Methods of Energy and Consciousness

Is there a method when the Energy and the Consciousness merge together and it is impossible to separate one from another? This is called being in love. This is when meditation of the Energy and meditation of the Consciousness merge together. Being in love can be interpreted as the highest condition of meditation on another object. We are completely absorbed by the object of our love, we can’t think of anything else. In other meditations one goes after another, the Consciousness follows the Energy or the Energy follows the Consciousness. When we are in love it is all together. You should always remember that when we say, “the method of Energy” or “the method of Consciousness”, it does not mean that we practice 100% of one of these methods. Psychologists say that inside every man there is a woman and inside every woman there is a man. It is the same in these methods. In every method of Consciousness there is a bit of the Energy and in every method of Energy there is a little bit of the Consciousness. If there is the Energy, there is the Consciousness behind it. If there is the Consciousness, there is the Energy behind it. We can talk about dominant method in every practice. Meditating by the Consciousness you begin concentration on some object, some event, something obvious, and then you go from the outside into the inside of this thing, object or event. The same happens with meditation by the Energy.

You sit down and surrender to the beautiful view. You have no thoughts, but your mind is toned and clear. There is Consciousness behind this. There is another important point. One thing is when we perceive the beauty of the world, there are no thoughts, but there is clarity in your mind, and another thing is when we concentrate our mind on some object, such as a match, and we expend some effort. In the first case we are given to feelings, senses and emotions, and in the second case we make our mind concentrate. It is highly recommended to vary and combine those two methods. For example, you have a hard work, outside, not at all intellectual, as you mainly use your muscles. Your muscles are tense, and your attention is concentrated on these feelings. It is very good to do meditation by consciousness in this case. It will compensate what you are normally missing. Another situation is if you are a professor of mathematics and your intellectual ability is constantly used for some new advanced mathematics division. It would be very good to compensate these efforts by meditation of the Energy, when you relax and surrender to your feelings. This is when a harmony takes place. We change one meditation by another, balancing the two approaches. The meditation of Consciousness develops our mind. The meditation of Energy develops our intuition, sensation and imagination. However, one meditation at some point slowly flows into another one and vice versa.

In this state of harmony and union it is possible to reach the state of samadhi or nirvana.

Our will is the key difference between meditation and contemplation or involuntary concentration. Imagine that the door suddenly opens, and a person looks into the room, where you are sitting, and then he shuts the door very loudly. What would happen to your attention? And what if he also shouts something loudly? Your attention will spontaneously be attracted to this door and these sounds. Why so? This is happening because this is out of your current quiet state of perception. You will keep looking at the door as long as you are interested. If the person at the door keeps doing something unusual or loud, you will concentrate. This is involuntary concentration of attention.

Concentration is keeping our attention on some object for a long time. We keep it voluntary or involuntary. Voluntary type of concentration is willingly directing our consciousness to the object which we have chosen ourselves. Even if this door is not an interesting object for us, we decide to look at it and we look at it. The difference between these two types of concentration is such an important factor as the presence of our will. Many of you can remember when you were reading a useful but not interesting book you had a lot of different thoughts about something else, you had millions of thoughts about your life while you were reading just one paragraph. Or sometimes we are in a taxi and we don’t even notice how we got home, because we had so many thoughts on the way. This is how we live, i.e. our attention is normally distracted. It is like a beam from our Higher self. If it is disseminated, it becomes very weak, but if we focus it and direct to some object, this object will become clearer to us and we shall understand it better. For example, in The Yoga Sutras of Patandjali the yoga practice is narrowed down to concentration: we had a million of thoughts, we reduce them to one thousand, then to hundreds, to tens until only one thought is left. Our disseminated consciousness is gathered into something united, strong and powerful.

