Advanced meditation is not just stopping your thought. It’s very technical. The process of eliminating the samskaras and reaching complete enlightenment is a very technical, wonderful -- mystical of course -- process. As you do very advanced queries in computer science, as you create data structures and data pathways in a more advanced way, what you’re doing is pushing the envelope of mind significantly in a way that will then assist you later on when you do more advanced meditation. So I suggest that people become programmers, even though they may be initially bored by programming and the initial phases of programming, just to create a logical discipline of the mind, which is a helpful and necessary stepping stone later. But later, when you start to get up there, as you advance, you will find if you meditate that you will probably be an outstanding programmer further up. It’s like you have to learn the grammar of the language and you might even learn the grammar more slowly than somebody else. But once you get into the language, you may be very fluent. You may do well with the literature. Whereas the person, maybe, who learned the grammar quickly, that’s as far as they could get. But when it comes to the ideas within literature, they don’t have the mind-state to really deal with them. People who meditate have the mind-state to deal with advanced concepts. Sometimes it takes them, if they were raised without a lot of mental discipline, a while to pick up those disciplines. But once you get those disciplines down and you get up there, your mind will take over. And if you’re willing to be patient enough to get yourself through the basics of computer science, even though it may take you three times as long as someone else, once you’ve done that, if you’re patient, once you start to get up into higher level programming, then you rock and roll -- a person who meditates. Your mind and the abilities you developed in past lives -- you will access those states of mind to create advanced data structures and advanced data pathways. And it works really well, and it’s a wonderful workout, basically, for the mind, which is what we’re looking for in preparation for the enlightenment experience.

Programming, initially for most people, is a real bitch. When you start to program it’s just really hard because you don’t think that way, which is logically. But after you’ve programmed for -- initially there’s a tremendous resistance to programming, but as you get into it further and further, once you develop your muscles a little bit, it’s really fun. And people who are drawn to meditation innately make excellent programmers, often exquisite programmers. You might say it’s just an innate ability that people who meditate have. The kind of person who would be drawn to meditation is the kind of person who, in most situations, makes an excellent programmer because the two skills are very similar, the natures are very similar.

Buddhists spend a great deal of time working on and refining their minds. Because once the mind is properly refined, it will automatically select the right states of mind. It just happens by itself. What’s necessary is just to refine the mind.

The states of mind that we seek are inside ourselves. They’re inside our mind. Our mind is a databank -- not the brain, but the mind, the consciousness principle that we are. That which is the existence in us is infinite. It contains many things, as it does infinity, as it is infinity. But in particular it contains what we call the ten thousand states of mind. Ten thousand is a symbolic number in Buddhism which just suggests that there’s a lot -- a tremendous amount, more than ten thousand, more than ten billion, beyond counting is what ten thousand symbolizes. That’s good, and it’s nice those states of mind are there, and it’s wonderful that there are enlightened states of mind and ecstasy and knowledge that human beings don’t know about. But how does one get there? How does one get to this paradise of mind? It’s through refinement. It’s by developing a sense of style. I would say that style is the opposite of mediocrity. Mediocrity implies a lack of exactness -- colors run together and get kind of gray, you see? Style, on the other hand, implicit in it is a certain awareness of not only what style is, but an ability to extract from the vast multitude of things, those things which are brightest.

Meditation is the freeing of ourselves from all mental states and concepts of self.But it really begins with a focus,with a restraining of the life force or the life energy.So you touch your object of concentration for,say,45 minutes.Put a watch there,take out a clock,time yourself.Then,after you have done it for,let's say,45 minutes,if your time period is half an hour,and you've really tried just to see that one thing,to look at it-you can blink,you can shift your position a little bit if you need to-but then after you've done it for half your meditation,close your eyes and now do the same thing focusing on one of the three chakras,either the navel center,around the navel;the median center,which is in the center of the chest around the heart,or the third eye,which is between the eyebrows and a little bit above.
I recommend that you focus on these three centers in rotation.So Monday morning,do your navel center;Tuesday,the center of the chest;Wednesday,the third eye,which is between the eyebrows and a little bit above.

