Cleanse your mind!

We cleanse our body regularly to get rid of dirt. In the same way, our mind requires cleansing. During the day, we go through different thought forms from human interactions, watching TV, reading newspaper, etc.. All these activities leave some impression in our mind. It becomes vital to cleanse the mind and rest in your own energy to completely heal yourself daily. Your energy is your best healing agent.

One of the simple ways to do this would be to observe the breath. There is a Zen saying.. Sit like a mountain and observe the thoughts as if they are floating clouds. Allowing the thoughts to flow through becomes easy when the awareness is on the breath. If the awareness moves from breath to the thoughts again, bring it back to the breath and settle with your breath.

If you are already into meditation, focus on the gaps between the thoughts, if you could feel it. Stay in the thoughtless state even if it happens for brief moments. Breath also shall be very shallow in that state. One reaches this state with ease if the prana moves through sushumna (breath balanced in both the nostrils). One could even walk and observe the thoughtless state. It is resting in the awareness itself. Rest in yourself and cherish the inner peace!

Prana and Mind - Way to Liberation

The flow of prana in the nadi's is directly related to the state of mind. There are three major nadis - ida, pingala and sushumna. Generally the breath shifts between ida and pingala. For a brief duration, it flows through sushumna during the shifting phase. The mind becomes free only when the breath flows through the sushumna. Until then it remains captivated by duality, the good and bad, positive and negative, pleasure and pain... When the breath flows through sushumna, the mind becomes more of an observer. It is the state of meditation. The goal of a yogi is to keep the breath in the sushumna channel.

When the prana flows through ida, you can feel the breath flowing through your left nostril. When the prana flows through pingala, you can feel the breath flowing through the right nostril. When the prana starts moving in sushumna, the breath starts flowing in both the nostrils.

A hatha yogi uses different physical poses to control the flow of breath. Mahamudra is one of the mudras that helps in making the breath flow through sushumna. That is why that mudra is given a very high importance. Long back it was the secret known only to the himalayan yogis. Advanced yogis control the flow of their prana, just with their mind. Keeping the mind in the bridge between the nostrils will help the breath flow through the sushumna.

One cannot be always putting some effort to keep the breath flow through the sushumna. It has to naturally flow through sushumna most of the time without any effort. That stage is achieved when the major energy blocks (granthis) along the sushumna are opened up. That is achieved through yogic practices. Kriya yoga moves the prana in the sushumna to clear the blocks. It is considered one of the quickest methods to achieve great results. Working directly with the subtler body (being aware of the energy body) is my favourite way for clearing the blocks. I consider it a very efficient technique.

When the energy blocks are opened up, the prana starts flowing through the sushumna giving a state of freedom and bliss. It may not free one completely from the worldly suffering immediately. There may be still disease, old age and death. But, a free mind makes you a pure observer. An observing mind does not add further karma as you would lose the sense of doing and you would know things happen through you. Things happen to reduce the karmic burden. It would pave way for liberation.

When Seeing is Just Seeing...

The world is not the same for everyone. It varies according to the mind of the seer. To be more precise, your mind is the world for you.

The happiness or the pain that we suffer is dependent upon our mind and the way we look at the situations. When seeing happens, it does not just end with the seeing. There is always more to that seeing, that happens inside. That is interpretation of that seeing, according to the past moulding of the mind.

If you change the colour of the glasses that you see the world through, the visuals may appear accordingly. It is just the same. We see the world through a conditioned glass called mind. A pure mind has no conditioning and it sees it and only sees it. There is no interpretation. When there is no interpretation, there is just stillness and bliss.

When one starts experiencing that stillness and bliss, one losses the sense of doer-ship and starts observing the happenings. In the deep stillness, there is no you, but then the things happen through you. It cannot be called as an action. It is just a happening.

When this seeing is just seeing, no new karma is added and one is free from the entanglements of this world and lives a liberated life.

Fastest Way to Self Realization

Self Realization : Realization of the self. It is just the realization of the existing self and there is no need to add anything to the self. The self is ever pure and animates all the beings and it is changeless and everlasting.

Our responsibility is to just remove the layers that cover the 'I' by transcending 'i', where 'I' is the real self and 'i' is our imagination or the mental image of what we consider ourselves to be.

This is not to be achieved. Achievement is the play of the mind. It has to be realized. It is a simple happening that will happen by awareness.
This realization could be as quick as the blink of the eye as told by many realized masters. It is the start of the realization of the real self. As the progress happens, one completely transcends the mind and is able to use the mind as a pure channel for receiving the messages of the higher self.

