I am eternity

'~Sama'

Atoms are indivisible.

The enemy is fear.We think it is hate;but it is fear.

All words are useless.

Options.

Options.

Self-realization is a circle. We run away from the things of the world because they seem to harm us. We leave them, we progress spiritually, now we need to go back into the world again, into careers, into relationships, into all of those things and see God in all of them. That's tantra—that in spite of your advanced spirituality and in spite of your high consciousness, when you think you should be up on top of the mountain just contemplating all day, you'll find yourself in the middle of a traffic jam, you'll find yourself talking to someone, you'll find yourself working in an office. That's advanced yoga.

So it's kind of crazy, this tantra stuff. In other words, after many years of meditation, self-discovery and devoting your life to God, studying with a teacher, different teachers, or just being by yourself but really working on it, and you finally give up everything, all the things that you're supposed to avoid, then you find out that there's nothing you're supposed to avoid, yet there are things that are good to avoid. I mean, you shouldn't run around killing people or eating meat1 or doing things like that. That's not what we mean by tantra. Again, there's no need to break the rules. The rules have become your life. They're your discipline.

So on the dark day in a dark time, when everything is frustrating and depressing, what you need to do is first to meditate, to just sit, even if it seems you're not meditating well,and think of all the beautiful and wonderful experiences that you've ever had in your life. Just take five minutes and quickly review, holding each image just for a moment in your mind⎯the beautiful places, the power places you've been to, experiences in nature, people you love—bring it all together. Just take five minutes and scan very quickly through the good experiences in your life. By that I mean what you would consider to be the spiritually evolved experiences, the higher moments, when you've touched a deeper reality. And by doing that you'll reawaken something in yourself. Then, once you've done that, even if you still feel terrible, do something. Break your patterns. Instead of going to work that day, roam a shopping mall—this is why I love shopping malls—and see that all the people in that shopping mall who could care less about self-discovery and spirituality are God. Go to a movie. And see that God is the movie. Go to Disneyland. Go away for the weekend. Just buy a ticket someplace. Surprise yourself. Put it on your charge card and go with a friend or by yourself to the mountains someplace, to a ski resort even if you don't ski. That's true tantra! Be a little bit crazy. Break out. Remember the things that made you happy in those past years, that gave you that high moment. Were they experiences with people? Were they experiences in nature? What worked? What brought you to the path of selfdiscovery? That was your tantra. Don't go back to those same places. But grab onto that essential energy that you used and use it again, only in the next step, in the next phase.

If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.'

Try the inner cry. Cry to God, cry to your spiritual teacher, if you have one. Cry to a favorite god or goddess or whatever you consider noble and divine. If you do that just for a couple of minutes with your whole being, just like a child who so badly wants a cookie is going to say, “Oh, Mom, pleeeease can I have a cookie? Pleeease?” The child wants that cookie more than anything else. If you feel that you want eternity and light more than anything else in your meditation—just for a few minutes, you don’t have to go on and on— you’ll break through the barrier of the mind. You’ll go beyond it. Then just sit quietly and feel, and you’ll see that light will enter your consciousness and fill your meditation.

The inner cry is a very good way to meditate. As you’re sitting there in meditation, just cry inwardly to God, to that source, to your spiritual teacher if you have one, to a particular god or goddess, a celestial being in a higher plane that you’re drawn to. As you sit and meditate, reach with your whole being. Cry like a child, not with tears or unhappiness, but just reach. So, for example, if you were meditating with your whole being on Lakshmi, the goddess of light and beauty, you might repeat her name. You might, with your whole being, just say, “Lakshmi, Lakshmi, Lakshmi” silently inside yourself. If you do this with great intensity just for a few minutes, it will bring your heart out, and the power of your love will attract a higher reality to you.

But now it’s time, now that you’ve gotten this practice a little bit together, to start to work on refining your meditative level. To do this you need to intensify the practice. Try some of the following methods. When you’re meditating, after you’ve started to meditate and you’ve meditated on the yantra or a candle flame, instead of meditating on the heart center, now instead, simply try feeling gratitude. Sit and feel grateful to existence or to eternity or to life because you are, because your life is good, because you’re meditating and if you’re meditating, that means that your life is going to continue to become more beautiful, you’ll become happier and clearer and more aware. Feel grateful for the people you love, for the beauty of the day or evening. If you can’t feel grateful, if you’re discouraged or depressed, then think of the fact that things could be a lot worse than they are, and you should be grateful that things are not worse because believe me, no matter how bad things may seem, they can always get a lot worse. Just start gratitude. Create it. Gratitude is a bird that soars very, very high, and you can get on its back and fly with it, way above the clouds. Gratitude is a good method.

Try will power. When your thoughts come and you’re trying to stop them, simply say “No.” Learn the mantra, “No.” N-O. Every time a thought comes in your mind, say “No.” Just repeat the thought, “No.” This is the method endorsed, in a sense, by Sri Ramakrishna, the great spiritual teacher from many years ago. He said that when you have a thorn stuck in your foot, you can take another thorn to help you get the first one out, and then throw both away.