When we meditate, then, what we’re doing is not just simply concentrating. We’re raising the kundalini through focus, through concentration. There’s a metaphysical astral process that’s taking place. What I would recommend is, if you’re meditating for half an hour, sit down with the eyes open, look at your little power rock or flower or candle flame or anything -- yantra, geometrical design. Focus on one point and hold your attention there. The mind will waiver, you’ll think a million thoughts, but each time you do, bring your mind back to the point of concentration, seeing it visually. If one were blind, one can simply focus on a feeling. Sight is not absolutely essential for this process, but we use sight because sight is the dominant sense. We can use hearing and do the same thing. We can listen to a tone. We can feel something physically. We could smell something and do it. But sight is the dominant sense. It takes precedence over all other senses unless one is blind or has been trained otherwise. So it’s easiest to interrupt the flow of thought in sense perception and move the mind beyond sense perception with sight. That’s why we do something visually to start with.

Padma Sambhava

When you select a place to live, you’re not only selecting a location, but of course you’re buying into the people around you. If you’re renting, the person who owns the place will obviously have their energy lines there, and you’ll be feeling them, so you should like your landlord. If you don’t like your landlord, don’t rent, because you’re going to be feeling their attention all the time. It’s a good idea not to live next door to the landlord, unless you really like the landlord, because they’re going to be thinking about you and focusing on you a lot. Pick carefully, but don’t be afraid to pick one. Take the best of what’s around. You can always change, but we have to be practical. Pick a spot. It’s good to look at it at night too, if you want to. You know, just drive by it and park in front of the place for a minute or two before you sign that lease, and look at it and see how it feels at night. You know, it can be real different. It can be better, it can be worse. Who knows? You have to look and see. The same is true when you look for a job. Get the job that sounds the best, but it shouldn’t be in a place that drains you. If there are two or three job possibilities, and if one pays a little less, but the place feels ten times better, go for it, because ultimately, if you’re drained, you won’t be able to move on to a better job or a better position. Whereas if you feel good about where you work and whom you work for, that means your body’s telling you it feels good—again from what’s available. How great can it be? They’re paying you, right? But still, pick the one that feels good. When you drive to work, follow a power line. Drive along the road that feels right. There might be one route that takes ten minutes longer, but the power line is better for you along there. There are lines that run along the earth, invisible lines. They’re invisible until you can see them—drive along those. In terms of movie theaters, places you shop, supermarkets, everything is on a different place of power. Don’t let convenience run your life. You run your life. Shop at places where you feel good. When you come home from shopping, look in the mirror. See if you look drained. Examine your attention field. Naturally, it’s always draining to a certain extent to interact with a lot of people and places, but some places will pull you down more than others—it’s just like people. Some will renew you, some are fun to shop in, some are exciting. Also, don’t wear a place out. It’s very important to keep moving, not only because people find you and focus on you when you stay in a physical place too long, but simply because you become too accessible to a place or too accessible to people. Don’t go to the same restaurants and the same movies all the time—you won’t pick up any new power lines. In other words, if you want to change and store power, great. You live in a nice place, you found nice shops and nice restaurants that you go to, you know, good places for vacations, good power spots. But after a while you’re just going to keep drawing the same power into yourself, and if you don’t switch to new places, you won’t be drawing new energies into your body. So all you’ll do next year is repeat what you did this year, pretty much. Follow me?

Now,look at your object for 3 minutes..Look at nothing else, think of nothing else..Pause...Repeat..

Self-giving is the best mantra I know. A lot of people ask me sometimes, they say, “Gosh, Rama, what’s the best mantra?” They all want the secret code word. It’s like when I was a kid and we had the Captain Video Decoder Rings to get the secret message that they’d flash on television. Everybody thinks that if they can get the right word or holy phrase down, the right meditation technique, that it will make all the difference. While that may make you feel better, it isn’t necessarily true. Or, I would suggest, the best mantra is self-giving because as you repeat it again and again, you change. It’s the only one I know of that really works.

