₦airaland Forum

So that's how to concentrate and how to meditate. If you practice these things -- simplistic though they may seem -- they will enable you to develop a great power in your life. Again, it doesn't seem very complicated when the guy just lifts weights all the time. There is not much to it -- a bar, some weights, and he lifts them. But if he keeps doing it, he can quadruple his strength. It is the same [with concentration and meditation]. This is like working out. It is working out -- working out with your mind. Most people don't do it at all. The only concentration they have is on the television set. That isn't very powerful or profound. If you do these exercises on a regular basis and you become consistent, then you will become a gymnast of the mind. And once you learn to concentrate and focus for extended periods of time, and then to stop thought, you'll be ready for more advanced lessons.
Rama

Initially, it won't seem like anything is happening, but something is. Inwardly, your mind is becoming stronger and you're gaining personal power. After a while, that power will begin to manifest in your life. You will find it’s easier to study. It’s easier to do your job. Your mind is sharp, clear and defined. You are more aware. And a feeling will come after a while. You will just feel better. You are more in touch with everything in your life. Then knowledge and power will come to you, later, through these practices.
Rama

Initially, it may not seem like you're doing anything and you are just thinking a lot. But you are doing something, as long as you're trying. It is like doing push-ups. You can be doing pushups and all the time thinking it's not doing anything, but obviously, as long as you're trying and doing them, you're getting stronger. After you've practiced doing your push-ups for a while, after two or three sessions, you won't necessarily see huge muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger has, but you will begin to see and feel a difference. It is the same with the practice of concentration.
Rama

The chakra around the navel area is the power chakra, and as you focus on this center you will develop tremendous will power. The heart center -- which is in the center of the chest -- develops the psychic centers, the psychic abilities, sensitivities, and also brings about a tremendous stillness within the mind and extraordinarily develops one's ability to experience love and beauty. It also develops your ESP and many other things. The third eye, which is between the eyebrows and slightly above -- focusing in this area develops your intuitive wisdom, your knowledge, your higher mind, and gives you visions into other planes of reality.
Rama

When you concentrate, you're focusing on something. When you meditate, you're letting go and dissolving. You're losing awareness of anything in particular at all, even the awareness of awareness. In meditation, you are seeking to stop all thought. It is very hard just to stop your thoughts. Try it. Not to have one thought, image, idea, or associative feeling in the mind is difficult for most people. Rather than just trying to stop your thoughts, which is hard and frustrating, it's easier to concentrate and focus on something. As you focus completely on something, all other thoughts will be forced out of the mind because your attention will be dominated by the object of concentration. This develops your mental power exquisitely.
Rama

I wouldn't jump to an hour twice a day to start with, because you'll be wasting your time -- because you will not be able to sustain high levels of awareness for that period of time. It is better to meditate for a short period of time intensely and go do something else with that extra time, than to sit there and space out and just think you're meditating and concentrating. Very few people are capable of an intensive level of concentration and meditation for very long periods of time. You develop that ability the same way that you develop muscles, by working out. In the beginning, you can only do a few push-ups, maybe one or two, then five, then ten, then 50, then 100. So your mental agility and power will develop through practice. That's a simple training schedule for you.
Rama

In short, the practice of Zen enables you to use your mind in an extremely effective and precise way. It allows you to succeed at whatever you would like to -- within the parameters of possible success, owing to circumstance, and whether it's material success or psychic or spiritual success, or whatever. You can do it when have mind at your disposal.
So, how do you meditate?
Rama

In the study of mind, you are engaging in a very high-tech study, the ultimate high-tech study, and that's the study of being. Even after a year or two of intensive study -- let alone five or six years, or a lifetime, many lifetimes -- you will possess a knowledge and power of mind that far dwarfs most human beings. Your ability to use mind in whatever way you choose is outrageous. Again, a lot will depend upon how intensely you approach the study and the state of mind in which you begin, and so on.
Rama

like that. But we're not taught about mind, states of mind, and how to use mind in a variety of different ways. The study of mind is the study of life because all of life obviously interacts with mind. We can't dismiss aspects of our life, our careers, our relationships, our loves, our hates -- all of these things are bound into the study of mind. The study of mind is the study of life itself. The study of concentration and meditation is not simply the study of exercises and focusing. It is that, but to truly engage in the study, you engage actively in every aspect of your life. And, of course, a revolution occurs in your being. The average person who studies martial arts, even after a year or two, becomes amazingly proficient in self-defense. Were they to run into the common neighborhood bully who is capable of beating up most people on the block, they could drop him with one kick -- because the bully's knowledge is simplistic. It may seem impressive, if you're just a kid on the block, because he's been in 50 fights, and you've only been in one or two. But after a couple years of martial arts, where you have studied the discipline of fighting and learned from an advanced master who learned from an advanced master and so on, you're studying such a high-tech form of self-defense that the bully, with all of his knowledge and all of his battle experience, will have no idea what you're doing when suddenly, that foot connects with his head and he's on the ground -- and it's all over.
Rama

