Meditation and More

Shanti Mandir: Swami Nityananda, 1996

It is really like submerging oneself underwater for a long swim. It is striking to enter this place, Shanti Mandir. To the outward eye it appears a suburban home. Put away for a moment the self-armoring permitting one to joust with the enemy without, a meeting takes place within these walls. The air is different inside. One doesn’t at first know why. The feeling differs from the outside where the broad daylight splashes down on the lawn of dry grass. Swami Nityananda has said that words, no matter the genius of the writer, can describe the ultimate state of consciousness. He compared this indescribable state to the instant when first meeting a friend. It is like the shock and astonishment of the first glance, an awakening, a delicate moment quickly rushed over and swallowed whole by the whale of regular time. Entering here is to encounter, if one allows it, a deeper and long lasting experience of that moment. It can be sustained. The elements encourage it.

The main entry brings one into an overlarge living room with a sweeping area of carpet. In this room at the far wall looms a large murti of Bhagawan Nityananda sitting in meditation. His eyes are open, regal, aware and alive. He awaits you, but one can pass by without taking up the invitation. Other rooms are relatively unimportant to the visitor. One passes through the living room to go down through the navel of the house, a wormhole of sorts, a dark passage down the stairs into the meditation hall where the intensives occur. One can imagine knee high water through which one must wade. So thick and resplendent is the energy of the place, and so small is the room, that one cannot avoid it. 

In that room dwells a sacred energy, the shakti, a sacred thread leading the aspirant to a more awakened state of consciousness. One must give pause here. The eye, ever roving, sees a wonderful portrait of Baba sitting cross legged in a chair, his eyes open, looking slightly to the left as if he is drinking in the surrounds. A lamp behind this photographic portrait fills its surface with light. Is it a still image? It seems almost to breathe. He is almost smiling, is it his eyes, but the expression is not formed. A dish lit with a candle sits on the altar directly below this photograph representing among other things the lamp of consciousness. Its flame does not flicker, unlike most of our consciousness. 

The disturbances in the fields of consciousness or thought modifications must be stilled,  Swami Nityananda often says. So forceful is the thrust of this place that it shuts down the regular phantasms of thought going hurly-burly through the mind. Usually the mind is an open gate allowing all and everything to enter unchecked. It is practically a sewer. Here the gate mercifully is partially closed. 

A doll-like figure of Bhagawan Nityananda wearing orange robes sits facing this dish. But he is small and not the focus on which the eye rests. Off to the right of the altar surface is a black and white photo of Bhagawan’s profile. He is looking up at the large image of Baba. On the left of the altar is a digital clock whose digits pronounce the time in bright red characters. The mind when it returns to its regular state first wants to know the time, then how much time is left, and then how much time has passed. The nature of time itself remains unanswered.

On this the Guru Purnima Weekend Intensive and Yagna, a thread of consciousness teases us. It comes to us from out of a great dark wood lying perilously before us, seeming impenetrable, a forest of demons, harsh passage, a drowning in darkness, unutterable, not-to-be-named. Where has Baba gone? In that photograph lit behind by a lamp? It is attractive, even noble, perhaps alive, but if so, in what sense? Yet Baba the man is not here. As Swami Nityananda reminded us, Baba left his body on October 2, 1982. We do not worship the man precisely, but the guru principal in him. I believe he gave part of his self to Swami Nityananda as if pouring it into a waiting cup. Time has neither beginning nor end, yet it creates beginnings and endings. The king is dead! Long live the king! The true treasure, the crown jewels of consciousness, has been handed down. 

Of what stuff worldly or unworldly is the Guru Purnima made? Are we the more aware because we have traversed the bounds of this day, come to its conclusion, mediated for the last session keeping perfectly still, saying the HAM-SA mantra while gazing inward? During the third session of this Intensive, while Swami Nityananda spoke, the men and women assembled before him sat in rapt attention, completely in the spell of his voice, like dots before the great exclamation point. Do all these hearts ache to hear what it was like to have been in the company of Baba? Do we wait for the pearl to be dropped from Swami Nityananada’s lips, that we may take it up and gain siddha hood? What drives all these people to sit here in meditation the entire day?

There are three people here today for the first time who heard about Shanti Mandir through the internet. I spoke to Jeff last night. The Shanti Mandir website sparked an interest to read Baba’s books. Last night he was reading Is Death Real? By Baba. He told me that there is contained in those pages remarkable wisdom, and that he could feel the shakti when reading The Play of Consciousness.

