A Lecture at a Session of the University of Life Ethics
“About Yoga and Meditation” by Tatyana N. Mickushina, Part 1
March, 27, 2015
CONTENTS
1. A fragment from the seminar “Inner Path,” given in Altai, September, 2006
2. About meditation
3. From the lecture “An Introduction to Yoga” by Annie Besant
1. A fragment from the seminar “Inner Path,” given in Altai, September, 2006
Regular meditation and communication with the Higher Self
You should not stop meditations. Only regularity will bear fruit. If you want to succeed in any business, or for example, in playing some musical instrument, you need to acquire and consolidate skills every day. Meditation is exactly the same art as playing the violin. Fifteen minutes is enough, but it must be a daily session. In addition, you will need to spend about 20-30 minutes to prepare yourself for meditation, and to ask Archangel Michael for protection. The meditation practice is not readily available. If we also take into account that you live with a family and among neighbors who prefer turning on the radio or TV loudly or listen to music, then the practice of meditation is even less attainable.
I think that in fact, if your aspiration is great, the circumstances of your life will change sooner or later, and you will get a chance for your meditations. If the practice of meditation is the practice that you must deal with, then the conditions should arise to the best of your aspirations. You can write letters to the Karmic Board Masters if you do not have conditions to meditate, and the situation will change. These external circumstances surrounding your life must change. The external environment adapts to you completely, even without your participation. Everything you need to do is just to change yourself, to change your consciousness. Not thinking about external circumstances… You can ask about something and it all happens. It just needs time, about six months or a year, for the circumstances to change. You just need to endure it, to understand that it is your karma that prevents you from getting the opportunity to meditate. You must work within yourself, to endure this condition, and everything will change.
In the beginning, you do not have to do these regular practices every day. You can do this once or twice a week. At first, I was engaged in the practice of meditation twice a week - on Saturdays and Sundays, because I worked as chief accountant and was busy all day long, that is, from morning until night. I used to come home at 7, 8, or 9p.m., and I had no opportunity to meditate. But these regular sessions twice a week appeared to be enough for me to advance.
Some more recommendations
Make sure that the conditions around you correspond with the fact that you begin to contact the Divine. That is, you have to ensure that the whole situation in and around you when you begin to meditate is as harmonious as possible. If you do not clean the apartment, if you have all the things scattered, dust is all around, and the floor is not washed, then you must realize that all this purely physical dirt attracts astral entities and the vibration of the premises lowers. Especially if you have some rotten vegetables collected from the garden or flowers decaying in a vase, all of that attracts astral entities and the vibration of your apartment falls. It will be difficult for you. So you have to provide physical cleanliness.
Further, I made an altar at home because initially it helps a lot to concentrate. That is, the altar can be a center of focus. There I have placed the images of Masters, the scheme of “I AM PRESENCE,” statuettes, stones, candles, incense, and books. I have a Bible there. At the beginning, the altar was my place to focus. Now I do not care, in fact, if there is any altar or not, because I concentrate on my heart and go inside myself. But at first, at least to me, it was important. It helped me to elevate my consciousness.
Further, proceed to meditation after you take a shower, because by doing that the water cleanses your physical body from any external energy influences. Something may be stuck to your aura, and when you take a shower in the bathroom you wash this negativity off of yourself. Then it is easier for you to start meditation.
Also, if there are unfavorable outer sounds, I use earplugs that are sold in a pharmacy. I plug my ears, but this is not enough for me. I also wear muffler headphones on top of the earplugs when I start meditation. This is my tool for meditation, and you can use it too.
At the last session we talked about the fact that if it is very hard for you to focus on your heart, on the Divine, then you have to try to fill all your perception channels with something higher. Meaning you can turn on music, but not rock music, but classical music (like Bach or Rachmaninoff), which is very calm and comforting. You can light incense sticks, or use some aromatherapy oils. The largest perception channel we have is visual, so that is why we need the altar as a focus to fill in the visual channel with something higher.
2. About meditation
So, about meditation. Meditation is a Latin word. The verb meditari means in Latin “to ponder, to contemplate, to produce ideas.” I came up with my own definition of meditation. It goes like this: mediation is the highest degree of concentration.