0 nobly born, listen well. There are two correct types of methods and means for the attainment of the all-blissful state of enlightenment: the ordinary and the extraordinary methods. The ordinary methods are those revealed by enlightened masters in their preliminary instructions. In the case of Lord Buddha, these were the sutras. The sutras outline correct meditation, attitude, intent, mindfulness, and a general introduction to the basics of Buddhist cosmology. The ordinary methods also include Buddha’s second cycle of teachings: the later sutras and the early tantras. Here more advanced methods of meditation, attitude, mindfulness, and an intermediate explanation of Buddhist cosmology are provided. There is some overlap between some of the teachings in Buddha’s second cycle of the sutras and the extremely advanced teachings in his third and final cycle of Tantric teachings. While scholars and pundits may argue as to whether his second cycle of teachings were sutras or tantras, this is not our concern, for we are not interested in what the teachings are called, as revealed by Lord Buddha, Lord Milarapa, Guru Rimpoche, Padma Sambava, Atisha, Lord Krishna, Bodhi Dharma, Lao Tzu, Tilopa, Naropa, or lesser-known enlightened ones. Nor is our goal to place in competition with each other the systems of Mahayana, Hinayana, Zen, Vadrayana, or other forms of Buddhist, Hindu, or Taoist yoga and Buddhism. The point of the practice, as outlined in this book, is twofold: (1) after grasping and training oneself in the preliminary methods, to attain the transference of consciousness, which concludes with the great awakening to the clear light of reality, the Dharma kaya—complete enlightenment-— the realization of the one without a second; (2) the training to become a Mahasiddha, with the realization that this training—while essentially void in nature, as all training and attainments truly are—allows the practitioner to avoid the trap of limiting the experience of the clear light of reality to the supraconscious realms. It is only the Mahasiddha who is a pure living mandala, embodying the realization by his existence in all of the worlds that samsara is nirvana. As Saraha has correctly expressed: “Those fortunate ones who attain the knowledge that from the beginning of endless time mind has never existed realize the mind of the Buddhas of the three eras.”

THE EIGHTY-FOUR MAHASIDDHAS


Since the ordinary means of the Buddha’s first two cycles of teaching have already been expounded upon in the previous chapters of this handbook and in countless other commentaries and texts, it is the particular point of the last third of The Handbook for Enlightenment to transmit to you the extraordinary means by which the eighty-four recognized Mahasiddhas attained enlightenment. Know that it was through a blending of both the ordinary means of attainment, which have been previously expounded upon both in this text and in other works, and through the extraordinary means, which follow this introduction, that the Mahasiddhas transformed their impurities into perfections and went beyond the limitations of their perfections to full realization of the inherent emptiness and enlightenment of all. The eighty-four Mahasiddhas should be seen as mandalas. They provide eighty-four different pathways to enlightenment. You may choose to study one of them and the methods for attainment, several of them, or all eighty-four of them. The knowledge of more is not necessarily better than the knowledge of a few or even of one of them. It is a matter of individual preference. Our concern here is not the quantity of techniques that you come to know, but that you attain the skillful means by which your enlightenment will blossom. Therefore, our approach will not be to look at the eighty-four Mahasiddhas individually. Elsewhere in Tantric Buddhist texts their lives and songs have been amply recorded. While it is recommended that you have a general knowledge of all eighty-four of their lives, methods, and songs, what is most important is that you then choose one of the eightyfour, whom you find most appealing or whose circumstances before their realization most resemble your current situation in life, and make that particular Mahasiddha your Tantric root guru and the focus of your study and practice. Naturally, if you have the priceless opportunity of now studying with a fully enlightened Tantric root guru who is still embodied, his or her instructions will supersede these words. But the best remedy for the illness of illusion is to employ two medicines: the medicine of your current enlightened teacher’s knowledge and also the methods revealed in this book that have been used with great success by past enlightened beings, with a particular focus on the eighty-four Mahasiddhas. If your karma has not led you to an encounter with a fully awakened one in your current lifetime, then use this guide, coupled with the understandings of past cycle awakened ones and the eighty-four Mahasiddhas. Make sure to choose one of the eighty-four Mahasiddhas to be your personal mandala: synchronize your vibration with his aura by repeated study of his life and songs. Meditate upon him, and he will aid you from the other dimensions in your attainment of the emptiness of enlightenment. May your path be filled with joy!