Observe yourself during a day. For example, notice how you can concentrate on some conversation – you communicate to each other, say something, something has been said to you, may be something interesting and useful, but you have thousands thoughts in your head and you miss what is said to you and do not understand the person talking to you. It is easy to concentrate involuntary: you read an interesting book and you concentrate on it, you watch an interesting movie and you forget about everything else, you talk to an interesting person – you are listening to every word. As far as voluntary concentration is concerned, we have a problem here. There are several exercises in yoga when we work with voluntary concentration. You will find some of them at the end of this book. Why is it necessary to work with voluntary concentration? If we concentrate on some object, it reveals itself for us. If something is not interesting, but we concentrate on it and keep concentration for a long time, it starts to display its contents, its core meaning. It often happens in real life. For example, when we study at the University and we are not interested in mathematics, but we concentrate on it for a year or two, we suddenly realize that it is so interesting! We discover a magic harmony in mathematics. We are concentrating for several years and then all the formulas become meaningful and we start seeing in them the encrypted laws of the Universe. We start appreciating the beauty of these formulas, numbers and we perceive the subject completely different, because we concentrate our mind and the subject becomes obvious to us. If a person has achieved something outstanding in life, it happened mainly because he or she concentrated the attention on this aim or purpose. Sometimes we think that Mendeleev saw the famous Element Periodic Table in his dream incidentally. This is not true. The fact is that he was concentrating his mind on the chemistry and its laws and on all the elements in particular, for so many years, that a miracle happened: this subject became obvious to him and he saw the full picture. This is a force of concentration, the force of mind. You should not think that concentration or meditation is something unpractical. This skill is required everywhere. You will not be able to work productively if you don’t concentrate on your work enough, you will be fired very quickly. If you are able to concentrate and if you think only about your business at work, and not about your daily problems or domestic affairs, you will be a very good employee, you will be highly appreciated, and you will start getting better in whatever you are doing. If you come to work and you are only 1% focused and the other 99% you are somewhere else in your mind, you will never become a good specialist. For example, if you are reading a book and concentrate on it, you understand it better, remember more and feel what the author wanted to say, you will live the life of the book characters. But if you read and at the same time think about something different, you will not understand the meaning of the book and soon will forget the line.

Even animals can concentrate involuntary. If you put a spongy bone under the glass in front of a dog, it will mess around it for hours. We have a human body, and we can unlike animals make efforts and direct our attention willingly, make ourselves do something, even if we don’t want to do it. We are capable of voluntary concentration. We are highly developed creatures and should not follow our “want- don’t want”, or “like-don’t like” feelings. If you have a goal you should achieve it. Sometimes it is easy to achieve, sometimes it is difficult, but you know your goal and you need to achieve it.

Our ability of getting into a habit can help us in this. If you were making yourself for some time to concentrate on something voluntary, sooner or later this concentration will become a habit and you will have a skill. If this skill is developed, we can use it in all areas of our life. If a person can concentrate on something for a long time, he or she can concentrate on any other things or objects. We need to develop this skill.

The process of concentration is very energy consuming, because our consciousness is used to wandering and we need to concentrate it with the help of your will. The process of getting the wandering mind to concentrate is very hard, but later you will definitely feel the energy boost: the Energy is following the Consciousness and together they make prana (life force), inspiration, ananda (pleasure).

The process of attention focusing means working with deep structures. Our aim during concentration is to draw the light of consciousness away from multiple thoughts, objects, and events and make it not stray but concentrated in one point. Practicing concentration makes us full of energy, joy and inspiration, and also brings relaxation. You would never be able to relax if your attention is wandering. First, you need a high concentration to be able to relax and disengage. If you want to control your emotions, thoughts and your body, you need to concentrate your attention, i.e. to control your consciousness.

The instrument for doing this is our will. Each of us has a will, according to yoga teaching. We all at least approximately realize what it is. If we hear the word “will”, we associate it with some sort of effort or some capability. But really the emphasis in yoga is a bit different.

What is will? According to yoga will is one of the most fantastic characteristics and one of the most marvellous abilities that each of us inherited from the Absolute, the first cause that created the whole Universe. It is also stated in yoga that our Higher Self is a particle of the Absolute, equally infinite and equally powerful. Progressing from one life to another we discover all the characteristics of the Absolute that are natural to ourselves as well, we learn to realize them in our life.

The whole Universe began when the Absolute manifested itself. It was done by applying will, the first characteristic (or ability) that was revealed in our world. Will is considered as the cornerstone in yoga and in meditation as its part.