This sounds too simple for the mind which may not allow one to realize this truth. So, in many cases, some techniques aid in this process. The techniques will just help quieten the mind (by shifting the awareness) and the rest of the process happens on its own. When the mind takes rest, the flowering of the consciousness happens in the human being.

The simplest way to achieve this, is to shift the awareness on the being that will give rest to the ever active mind. It is not very tough to get the awareness of your energy body or the being. Just close your eyes and feel your hand or feel your head. When you are comfortable doing that, just extend the awareness to your whole body. When you are able to feel your complete energy body, it will just dissolve and make the mind pure. This state is called as total dissolution in the vipassana lineage. This will give a good rest to your mind and would help realize the ever existing consciousness.

Initially, one could realize a short gap between the thoughts. Gradually the gap between the thoughts would increase which is the real indicator of a successful meditation. As the gap between the thought increases, the consciousness flowers. The same is achieved by directly observing the thoughts without analysing them along with breath, as in Zen meditation.

This simple and powerful guided meditation (Eckhart Tolle stye) may help you get aware of your inner being.

 

You can watch more of Eckhart Tolle's videos to understand his teachings better or could attend a vipassana meditation retreat in the lineage of Goenka which would be really beneficial for making a quick progress.

Realizing Truth - Possible only without mind

The Truth of human existence or the eternal truth or the so called liberation could only be achieved transcending the mind. The same has been referred to as nirvana, enlightenment and mukti. It is not possible to comprehend the ultimate truth with the help of the mind as the human mind has a lot of limitations. A human being is not just made of mind and body. There is one more important component, the consciousness, which animates the mind and the body.

To understand consciousness, you have to rest in consciousness and become consciousness itself (already you are the consciousness). This is possible when the mind is given rest and the consciousness is allowed to flower. Every human being is realized and nothing more has to be added or learned to attain that state. It is not a state to be attained at all. It is a state that has to be realized. To realize that state, we have to just remove the barrier, the curtain, which is the mind.


The consciousness is like a white canvas and our thought pattern is like the painting on the canvas. The painting is so rich with colours and overwhelming that we forget the canvas or fail to even notice it. When the layer of the paint is removed, the canvas becomes visible. In the same manner, when the continuous thought pattern is given a break, the consciousness makes itself visible and one can find one's reality.

We human beings, generally have a created set of thoughts. We create an identity like a doctor, engineer... and give that character a set of attributes and claim it to be the self which is a mind created play and not the reality. If one renounces the thoughts and realizes the eternal consciousness, one comes out of the play of the mind and gets established in the reality.

Mind is a Barrier for Enlightenment

A powerful weapon that a human being has got, in the process of evolution, is a powerful mind, which can imagine and manifest. It is through this mind we recognize what we see. For example, a flower is given in the hands of a Botanist and a Mechanic. Both have their mind conditioned in a different manner. If you ask both of them to write a page about that flower, you could see a great deal of difference in their writings. But, the flower is the same. How could it be? A same flower makes different sense for different persons! It is the play of the mind according to the conditioning. Both of them are seeing the same flower through a different lens (the conditioned mind). But, only a person who is capable of transcending the mind may see the reality of what it (the object that we recognized as flower) really is, without any lens.

The barrier

Mind becomes a barrier and makes us remain in ignorance which creates pleasure and pain. It does not allow us to enjoy the real bliss. Even though we always live in the present, mind does not allow us to completely participate in the present. It creates a past and a future and makes us spend most of our time in either the past or the future. It is only the current present which will have its impact in the future and it was the same present, long ago which has left some impact in the past. But, we ignore the importance of the present moment and are taken away by the past and the future which creates either joy or sorrow. Because of this, we react most of the time.

To transcend these duality of present and past, joy and sorrow, it is important to transcend the mind. It is the mind which creates this duality which is non-existent in reality and makes us ignorant of our real nature. When this great task is accomplished, we would become a better master of our mind and could call it to serve us, when we are in need of it. You could say, even now, I command my mind and have control over it. If that is so, you may try ordering it to stop its functioning for a while... Did you succeed? No thoughts popped up for a while? It may be a tough task, but not an impossible one to achieve.

The real freedom

If you could start observing your mind, it would be interesting to find that, there is a continuous flow of thoughts... continuous. When we start observing this flow of thoughts, the gap between the thoughts would become visible and it would increase in the due course of time. This process would take one to the inner stillness.

It is through meditation this could be achieved at ease and the grips of mind over us could be dissolved. When we are able to separate ourselves from the flow of thoughts and get a glance of the flowing thoughts, a great difference would come in. When this process sets in, we can start transcending the mind and enjoy the real freedom. Freedom from joy and pain! A feel of internal bliss!