THE SYNTHESES OF THE EIGHTY- FOUR MAHASIDDHAS TEACHINGS

It is apparent that the eighty-four mahasiddhas all had one thing in common: They practiced the advanced third cycle teachings of Lord Buddha, in which extremely unfortunate circumstances that an individual finds himself in and that would normally make enlightenment impossible are completely reversed into a state of total enlightenment. These are the extraordinary means and methods: To take what on the surface appear to be impossible circumstances and events that would ordinarily prevent an incarnate being from any attainment whatsoever, and turn those events and circumstances into the springboard to enlightenment. All eighty-four of the mahasiddhas distinguished themselves through the use of their siddhas as visible proof that they were embodiments of enlightened consciousness. In each of their cases their lives were filled with myriad misfortunes that should have made the attainment of enlightenment impossible. Their attainment proved that Buddha’s third cycle of Tantric teachings and methods clearly works. They are intended for use only when the ordinary practices are not sufficient to create enlightenment in one’s current life circumstances, and they should be employed only after you have fully mastered the ordinary methods that are revealed in the sutras of Buddha’s first and second cycle teachings. All eighty-four of these great masters of the Vadrayana did not follow the usual monastic methods of practice as elaborated upon in the sutras. While they came from different ranks and castes of society, while they were both women and men, while some were rich and some poor, some educated and some ignorant of reading and writing, all shared one thing in common, which is the essence of all Tantric practice: They were able to turn, in each of their cases, a devastating crisis in their lives into the very means by which they attained the knowledge of the great symbol of total liberation from all limited states of mind. Intensive study and practice of the advanced tantras will provide you with the means of taking all of the situations that you now see as blocking your practice and turn them into the actual stepping-stones by which you will attain the great realization of nirvana. In short, the inestimable worth and also the proof of the effectiveness of the Tantric teachings is that they can turn lead into gold. When properly understood and practiced, they can help you utilize any real-life situation, no matter how difficult, for proper attainment of enlightenment. One might say that the tantras show you how to make each seemingly impossible situation in your day-to-day life a monastery in which you can attain total liberation. How wonderful! All earthly experiences can lead to enlightenment when properly employed. This is the essence of the Tantric practices. As Padma Sambava declared upon being exiled from Tibet: “The entire world has now become my monastery.” So, in conclusion, study the following extraordinary methods of the tantras with great diligence. They will provide the skillful means by which you can transform even the most mundane events in your daily life into the pathway to enlightenment. And even in ultimate crisis, their worth—and the worth of Lord Buddha’s final cycle of teachings—is therefore proved beyond doubt. In times when many would say that the attainment of enlightenment was impossible because of circumstances, the proper employment of the Vadrayana tantra created liberation for the eighty-four mahasiddhas, as it can for you. May your journey through the extraordinary means and methods of the tantras reveal the hidden pathway to enlightenment to you. May all sentient beings attain full liberation!
-The Handbook for Enlightenment

Psychic self-defense, of course, is the opposite of psychic manipulation. In psychic manipulation what someone is doing is seeking to gain your life energy, pure and simple, (Rama laughs) or impure and simple, depending upon your point of view. It is possible to tap into someone’s life energy just like you can lift out money from their wallet, if they’re not aware of it. Just like in the old stories the vampire can drain blood from the victim and weaken them, and the vampire can finish them off and just take it all at one time, or they can keep coming back day after day.

When you think about someone or focus on them or you think about a place or another world or a God or a being or whatever it is, your life energy touches what you think of and focus on, psychically. So what a manipulator wants you to do is to think of them, and any way they can get you to think of them—any way they can get contact with you, that they can get into your life or get some control over your life or cause you to think that you need them, that they are important—will enable you to lose energy from their point of view. In other words, they’ve got to have you thinking about them, feeling you need them, you love them, you want them, that they’re necessary, that you’re afraid of them—same thing, attraction or aversion—any type or expression of control. Needless to say, there are magical beings, enlightened beings, beings of power, who seek to do the opposite, who would be happy to show you how to free yourself, who want nothing from you, who don’t need to take life energy from anyone else because they’ve learned simply how to create it by stepping into other levels of attention in other worlds. They will teach you to be free. There are both in the universe, but you don’t have to worry about them. We don’t really have to talk a lot about them. If you meet one, if that’s your good fortune, then trust them, after making sure that they’re that.