The basic disciplines of concentration and meditation bring about immediate and wonderful results. But what I'm suggesting is that there's something beyond that. And that's when a person really begins to explore altered attention and awareness. That is when the most profound experiences of mind start.
Rama

We hear wonderful stories about some masters who can walk on water and do all kinds of great things -- do healings, things like that. These are true powers that can come from a person who engages in the study of mind. But the major power that a real teacher has is not the ability to do things like walk on water or heal. Those are interesting talents, and they're useful sometimes. But the real power that a teacher of mind develops is the ability to transmit power and knowledge directly to an individual. Because in the teaching of the ten thousand states of mind, particularly as one advances further -- not so much in just learning basic concentration and meditation, basic zazen, but after a person has done that and they progress further -- the teaching is done through transmission. This is where we differ from teaching algebra or calculus or English. Those things are taught through verbal instruction.
Rama

Some people climb a little bit higher up on the scale of consciousness and they seem to know more, feel more and experience more, and perhaps they are more successful. We say that such a person is deeper or more aware, more dynamic, charismatic. There are different formations of this. Sometimes it takes an intellectual tack, sometimes a spiritual tack, sometimes an artistic tack, maybe a physical tack. It depends. It varies. There is no way it has to be. These individuals have learned something. They may have just stumbled upon it, or they may have studied a type of self-discovery that gave them the knowledge to be more successful and more profoundly aware, to be happier. Whatever they did, whether it was accidental or intentional, allowed them to stumble upon some higher states of mind. Yet very few of those persons could teach you how to do what they've done. They could give you a general prescription, "Well, I bought stock at this price and it rose suddenly to that price, and then I sold it and then I leveraged some real estate." Or they might say, "Well gosh, I sat down and I meditated for two hours a day every day, and after a while my awareness field changed." In other words, they could explain what they did in physical terms, but you have to be in the state of mind that they were in to experience what they experienced. You might employ the same prescription, and it might not generate the same results because you're not in the same state of mind that they were in.
Rama

Citipati

Meditation, then, and concentration are practices that enable you to become more conscious and to utilize the moments in your life completely. Concentration and meditation are also taught in other forms of self-discovery, in yoga and in other practices. Zen differs from many other practices in that its emphasis is almost exclusively on concentration and meditation in two forms. One is zazen, which is the practice of direct concentration and meditation, where for a period of time you are not active physically, and you sit down to practice concentration and meditation exercises. [Two is] mindfulness, which is a practice that an individual engages in at all other times, which is an advanced usage of the mind in a variety of different ways -- to increase the power of the mind, to develop it fully, and to employ that development in direct physical, mental and psychic ways. In other words, when you practice mindfulness, you're able to accomplish basically anything you might like to within the parameters of your capabilities. But you realize those capabilities.
Rama

Ganapati

Zen -- which means meditation, stopping thought -- is about going beyond ideas to direct and immediate experiences. Inherent in this is a sense that there's much more to life. There is much more than the state of mind you're in. There are 9,999 other states of mind. And beyond that, there's something entirely different that is impossible to put in words, which we call nirvana -- which is just a word to suggest that there's something else that's wonderful and amazing and fantastic that lies beyond the ten thousand states of mind.
Rama

Mahakala

Vessavana

Self-discovery requires a bit of courage and a belief in a feeling. I can’t define it more than that for you—except to say that there’s a feeling of ecstasy, of freedom, which is available to a person depending upon how gutsy they are, how patient they are, how hopeful they are and how tough they are. You have to be very, very gutsy to look the world in the face, society in the face, families, power structures and to walk away from all that. To decide that you’re not going to fit in, nor are you going to try not to, but you’re just going to follow the beat of a different drummer—your own. That’s pretty gutsy because everyone is applying pressure for everyone else to conform. If you think about it, the constraints that humankind has set upon itself, what they’ve agreed upon as acceptable, is so narrow, so rigid. If you just don’t wear your clothes one day, they’ll lock you up. No, that’s pretty rigid! That’s a pretty simple action. In other words, everything’s been so defined that it doesn’t really leave one a lot of room to move.
Rama

