Children of Immortal Bliss

[Tara]

The following is an excerpt from Children of Immortal Bliss By Paul Hourihan. 

This is a wonderful answer to the question: How do we choose our path in daily life? How do we know when we must judge whether some act is a right act for us to include in our life? How do we know in which things we should participate in our life?

Imagine what the world would be like if each person came to know this understanding.

In the Yoga Aphorisms meditation is discovered and presented as the means to realizing the light within, the Self within. By meditation we chiefly mean yoga, and it is the heart of yoga, also yoga is more than meditation; it has an ethical and moral background as well. The first steps in this system focus on the development of character. A moral and ethical foundation needs to be established before one is fit for the practice of meditation and concentration. But essentially for our purposes here, meditation is yoga as chief thrust and practice item which the cells is realized.

One of the all-time great achievements was by Pantanjali when he discovered that what ever served to advance meditation was good and what ever it did not advance meditation was evil. A way of life that advances meditation and the meditative state is good, it is an absolute right. And anything that does not advance it, that tends to hobble it–a way of life, or attitude, or activity, or value, or book or whatever–is evil this is the yardstick: what ever makes the mind calm, that's good. What ever makes the mind restless, that's evil. Pantanjali saw clearly that in order to realize that Diety, the Truth within, you have to do it through meditation. You can't do it any other way. Prayer and good works are helpful, so they haven't brought us too far–mainly because we haven't learned how to do them in the right spirit. They are appendages to spiritual life and we have to go through them, but they lack a central yardstick, a central principle to which everything is related. That is meditation, and naturally, that means the mind. The mind is going to be effected by meditation.

You can realize the truth only through meditation. We have to learn to meditate. There are certain ways to meditate that are right, and search in ways that are not bright we have to find out the right way. Making the mind uplink is not a good way. We may have read that in a book: make the mind a blank. Before we listen to anyone in such an important area, we should find out their credentials. Or someone else may say, well, meditation is just relaxation. These relaxation therapies have value. They enable us to cope better in the stressful world we live in. Anything that can contribute to our peace of mind is of value, but they don't lead us to the truth.

We have to learn the right ways to meditate. Having done that, we find that certain conditions, including a certain state of mind, are necessary to meditate well. Other states of mind are inimical to meditation. Therefore what will help the mind to be calm and collected is what we want. Pantanjali sees this in a flash. Of course this was known in Upanishads. Columnists, tranquility, serenity–those words occur all through the Upanishads; they are self evident to the stages. But Pantanjali says that it's not self evident, that it needs to be spelled out or those who are not stages, but who want to become stages through the ladder of ethical development. So that is what he did.

We see that we have to be calm to meditate. We can't meditate when we are restless. When we are restless, instead of meditating we should pray, or repeat a mantra, take a walk, take a cold shower, do hatha yoga exercises or other things, as meditation at this time will make things worse. Unless we are calm, meditation will only intensify the cause of the restlessness. So we don't meditate when more restless, only when work home therefore whatever makes us call home or keeps this column is good: our mind will be in this state to meditate and through meditation or mind will get closer to truth. Therefore calm this is indispensable on the way to truth. Whatever gives us a feeling of peace and calm is an absolute good. It's part of the universal morality, the subjective fact we all discover.

Children of Immortal Bliss By Paul Hourihan