Now, some of the most obvious forms of manipulation, domination and control are sexual manipulation, manipulation through fear and manipulation through love. Sexual manipulation is easy to understand. You’re not particularly interested in having sex with someone, you know, a particular individual. They pass you on the street and they project a sexual field of energy toward you, which everyone can, that hits your plasma body, your subtle body You feel it, it creates a level of excitement if you let it, you look at the person, you desire them, they’ve got you. Now, they’re in your mind and even if you only passed them in an airport, in the office, for a few seconds and you never see them again, if you dwell on them, then you’ll have what we call an energy line into your being, your attention field. You’ve created a link between yourself and that person and they can walk back across that link psychically later, when you’re not physically together, and draw energy from you. The tease is a popular method of sexual manipulation. Someone doesn’t want to have sex with you, but they want you to desire them like mad. Actually, if you have sex with them that will end the desire for a little bit or you might get so close that you don’t want to have anything to do with them. It’s a control game. So all they do is project a lot of sexual energy and you feel it and they’re saying, in effect, “Come on! Let’s jump into bed and have a good time.” You feel that, but then when you come up to them, look at them, they pretend just the opposite, that they have no interest or there’s something wrong with you for even thinking that. Therefore you get very frustrated because your body is feeling what they’re really saying: “Let’s go for it,” but they’re telling your mind, “What’s wrong with you? That isn’t my intention at all.” So, as you get frustrated you focus on them even more and of course they drain your energy even more effectively. It’s a control game. In terms of sex, the most difficult time, of course, aside from these that I’ve mentioned, is when you have physical sex with someone—it’s a snap to drain energy and life force from them. During sexual intercourse there is usually a moment when a person will kind of abandon themselves, unless they have great control, to the ecstasy of the physical experience. As soon as they let go they drop the defense shields. You can snap their energy, you can drain them. Once you create a line, particularly through sex, it’s very easy to drain someone’s energy. Now needless to say it’s also easy to raise their energy—that’s the tantric sexual concept—because such a strong line is created during sexuality and after that you can also raise someone’s attention that way, if you’re powerful enough, because having sex with someone breaks through so many barriers. But it can be used either way. It depends on one’s state of mind.

The dream plane. A very sensitive time is when you’re asleep. When your conscious mind is there you’ll know if someone’s trying to break into your house. When you’re asleep they can sneak in. So, it’s very important to be aware of that. If you wake-up feeling really drained, instead of refreshed, it means that you got hit during your sleep. So it’s good to meditate a few minutes before you go to sleep, bring a lot of energy into your being, read a book that inspires you, whatever, and then when you wake up in the morning, if you feel very drained, just meditate for a while, recharge yourself and review in your mind who you just feel did it. Again, your body knows. There’s something inside you that knows. You just have to trust your feelings. Then, if you break connection with that person, if you figure out whatever method of manipulation they have to get inside you, what level of control they’ve gotten of your life or your emotions or your time, if you eliminate that they can’t really bother you. People can only manipulate you and come into your dreams and things if you create an opening. If you want them, fear them, think you need them, trust them, then they have to create an opening in your attention field. Somebody could live three houses down from you and you don’t know them. They really will have a heck of a time infiltrating your attention field. It’s the people you know who manipulate you, and the more you trust a person, the greater the possibility of manipulation. That doesn’t mean everyone you trust manipulates you, but those are the most likely candidates. Christ had twelve disciples. He trusted them. One betrayed him and he died. In other words, you can have eleven good apples and one rotten apple. Don’t worry about the good apples. They won’t hurt you, but the one rotten apple, if you miss them, can cost you your life—energy.

The chief device of a manipulator—meaning someone who doesn’t want you to know what they’re doing, because their purposes are contrary to your own—is to keep your energy level low, because if your energy level is high you’ll be able to just naturally see. Just as your body recoils in pain if you were to touch a flame for a moment—it does that because it’s part of its natural defense system to let the intelligent being in there know that it has to, if it wants to preserve their body, keep it out of the flame—so you have a natural psychic self-defense network within you that reacts with complete sensitivity to psychic manipulation and people draining your energy. If you would listen to it you would always know exactly what to do. There’s no need to be afraid; you’ll just sense, immediately, danger and withdraw yourself from the situation. But, we live in a world where we’ve been taught to not pay attention to our feelings, and instead to always use reason and logic. I love reason and logic. I write computer programs and love reason and logic, but that doesn’t mean that I think reason and logic are the only modes of perception for dealing with life in the world when I have more. That’s like saying, “I love my little Chevrolet, but I have five other cars and I’ll never use them. I won’t drive the Mercedes, I won’t drive the Ferrari, I won’t drive the Jeep,” that sort of thing. How silly. We have many modes and levels of perception. They are us, we should use them. They protect us, they give us a good life. But we been taught not to believe and trust our most basic feelings. So what a psychic manipulator does is seek to keep your energy level low. If they can lower your attention level you won’t see what they’re doing, and obviously if you don’t see what they’re doing they can keep doing it, which is feeding off your energy. Psychic manipulators work in a couple of ways. They want your life energy, or sometimes, just for the hell of it—they’re not that interested in your energy—they just want to screw you over. They derive a malicious joy just from injuring, just from seeing people not succeed, or because they haven’t succeeded at something themselves they don’t want anybody else to. It’s a threat to them. It’s like in the middle ages when the church would burn so-called heretics, who were scientists, because they didn’t want to hear about the fact that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, and so on. They didn’t want to have knowledge, because if people had that knowledge they’d look at the theories of the church and say, “You guys are nuts! You’re not going to run the world anymore. Your theories are not in touch with what is real.”