I personally have lived in a number of spiritual communities over the lifetimes and directed a number of them. I feel that in today’s world, one is better not to live in such a place because one can, with a minimal amount of effort, earn a very large amount of money these days since there isn’t as much of a class system as we had in other lifetimes. A person can really set up their own little ashram, their own little community, in their own little apartment or condominium or house, do commerce with the world and not be undone by it. I’ve devised a way, through computer science largely, of making a great deal of money in relatively short periods of time and in a way that will actually develop the mind, further the mind’s awareness, and that will assist one in being able to meditate, in other words, and be free. If your ashram is your own, no one’s going to tell you what to do. You don’t have to deal with a power infrastructure. You don’t have to deal with whether someone likes you or not. You can cut your own way through the universe. I think it’s better. I think that we just give up one dictator for another when we leave society and move into an ashram. I think it’s better to make our own way and have our own spot and then we can call the shots. If we make mistakes we make them, and if we succeed, then we succeed. But before launching on your career of self-discovery, I would make a few suggestions as to what matters and what doesn’t. To begin with, what you’re trying to do is to be free. I think it’s good to keep it simple. There’s a lot of religious jargon and mystical jargon and a lot of people seem to get caught up in jargon like they get caught up in ashrams and power structures and they never become free, but they become masters of jargon and power structures. I think freedom is a good word, and it’s an English word and it will do—freedom from the limitations of the world, freedom from the limitations of the mind as we know the mind in day-to-day life—the thinking mind, the doubt-ridden mind, the fearful mind, the aggressive mind, the desiring mind.
Rama

But suppose you've been imprinted by people who take power from others, which is most, almost all human beings in this world. In other words, I would suggest that a lot of the imprints that you have gained, or imprints that you have gained as you have lived your life, have been imprints of taking power from others -- taking power during sexual experiences, taking power from those you associate with in school, taking power from those who you associate with in family relationships, taking power from those you associate with at your job, taking power from people you don't even see physically anymore. You may have known them years and years ago, but you can still enter into their attention field and drain them. Most people drain each other. Or, what's worse is, they're draining you right now, psychically. To not know about this is not to be protected from it. Innocence does not protect you. Otherwise, the little lamb would never be slaughtered. Purity does not necessarily bring about, by itself, awareness and knowledge and freedom. Otherwise every tree or plant that grows would be totally powerful and totally knowledgeable and totally free because they're completely pure. In addition to purity, in addition to innocence, we have to have knowledge -- the knowledge of good and evil and also a knowledge that transcends good and evil, which is self-awareness. We have to move beyond the limited parameters that most human beings have and realize that there are thousands and millions of worlds beyond this world -- planes of reality.
Rama

So it's necessary to groom our life, to bring it into order, to examine each thing in our life and ask ourselves if it's bringing power and force and energy into our life or if it's draining it. So it's necessary to look at each relationship we have, at our career, where we live, at our habits and routines, at our thought patterns. Each item has to be carefully gone through and constantly improved and checked and rechecked. The question you have to ask yourself, the most basic question is, is your life taking power from you? Or is it adding power to you? You need an honest answer. Are you stronger each day? When I say stronger, I don't simply mean your physical body, but is your awareness stronger? And remember, the way we measure awareness is by how long you can stop thought. If you can't stop thought at all at this time, then you are not powerful. You might be quite evolved, but you have no access to that evolution. You've inherited money, but it hasn't come to you yet, and it might not come to you. It's necessary for you to stop thought.
Rama

If your parents were strong in one way and weak in another, you will be strong in the same way and weak in the same way. Even though you may detest the weakness that you saw in them, you will find that you will do exactly the same things in the same situation because they imprinted you. Not by choice. That is to say, they didn't want to give you a weak imprint. They might have wanted the opposite, but they couldn't help themselves. Perhaps they were imprinted in the same way.
Rama

Power. Power is what's required to change the universe -- to change yourself into what you might like to be. If a rocket seeks to put a space ship, a satellite, whatever it may be, into orbit, it has to have power. The more velocity it has, the higher the orbit will be of the satellite or the space station or the space ship. A great deal of power is required to go above the earth's gravitational field. If there's enough power, then an orbit is gained above the earth, above the world. Eventually gravity will pull the object back down. The higher the orbit, the longer it will take. If there's enough power, then one can break free of the earth's gravity field. But then again, one can get trapped in the field of another heavenly body, so to speak.
Rama

There are many ways to store power. You can visit places of power, special locations on the earth that are charged with power. You can be around powerful people. You can read the writings, listen to the tapes or read about beings of power. In other words, anything that puts you in touch with power -- exercise, certain types of food, fasting, breaking up routines, specific ways of dreaming, certain ways of looking at life -- there are many, many ways to shift one's attention, to be more or less powerful.
Rama

Heruka

Hunpey

We see signs of it perhaps for 28 days or 34 days, then it goes away. Yet we are different.
Rama

Satori is a brief flash. Suddenly the light breaks through. For a short timeless time we experience eternity in its unmanifest form. It's comparable to salvikalpa samadhi.
Rama

Each of the small enlightenments that a Zen practitioner has, which are known in Zen as "Satori experiences," provides deeper insights into the nature of existence and helps a person prepare for complete enlightenment.
Rama

Everyone is psychic. People just don't know that. They think so much. They worry so much. They're so caught up in unhappy emotions. They're not still enough.
Rama

Meditation is the way the mind is. That's why in Zen they call it the natural state, which means you don't have to go and do anything to meditate.
Rama