When you start to meditate, you must understand what you will face. What is meditation? There are so many various definitions in the Internet, and different masters teach meditation techniques. The word ‘meditation’ can refer to totally, absolutely different things.
If you are engaged in a true meditation, then you, as if, switch your consciousness to another world.
We are in the physical world. This physical world has different vibrations depending on the location. If you are, for example, in Moscow, there is one level of vibration. If you come, for example, from Riga, you have another level of vibration. If you live somewhere in the country, you have yet another level of vibration. Every place differs in its vibration. When you begin to meditate you, so to say, change your vibration. Our physical body and our subtle bodies have a certain level of frequency, a vibrational frequency. That is, the cells pulsate all the time; they are alive - it is like the cells are beating the same way as a heart is beating. Depending on your inner state, the place where you are, your conditions, the food you eat, these vibrations are totally different. When you start to meditate, you change your vibration. When you change your vibration you begin to fall out of the overall vibrational field that you are in. Do you understand this?
That is, you meditate. If you are uncomfortable meditating, meditate not properly, or only meditate sometimes, it will affect neither you nor your environment. If you start meditating very seriously - meditation is like yoga, it is life - it is a completely different lifestyle. You either meditate or not meditate. You either aspire to God or not aspire to God. If you do not aspire to God, then you cannot meditate. So, if you meditate regularly in a certain place, then you change the vibration of the place. If you change the vibration of the place, what happens next?
For example, a place has a certain level of vibration and you begin to meditate. Little by little you start “falling out” from this level of vibration. You change the vibration of your space. What starts happening? You start being pushed back by the external forces around you - they start trying to get you back to the previous level of consciousness, to the average level of consciousness. It is logical, it is Physics. That is, for example, if a ball is immersed into water, it jumps out. So it is here, when your vibration rises, all around you starts trying to put you back in place. You need to feel it in order to understand what I am saying.
3. From the Lecture “An introduction to Yoga” by Annie Besant
Let’s refer to a lecture read by Annie Besant in 1912. I will remind you that Annie Besant headed the Theosophical Society of England after Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. She gave a lecture in London, called “An Introduction to Yoga.” It is quite large, voluminous, as there is not one lecture, but four lectures. In the lecture she says, in particular, that there are two Paths. There is the Pravritti Marga Path and there is the Nivritti Path. Pravritti Marga is the Path of Forthgoing, which the vast majority of human beings are on. On that Path “desires are necessary and useful. And the more desires a man has, the better for his evolution. They are the motives that prompt activity. Without these he stagnates, he is inert.”
What is the Path of Nivritti? It is the Path of Return. On the Path of Return “desire must cease; and the Self-determined Will must take its place. The last object of desire in a person commencing the Path of Return is the desire to work with the Will of the Supreme; he harmonizes his Will with the Supreme Will, renounces all separate desires…Desire on the Path of Forthgoing becomes Will on the Path of Return; the soul, in harmony with the Divine, works with the Law.”
If we remember the dictations given by the Masters, they also refer to two huge cycles in the Universe. One cycle is an expiration of Brahma and another cycle is an inhalation of Brahma. Exactly the same cycles of the Universe are relevant to each individual. That is, every person in his evolution goes through two big stages. The first stage is Pravritti Marga and the second stage is Nivritti. First he develops, he goes outward, he must try everything, test everything, get experience in all possible activities that are there, that are available. He must try everything, absolutely everything. Then the stage comes when he is satiated with everything in the physical world and his soul is willing to return Home.
Let’s go back to the Masters and remember the very first Dictation, which Sanat Kumara gave on the 4th of March, 2005. I am going to read a fragment from this Dictation:
“The level of the planet’s vibrations is rising. New energies are coming to Earth. The majority of mankind feels these energies, and it becomes impossible and senseless for them to wander in the darkness along the Paths which they have been following for many, many millennia.
This is manifested as a feeling of dissatisfaction, heart sadness and expectation of something that is about to happen. The most sensitive people have lost interest in their usual activities. It seems to them that the things that were important and made up the meaning of their life before are absolutely meaningless today. All of their previous activities, idle pastime with friends, watching endless serials, the pursuit of new trinkets, seem to have lost all their meaning. All this resembles festive tinsel left in place after yesterday’s party. Today all this is meaningless.”