The universe is wonderful. The secrets of life are fantastic if you get to them, and if you want to you should be able to. It’s not intrinsically hard to have a strong and powerful mind. Granted, we live in a world of constant change. Success is followed by failure, failure by success, life by death, death by rebirth. Still, you can dance along with all those pairs of opposites and have a wonderful time. It’s not necessarily so hard when you know how, like anything, unless someone or something is interfering with you. In my opinion, everyone is interfered with to an extent by others. People want your life force more than you realize. Now, of course, at this point one can become extremely paranoid and start to blame everything that you don’t succeed at in your life, or every problem that you have, on others who are taking your life force, which is just a wonderful way of excusing yourself and not doing those things. So here you have to be very careful to perceive properly when you are being manipulated and when you are just trying to blame others. If you search your heart you will really know. That’s about all I can say on that subject.

The most dangerous of all manipulations is love—most frequently used. Someone will get you to love them or think that they love you. Human beings have this crazy need and the need is not necessarily there, it’s just part of the way of seeing that we grew up with, that people taught us, but that isn’t necessarily intrinsic to our being, and that’s a need to be loved. I don’t really believe that we need to be loved. If no one ever loved you, you could have a perfectly happy life. I do think that we have a need to love, and loving brings us into higher states of attention and makes us stronger, but we don’t actually need to feel anybody’s love to be happy. It isn’t feeling someone’s love that makes you happy. Someone can love you and you can be miserable if you’re not in a good state of mind. But when we love, we are happy, we’re strong, and we take a step beyond the limited self and we see the other. But love creates the greatest possibilities of manipulation—love and ego.

"Om namah shivaya"

There are many different mantras that you can use when you meditate. I have several favorites. I like Aum, of course, which is the most powerful of all mantras, but I also like Lakshmi’s mantra. Lakshmi is a celestial being who lives in a higher plane of existence, another world. Her mantra is “Sring.” S-R-I-N-G. When you chant it, it brings beauty and light into your consciousness. Someday you might try starting your meditation with Sring instead of Aum. Chant Sring as follows— (Rama demonstrates chanting Sring.) Try chanting Sring for five minutes and see what happens. You’ll find that your whole consciousness will fill with light. Another time you might try Kali’s mantra. Kali, of course, is another celestial being. She offers very fast spiritual progress through intensity. Her mantra is “Kring.” K-R-I-N-G. When you chant Kring, chant it very intensely and sharply. (Rama demonstrates chanting Kring.) When you chant Kring, you’ll feel power entering your being. Only chant Kring, though, when you’re in a high meditation. While you can chant Aum and Sring and most other mantras at the beginning of your meditation, or any time you like, Kring will only really work when you’re already in a meditative state. So you would chant Kring towards the end of your meditation a few times very intensely and then sit and meditate for a few more minutes. These are a few different mantras that you can use. Experiment. See how they feel.

