Making Your Mind Your Best Friend

My thoughts and prayers are with everyone who is suffering from financial insecurity these days. Fear can be unnerving. Concerns about job loss, home foreclosure, retirement shortfall, or burgeoning debt in a worsening economy can be raw and painful. But this crisis can also offer immense potential for spiritual growth. To access this potential, I recommend that we take a deeper look at ourselves and our priorities. Anchor yourself more firmly than ever in the resources of your Spirit which enhance your ability to face all of life with confidence, and to serve others.

We can either resist difficult situations; or, we can respond to a crisis effectively. However intense circumstances may become, immersing ourselves in the deeper truths, attitudes, and conduct of the Spirit is the only, and ultimate, security.

Today, we are experiencing the effects of unbridled greed throughout the entire world. Humanity needs to reflect on how we have allowed love of money to displace our higher values and priorities. We have enshrined money and worship it as our god. To be fully human we must rediscover the true God Who resides in our hearts.

If you are seriously disturbed by economic conditions or other kinds of turmoil, remember that nothing is permanent: This too shall pass! The Infinite Power of the Universe is working out a grand design. The Infinite Power of the Universe is working to harmonize and to lift humanity from its present state. But, human society will not progress by blindly worshipping money. Human society can only evolve by embracing Light, Love and Compassion.

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Indeed this is the greatest challenge of life. To always be positive.

As such it needs your deepest yearning for peace and happiness in life. When you are convinced of the fact that life is not all materialistic on the surface, then you try to dive a little deeper.

You start to realize that happiness or peace is not something that you can find outside of you. No one can give you that. By seeking happiness and peace outside of you, you swing like the pendulum between the pains and pleasures, praise and insults.

Those experiences one day bring you to a deeper conviction that you need to move within to find peace in life. You find that it is ultimately the game of the mind. It is in the mind you are happy or unhappy. So you start to work with your mind. In the process of stilling the mind you find that it is restless.

You seek the guidance of the Holy ones who have walked the path of calming the mind before you. They will let you know that one of the simple techniques by which you can calm the restless and unhappy mind is by observing your Breath. Or just by observing your thoughts. No judgments. No criticism or running commentary on the good and bad thoughts. Just observation. Just being mindful and conscious of the thoughts and just relaxingly watchful. You will find that the thoughts are slowing down.

The other miracle that will follow is as the mind is observed or the breath is observed, you will reach a finer state of mind and breath which will purify your mind of its dross and materialistic perceptions which are based on your ego-patterns. As the mind is cleansed and calmed, you will find that the negativity of the mind will gradually leave you, as the darkness leaves naturally with the rising of Sun.

You don't have to stay positive or put special efforts for it; you will have positive thoughts for your mind now is cleansed from within. You will find that now you are able to forgive and forget easily, you are naturally compassionate. You start to flower into a good human being, the prerequisite to become a spiritually enlightened soul. To be in celebration all the time.

Meditation as a practice is an effort to stop the mind from its natural tendency to weave thoughts. In meditation, you need to relax yourself and then focus your mind on a divine form, a sacred sound, a word or phrase as a mantra; or to focus on your own physical body, your own breath or your own thoughts. It is, in fact, sitting with your own mind for a while.

You watch the drifting thoughts in the space of your mind. As you keep watching, the mind wanders away; you bring it back to the watchful, playful, mindful, act of being in the mind, for the mind, with the mind. Then you are in the grand world of your Inner Being. This is meditation.

It is not just a forced technique to practice. It is the playfulness of your spirit. Remember - the purpose of meditation is not to achieve anything. It is to reach a state of letting go, a profound state of relaxation. Meditation is your willingness to do nothing. You are obsessed with doing too many things. As if that is not enough, you are obsessed with doing them perfectly! That leads to untold stress. In meditation your effort is to attain to Non-Doing.

To do something without any expectation, then the mind cannot calculate any more. It has to melt. It melts into the flow of the Universal rhythm of joy. Meditation empowers your mind to be more disciplined, more focused, more refined, more content. True happiness in life, flows out of it spontaneously. Meditation connects you to that spontaneous inner source.

One of the best ways to enter Meditation is to watch one’s breath. As your mind comes close to the rim of your nostrils, you witness the warm air moving in and out. Count to ten while breathing (one cycle of inhale and exhale would be 1), then again start from 1 to 10, you will see that your mind is calming down and with that, your body and mind are vibrating in a higher frequency. This vibration invites lightness and luminosity, health and harmony into your life.