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.

There are a few things that you can do that will help you in your meditation. If you become a vegetarian it will make it easier to meditate. Eating meat and fish and birds, things like that, makes it harder to meditate. The consciousness of animals is very restless, very aggressive. You are affected by the food that you eat. Everything has a vibration, and the flesh of animals has a very unruly vibration. It makes it harder to stop thought. So if you give up meat and fish and birds and things like that, you'll find that it's much easier to meditate. It's also much healthier and less expensive. Human beings were not always carnivores. Originally they were vegetarians until the Ice Age. You can eat eggs—they have a good pure consciousness—for protein. Dairy products are fine, vegetables, pastas, all kinds of things, there's lots and lots—worlds to explore in vegetarian cuisine that will help. It's important not to move while you meditate. Sometimes when you're sitting there meditating you may find yourself swaying. As the prana current and the kundalini and different energies begin to move through you, you'll feel yourself moving and rocking. Keep the body still at all times, otherwise that energy will be lost as it expresses itself through the physical. Whereas if you keep very, very still you'll find that that energy will just take you higher in meditation.

Never expect anything from a particular meditation. Don't try and meditate a certain way. Once you've gotten started, once you've chanted the mantra a few times and practiced concentration on the yantra or a candle flame and meditated maybe for a few minutes on your heart center, or tried gratitude or willpower, all these different methods just to get you into the stream, then just let go and let the meditation take you wherever it would like to. Be free in your awareness and free in your love. Relax and let it happen. Remember you have lots of help. God is meditating in you and through you. The beneficent forces of existence are glad to help you. You can focus on me or any spiritual teacher. We're glad to help you. You've got lots of help. All you need.

For most people this is meditation. Getting up in the morning and as soon as you get up or whenever you get up, meditating and never leaving the house until you've meditated. Your mind is most receptive at this time, even though it may seem more difficult to meditate because you're a little sleepy. Still, the mind is quiet, you haven't been thinking, so you'll find it easy to meditate. Meditate then for half an hour or an hour. Then, don't think about your meditation. Go out into the world, do your best all day, try to think higher thoughts, try to be kind and compassionate, but don't let people take advantage of you. Then at noon, try and meditate again for a few minutes.

Then, of course, there's graduate school. Graduate school is advanced meditation. Advanced meditation assumes certain things. It assumes that one has meditated for many years, five, ten, fifteen years, and learned to meditate well. You can meditate for an hour, stop your thoughts completely at some point in the meditation, even if it takes you half an hour or forty minutes, and enter into a timeless state of existence. You've worked out the basics in your life. You become a very nice person.

Anyone who really practices advanced meditation has spent quite a bit of time, of course, doing karma yoga. You have to work for others. Usually such a person will live in a spiritual community where they have the opportunity to give to others, as the personal family doesn't mean as much to us. The personal family is a fixation. Not for you, perhaps, but for people who are advanced meditators. You can enjoy your family and your friends and your career, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. A person who practices advanced meditation has gone a step further. It's like joining an order of spiritual aspirants. The family, career, money, the things that most people strive for don't mean that much to you. You may have them, you may not. But usually such people don't have families anymore. They're usually not married, some are. They usually don't have children, some do. But the chances are, if they've become an advanced meditator, they will not marry or have children because it demands too much time. This isn't selfish, it's just that God is directing them in another way. If they become an advanced meditator after they've had children or married, they may choose to leave their family, feeling that it was a nice stage that they went through and now eternity's pulling them in another direction. They know that God will take care of their family as God would if they died—which they have, because in advanced meditation we die and another self is born.

Advanced meditation is taught, then, in most cases, by a self-realized teacher, one who is liberated, enlightened—not through words but through transmission. That transmission does not have to take place physically, that is to say, the student doesn't have to be sitting across from you. But it's easier if they are because the vibration of the teacher is strongest in the physical proximity of the teacher. Once the student has spent some time with the teacher and learned the frequency, you might say, the student can be thousands of miles away and tune in and gain quite a bit. But it's still a good idea, whenever possible, to be in the physical presence of the enlightened teacher because it's not physical. You can hear the ocean from quite a ways away, but if you're standing right in front of it, it's easier. Then of course you can just jump in, like my friend the gray whale, who seems to have vanished from sight, which is not a bad thing for all of us to do—you can just be absorbed.

There's not really a whole lot you could say about liberation. The closest experience you can have of it is to come meditate with someone who is liberated. Many people claim to be liberated. Oh God, if we were to believe everybody who said they were liberated and selfrealized, I mean, it's an endless list. According to "moi," as Ms. Piggy would say, there are currently on this earth 12 beings who are self-realized. Eleven are men, one is a woman. Most of them are in the Far East, most of them you've never heard of and probably never will. They work with a very small group of advanced students. A couple don't even have students. They have friends, I suppose, but they just meditate a lot.

How can I lose?

Yama.

Bonjour.

Experiments.

Lasema

Pushpema.

Dhupema

Joshua tree

Vajra sattva

Gandhema