An advanced way to meditate, of course, is to focus on your teacher. If you have a spiritual teacher and you focus on them during meditation, then you access the light that flows through them. For example, I am a liberated teacher. After many lifetimes of meditation, I’ve reached a point where I can no longer be separated from meditation. I’m always in the state of meditation, or you could say I am meditation itself. A person who meditates with me, even though they may be thousands of miles away, focuses their attention on me. If they think of me, if they chant my name a few times or just in some way focus on me, then they’ll connect inwardly, psychically, with me. Well, “me” is light, to be honest with you. That’s about all there is inside me anymore. When you focus on me that light will be drawn into you. You’re not taking anything away from me. It’s not my light to begin with, in a sense; it’s the light of God and the light of eternity. So take all you want. This is how real spiritual teaching takes place. You can focus on myself or on any spiritual teacher. Spiritual teachers who have left the body, who are no longer on earth can help you too. I’m on earth now, but I won’t always be here. When I leave the body someday, I can help people just as effectively if they focus upon me. You can focus on Jesus or Buddha or Krishna, Ramakrishna, Lao Tsu, Yukteswar, Yogananda, Vivekenanda, any of the great spiritual teachers who have lived, or on a living teacher, and draw light from them, energy from them. This is a more advanced way. You see, what we really have to teach you in meditation can't be expressed in words. This is a tape to help you get started. But to be honest, deeper meditation can only be learned from a teacher.

When I sit with my students and meditate with them, I channel the kundalini, the energy, directly into them. I bring them to plane after plane of consciousness. What they would do in 100 years of meditation, I can do in an hour with them. This is how meditation is learned in its advanced stages. But regardless of whether you're working with a teacher or not, everyone must meditate each day on their own and do their daily meditations. As you do your daily meditations, your life will change. A new power and energy will enter your life. Most people change between age zero and four. Then around age four or five the personality begins to become structured and our growth slows down. The older we get, the less we change. When we meditate we become perpetually young. We make the personality structure more pliant.

After meditation, don't immediately enter into activity. Sit for a minute or two in silence
and reflect on the experience you have just had. Often you will not feel the benefit of your
meditation until several minutes after you have stopped meditating. If you enter into activity
immediately, you can lose some of the benefits of your meditation.

I recommend the following practice for the first year or two or three. Each meditation session, when you sit down, relax for a moment and consider what you’re doing. As you sit for just a moment, before you start, take a deep breath and relax. Then sit up nice and straight, either in a cross-legged position on a rug, on the floor, or in a chair. Close your eyes, and repeat Aum. Aum, spelled A-U-M, is a mantra. Mantras are powerful sounds which, when repeated, help clear our mind and bring us into a deeper state of meditation. Whenever you chant a mantra, you should chant it lovingly and beautifully. The sound has tremendous power. It activates our psychic consciousness; it creates a response. To begin with, chant Aum four or seven times, or as many times as you would like. But four or seven is a good figure. Always elongate the mantra. Chant Aum as follows— (Rama demonstrates). When you repeat Aum, the second part of the mantra, that is to say the “mmm” should be much longer than the “Au.” Try and sustain the mantra for as long as you can, but don’t overdo it. Chant the mantra a number of times. As you do, focus your full awareness upon it. This is the beginning of your meditation session. Now, after you’ve chanted Aum, let’s say seven times, open your eyes. Now it’s necessary to practice concentration for several minutes. This is a very, very important step in your meditation session each day.

To do something perfectly, you must hook yourself to the power of the second attention and nirvana.Once you can do that, almost nothing is impossible, whether it is levitating, snowboarding perfectly or being enlightened.You come to know all of this through meditating.In meditation, when your thoughts are stopped, you become empty. When you are empty, your mind folds back on itself and you see through the illusions of the material world.

In Tantric Buddhism we learn to meditate in two ways. First we learn how to sit and focus on our chakras and stop our thoughts. Then, when the mind is empty, we can travel into the astral dimensions, the causal dimensions, or if we are very advanced in the practice of meditation, we can merge our minds with nirvana itself. The second way we learn to meditate in Tantric Buddhism is by practicing mindfulness.Mindfulness is the practice of doing physical things perfectly—in a state of emptiness—in which we become consciously ‘one’ with whatever physical or mental activity we are currently engaged in.You will find that, as you gain more control in your meditation,it will be much easier for you to practice mindfulness. You will also find, conversely, that the practice of mindfulness—of doing physical and mental things perfectly—will help you improve your daily meditation practice.

Close your eyes,fermez vos yeux,close your eyes babe.

"perfect action"

Before beginning an activity,always first empty yourself of thoughts regarding what you are about to do. Then allow the inherent emptiness within what you are about to do to direct you. Instead of your ego directing you and making countless mistakes, allow yourself to be guided by the invisible principles of the universe within your actions. At that time there will be a perfect flow of energy in whatever you choose to do, and there will be a grace and power present in all of your movements. From a Tantric Buddhist perspective, this is perfect action.