Belief and Direct Experience

This question of a belief system is very important to many people, but to us here in yoga what is important is that you find out for yourself. You don't begin the practice of yoga and meditation with a belief system. That is the difference between a religion and a science. In a religion you must believe first and practice afterwards. You declare your belief, and then you start practicing your religion. In a science, on the other hand, you practice first and believe afterwards. When you go to a research lab to take a course in chemistry of physics, you don't stand there at the door and cross yourself and say, "I declare my belief that water is H-2-0." No, you walk in there, without declaring any kind of belief; and your chemistry professor or physics professor says, "Take this flask, and connect this here, and do this there, and boil it here this way, and so on and so forth;" and then you see that water is indeed H-2-0, and you believe.

People who are very, very highly advanced in yoga, say that spirituality is the most important part of life. And my own personal goal in meditation is not to relax tensions or to be successful in the world or something like that. What is dear to my heart is dear to my heart, but I am not here to convert someone to a belief in God - if he does not believe in a God - or to change someone's notion of God in any way at all, but rather to help people along in the path they have chosen for themselves.

However, what does happen is, with your regular practice of meditation, at a certain point in your development, when your tensions drop and your body is relaxed and you are almost not aware of the body, then a whole different notion of self comes into your experience: that I am a being who is other than this body. But you must not think that you must believe this.

In fact, for many, many years I used to say this in my very first lecture of this course. I used to say, "I have one condition for your registration is this course, and that is that you must not believe a single word of what I say." Just take the practice and try it out, and do it, and do it, and do it, and strengthen it, and deepen those grooves of the mind. And somewhere, someday, sometime when you are in meditation, you feel as though all the physical realities, limitations of the universe, and your own personality dropped off for a moment.

It is as though you had touched the fringes of infinity in a state of absolute tranquility. And when that happens to you, then you decide whether something beyond this body exists or does not exist. And if God is an old-fashioned word for you, then call it the factor "X". So this is a practice system. There are people who are scientists, psychologists; each one has his own reason for coming to meditation, and they apply the system of meditation to their own particular needs, and go as far as they want to go. in other words, there must be no conflicts. Meditation is a state of mind which is free of conflicts.

Now what is meditation. For a complete beginner it is very difficult to define, until you have experienced it. How would you, having experienced just this one level, just this two or three or four days of practice, how would you, sir, define meditation. (The student responds, "Meditation is the ability to see into oneself.") You see, you gave your definition from your experience. The point about meditation is that you are not taking someone else's philosophy, and saying, "It's written here," or "My teacher says so," or "Swami Veda says so, " or "Swami Rama says so."

No, you experience it, and out of that experience, you develop your philosophy and your terminology, and you define it. Does someone else, out of their own experience, have an answer to what meditation is? (A student says, "Cleaning of the mind.") Fine. All of these definitions are helpful, but experience is the thing. Until someone has experienced meditation, they will say, "What do you mean by 'cleaning of the mind.' Do you take a vacuum cleaner and clean your skull out?" You can say that meditation is a state of mind in which you experience complete tranquility. Not emptiness of the mind, but a tranquility, a peacefulness of mind in which the conflicting forces of thought stop that conflict, and the mind then flows along a single stream of consciousness.

From Swami Veda's 11-tape series Superconscious Meditation (SCM). Available through the Meditation Center.
E-mail: info@themeditationcenter.org

By Swami Veda Bharati

created: 06-07-2006 17:39, last modified: 06-07-2006 17:39