Meditation need not always be simply sitting quietly, absorbed in Oneness. One can be in a beautiful state of meditation, even in the process of doing. You need to be awake to your inner reality - to your spirit! You can do the same things mindfully, consciously. For example if you are doing the dishes, recognize that you are not doing them alone. The water is also washing them. The detergent, the sink, the trees that provide you oxygen are also washing. The clouds in the sky provide the water. The air helps you to breathe. Mother Earth, the air, the sun, all have joined with you, in celebration. You feel washing dishes is a chore only when you cannot consciously connect to the Cosmic process involved in your work.

When you feel a part of the whole, everything becomes sacred. You don’t work; you are not doing. Work happens through you, it flows through you. You are no longer an obstruction. When you are not mindful, it is your ego, thinking in isolation, which feels alone. With mindfulness, your consciousness expands. You access the Whole.

A true yogi is one who does not give up action, but who makes action divine by turning it into worship and meditation.

The effort in meditation is always to be effortless. In meditation, as you persevere through the initial obstacles, you begin to feel your natural connection to the universal field of energy and vibrations. You feel the calm state of your mind. Mundane emotions are transmuted into a joyful experience of giving and forgiving. You feel your body and mind are in rhythm with the universal rhythm, and you are not struggling to be happy any more. Meditation thus is more an inner journey toward the Self within, a journey for discovering the real 'I" as contrasted with the “I” that goes through all the ups and downs of the outer world.

As you bathe in that Cosmic Energy, bask in it, dance in it, you are in the utter ecstasy of divine bliss. Once you realize the need to connect to your deepest Source within, you will come to know what you have been missing all through your life. It is your love affair with your Self!

Happiness and Love

You cannot please everyone in the world and be happy within yourself. But, you can please the Self within you, the You in you, and be happy for ever.

As long as you work from the plane of mundane consciousness, you will tend to do things for others and to have expectations of them. Consequently, at some point, you will feel exhausted and cheated. These feelings are really tricks of your ego. But, if you learn to be true to Yourself, true to your own consciousness, you will not stretch expectations of others beyond a certain level, lest you lose the sight of the point of balance.

The best way to cope is to learn the balance in life. Your spiritual objective is to attain that balanced state, that awareness, which keeps you calm and focused, so that you know how much you can stretch yourself to help another. Your true spiritual practice creates the stable ground of your mind from which you actually draw your happiness and joy in life.

It is not praise from other people that will provide a solid base on which you can build your home of joy. Your base is the experience and the awareness of the Spirit within you. The Spirit gives you the power to truly love, for love would happen to you as fragrance to flowers. You would never get exhausted because love is supplied by the infinite source of the Universe, and not from the capricious judgment of your ego self or dependence on the opinions of others.

Wake up to the reality that true happiness is found in the balance of your Mind, Body, and Spirit. To reach a this balance, you must first work to create a solid ground within your own mind. You must fine tune yourself to appreciate the Higher realities and realize the Power to share without expectation or judgment.

Love and infinite blessings from Baba!

While meditating, if you find it difficult to observe your breath - relax. Take a few deep cleansing breaths. As you continue to breathe abdominally (while inhaling take the abdomen out; while exhaling bring the abdomen in), observe each body part, moving from the crown of your head to your toes. Take your time, until you feel a sense of silence dawning upon your mind.

All problems arise from the mind, which has been trained over time to unconsciously support the root of the ego-self, the pseudo-self.

Until the mind is purged of its impurities, of the dross collected over your whole lifetime, until it can find something Higher to surrender to, until it becomes silent; the clinging, craving, crying, demanding, fearing continues to take the individual on a roller coaster ride.

The best way to purge yourself, is to realize that anything that bothers you, is NOT YOU. It is your ego, your conditioned mind, your mind attached to the past and future. It is your mind that is not in the Moment.

To unfetter yourself you need to recognize the Self that transcends all these fleeting thoughts and emotions.

Ego demands endlessly. It has a hunger that can never be appeased. You keep filling it, but it is never content. It only gives you a momentary feeling of apparent fulfillment; then it sends you off on the next pursuit, then the next, all due to its own sense of lacking. The cycle never stops. Ego never wants to die.

When you focus on your physical body, gradually you move into the space beyond the physiology and anatomical knowledge that you have gained over time. You move into direct experience, the experience of the moment. You feel the vibrations and sensations of the body, which become a doorway to the now.

The mind begins to quiet, experience deepens; it begins silencing the mind. When the mind stops taking you to the dead past and the uncertain future, when the mind has nothing more to cling to, it ceases its identification and modifications. There is a sudden stillness. In that stillness, in the now, in the eternal 'moment' is the death of the ego, and the resurrection of the Spirit, the Soul, the Universal Self that is beyond dualism.