Before we move further in understanding what is the role of will in meditation, let us illustrate what meditation is not. Take a man who visits a bar every night to have a glass and watch a match of his favourite football club. This ritual became his strong long-term habit. During the game he's totally absorbed by what he sees. His consciousness is focused. But something is missing to call this state a meditation, and it is the lack of will. In this case consciousness of the man, his attention, is caught by an external force, there is no deliberate effort applied by him.

Many ways were invented to manipulate our attention. Commercial advertising developed far in this direction. It is very hard to resist the tricks that are used on TV, for example. If you’d watch a well done commercial it is guaranteed that jingle or picture from it will stick to your mind and chase you for days or weeks, making you to return to it many times in your thoughts. Can we call it meditation on advertising? No, we cannot, as again there is no wilful action made by you to concentrate on it. Simple consuming of a TV show or spending your time in a video game is not meditation, because you do not control what comes to your mind, what thought forms arise in your head and what physical consequences they will bring to your body.

Meditation supposes that you express clear will to choose on what to focus your consciousness and energy.

Any action may be or may not be a meditation. For example, a kid who is forced by his tutor to solve mathematical problems every day is concentrating on the task but he’s not meditating. Because there is no wilful decision of the boy, his action is being led by external force (and most probably is followed by frustration). By the way, if the tutor would promise something like, “If you solve these now, I’ll tell your parents how good you are, and they’ll buy you a skate you wanted”, it’ll be no better for the kid. This is still an external driver, although it is positive.

But if the same kid would realize that learning math is important to him and take a deliberate decision to solve 5 problems per day then this process of concentrated solving might be considered as a meditation. In his head this can sound like this, “Now I’m going to solve these 5 problems, just like I did yesterday and I will do tomorrow.” He solved the first task, then he proceed to the second and suddenly a thought is trying to assault his mind, “Oh my, I really want to play an online-game with my friends right now!” But he takes an effort to get his attention back to math again and push all the parasite thoughts off. And so on, until he finishes what he planned.

You may choose some other activity that you find worthy to concentrate your attention on. Allocate 5 minutes every day during which you won’t think of anything except this action. If you will repeat this regularly day by day, just because you solidly decided to do this and nothing and nobody influenced your decision, then this also could be counted as a meditation.

For example, if you drive a car every day to your office in city through a country side or a park, most probably you distract to the natural sights each time you pass there. Try to stop yourself from distraction by enforcing your focus on driving. Not because we told you, but because you decided that this is something you should do, you expressed will to it.

So, will is the necessary part of meditation and it’s a basic characteristic that we inherited from the Absolute. But most of the time we just don’t use it, because we simply didn’t learn how to use it properly. If we did, we’d know that everything is possible with will, everything is dependent on will but will does not depend on anything. Our energy and consciousness, according to the axiomatic of yoga, appeared in the world after will and so they follow it. It is also postulated that only will can bring us away from the influence of karma, influence of cause and effect.

In our lives we can achieve whatever we like relying solely on our will. We can know everything that the best scientists have ever known or will know in the future. We can create the most beautiful masterpieces in art. We can rule the whole world just by truly expressing our will for it. But only few of us have ever tried to do so with even minimum necessary concentration and effort.

Fact is that 99.9% of our time we spend like robots. Our actions, our thoughts and decisions and our perception of ourselves and the world around us is based on numerous external factors. These could be our origination from a specific social group or family, our current environment and past experience from this and previous lives. We’re programmed, although our program may be very complex.

But somewhere inside us there is a particle of absolute freedom. Freedom to break any constraints we have at any moment, freedom to choose any path that we like. But certain skill is needed to find this freedom inside us and to develop our ability to formulate, express and realize our will. We should have character to decide that we don’t want to live on the life of pre-programmed robots and to start our way to more self-conscious being, willing so and realizing our will step by step.

Yoga is only an instrument on our path of self-development, it does not any work for you by itself. You may teach a monkey to repeat asanas and it might stretch and twist much better than you. You may teach a parrot to say mantras really loud and clear. But it’ll be just a mechanical process for both animals that makes nothing good for them. Reaching of any result is only possible if a person who practice yoga will do it with the strongly expressed will to have this result in his or her life.

Последнее изменение: суббота, 25 июля 2020, 10:40