The Masters give the messages for those people who have completed the outward Path and are about to start the inward Path, the Path of Return. It is for these people that the Masters give their messages.
You can ask yourself if this Path is right for you or not. Annie Besant says that on the Path of Forthgoing, which the majority of humanity is on, people are driven by desire, thought, and activity. So, when a person passes from the outward Path to the inward Path, desire must change into will. Thought must become reason. That is, a person in his mental activity at the level of carnal mind must change to the level of his Higher Self, the Supreme Mind, and activity on the physical plane turns into self-sacrifice. That is, for the person who is returning, who is on the Path of Return, if he is involved in any activity, this very activity becomes for him a sacrifice. For example, he doesn’t need to build houses, you see, he has been building them since long ago. If he is doing something, he is doing it for others. Then a person enters the Path of Return.
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Let’s get back to the lecture by Annie Besant “An Introduction to Yoga.” The year 1912 is about one hundred years ago. In her lecture, Annie Besant gives five stages of development of the mind. Now we will dwell on these five stages. These stages are characteristic of human development, although they are compared with a person’s age.
The first stage is called Kshipta. What is Kshipta? “The mind is flung about. It is the butterfly mind, the early stage of humanity, or, in man, the mind of the child, darting constantly from one object to another.” It corresponds to the physical plane, or activity on the physical plane. If you watch the people around you, you will see these people. These are people who live by what they see, that is, their consciousness is in the physical plane.
The next stage is Mudha. It corresponds to the astral plane. It is equivalent to the age of youth, the state of bewilderment, being in love, swayed by emotions, a person begins to live by feelings. He can love everybody or he can hate everybody, or something else - it is such a state.
The next stage is Vikshipta. Vikshipta corresponds to the carnal mind and it is the lower mental plane. It is the state of the man possessed by an idea. For example, he can be possessed by the idea of communism (communism - it is good), or on the contrary, by the idea of fascism, or by the Teachings of Masters: “Oh, Teaching of Masters - it is great!” That is, he can be obsessed by some idea, but then it may also happen that this obsession will be gone. That explains why so many people leave. Why do people leave the Teaching? First, they have not gone all the way through the outward Path to return to the inward one. Second, their level of consciousness is on one of these three stages: Kshipta, Mudha, Vikshipta. They were possessed by a certain idea, and then they got possessed by another idea. Ah, Kryon! Or ah, something else, and again – gone. At this stage a person learns to recognize, to discern, to distinguish good from evil, and illusion from reality. This is a very important stage of the lower mental plane.
Then, when a person has learned how to discern, he goes to the next stage which is called Ekagrata. So, Ekagrata corresponds to the higher mental plane. In the terminology of the Teaching of Ascended Masters it is the stage of Higher Self, that is, a person comes to the level of Higher Self. In this case “the man possesses the idea, instead of being possessed by it; that one-pointed state of the mind, called Ekagrata in Sanskrit, is the fourth stage. He is a mature man, ready for the true life; he is getting rid of the grip of the world, and is beyond its allurements, he is approaching Yoga, he begins the training which makes his progress rapid. This stage corresponds to activity on the higher mental plane.” For these people the Masters give their Teaching. Remember, we have just read the dictation by Sanat Kumara. That is, the Masters give their Messages exactly for these people who are on the fourth stage of development of their consciousness. At this point a person already becomes a carrier of an idea, for example, of the Teaching. That is, he possesses the idea instead of being possessed by it. “At this stage he chooses one idea - the inner life…he rises above the desire to possess objects of enjoyment belonging either to this or any other world.”
Then he advances towards the fifth stage, which is called Niruddha. It is the stage of self-control. It corresponds to the buddhic plane. In our terminology this is the level of causal body. At this stage a person reaches oneness with God, he rises above all the ideas and can choose an idea by himself. He unites his consciousness with the Supreme Mind. At this stage he can successfully practice Yoga. We have finally come to the topic of our lecture (See Part 2 of this lecture).