actions, speech, and thinking to skilfully communicate and interact with others becoming selfless. But you will not realize the Truth unless you surrender your ego to the higher Self. Only after rising above egocentric awareness, can one find the universe within. Only then will you have the capacity to love all and exclude none.
To achieve a state of mental purity you will have to cultivate smriti – mindfulness and discrimination. The first step is to become aware of your thoughts. Through constant awareness, you can learn to discriminate between pure and impure thoughts, based on whether they lead to greater freedom or greater bondage. You are what you are because of the way you think, feel, and understand. It is not helpful to have animosity toward others or to imagine negative things which only lead to bondage. You are bound by the ropes of karma because karma is of your own making. What we experience today is the result of what we have created in our past, and so too, is our future of our own making.
Freedom from karma is to be attained only when one passes beyond the limitations of mind to the highest state of superconscious known as tranquillity or samadhi. From this state alone, achieved through the practice of meditation, the seeker of Truth receives the intuitive awareness of the Supreme Self and passes through realization into freedom. It is the freedom of performing action selflessly as genuine love that reveals the purpose of life.
Meditation has four phases. In the first stage of meditation, there is still an awareness of the differentiation of concrete things. In the second, there is an enjoyment and comprehension of universal oneness. In the third stage, there is a realization of individual self (atman). The first three stages are “with seed”– that is; there is some subject and object in one’s awareness. When this fourth state of union, samadhi “without seed” the revelation of essence alone remains. In this fourth state, turiya, the mind is left behind, completely dissolved in the Self.
Of course, in the beginning, you have to use the mind and make it one-pointed so that it does not dissipate and distract you from the work that you are doing. But later on, the involvement of mind is not present in selfish desires and attachments to the fruits of one’s actions. As long as you are within the field and state of mind, you are not in samadhi. When you are in samadhi you have gone beyond the domain of mind, and when you have attained Turiya, then you have achieved mastery, and this mastery is your liberation.