Swami Nityananda said that there are two kinds of people, those who are happy they got ‘it’, and those who are sad they missed ‘it’. The ‘it’ is having had the opportunity to have been in Baba’s company. Undoubtedly there is a certain aura, a magic or a rarified air about those who have been part of the train of a master. When that master passes from the scene the remembrance of him, the feeling and the nostalgia remains. The old stories are told endlessly. The old participants gather and reminisce chattering among themselves. Oh for the glory days! They missed the real scene. 

The true theater is invisible to the eye, but real in essence. Though the guru has form, he is of two parts, Swami Nityananda said, the guru principal and the human being. The guru himself, however, casts a long shadow. It is like watching a movie and becoming entranced by the beautiful scenery and the actors, the heightened struggle, its cathartic effect, and the denouement, all the while forgetting that the story is only that, a story, a sign, a hint, an invitation to set oneself on a quest for the self. 

The beautiful pageant we witnessed and participated in yesterday, the day-long meditation intensive, the evening arati, the fast chant and the sangha, all created a buoyant feeling and happiness. Will it be there tomorrow?

Shanti Mandir is a bright place on the map. Many of us drive long distances to arrive here. Do we come here to be in the presence of the guru, Swami Nityananda, and to be happy? Swami Nityananda told us yesterday a story about a man who sought happiness. He met a sage one day who advised him that if he could find a man who always was laughing and if he could get this man’s shirt for himself, then he would have found happiness. The seeker thought this good advice, and he set out on his journey. He looked and looked, but in the end it took years to find such a man. He found that every man was happy and then sad, laughing then crying, in short, exhibiting the emotions and turbulence that is common to every man everywhere. 

One day he came upon a man laughing and laughing loudly in a nearby wood. The seeker thought to himself, “I have found him at last!” He approached him, but the laughing man kept his back to him. The seeker asked, “May I have your shirt?” The man laughingly said, “What?” “I’ll give you anything. Only give me your shirt.” The man turned and faced him showing he was not wearing a shirt. In fact, he was the same sage who had set this seeker out on his quest years before. The sage gave the seeker an inner-shirt or blazing heart of happiness. The seeker earlier at the start of his quest was not ready to hear. As Swami Nityananda said, “We all own shirts, which one has given us happiness?”

The story is absurd. The object of the search has nothing to do with laughter. As Swami Nityananda said, “We revere the guru’s possessions, yet these objects will not by themselves give the disciple the genuine certificate of graduation from the siddha university. The sign of this certificate is unshakable inner contentment.” What shirt other than in stories conveys to its wearer inner contentment? It is like trying to describe in words the ultimate state of consciousness. Up until the very last moment the seeker in the story fully believed there was such an object in the world. He expected with every last fiber in his being to find that shirt.

I experienced a shock of awareness upon first seeing Swami Nityananda this morning on the front steps of Shanti Mandir. I hadn’t expected to see him there. Usually he is not there when Janice and I arrive. Looking up as I approached the steps I saw him on the top step as if by magic. He was a bright emanation, and the warmth of his simple greeting only deepened my astonishment and happiness. He didn’t give me a shirt. But that is not what I am seeking after all.

The Guru Purnima celebration this year like the years before is marked by a meditational intensive and a yanga to Shiva, the primordial guru, who appropriately enough is fond of sitting in the cremation grounds. Concerning the ego and its death, Baba said to leave the ego at the door of the ashram. The ego can be forgotten, left at the door, as it were, like a coat at a dress-event left with the checkout lady. Once one surrenders the ego, happiness appears. Or do you suppose that torment, dissatisfaction, sadness, the burning of Hell and its frozen wastes is the reality underlying everything? In the presence of the guru these habiliments are scorched beyond use and recognition. They are absolutely useless, dinosaurs, a non existent shirt. While happiness, inner contentment, has an unshakable foundation because it is founded on a bedrock of inner conviction and borne of experience, sadhana, perseverance, and endurance. One adorns the temple of God with the riches and treasures collected during the inward journey. Its end is not an end. Its beginning is not a beginning. Shiva is without either. Where does happiness begin? It underlies even the burning grounds where Shiva sits in profound meditation. The death of the ego is not to be mourned. It might grieve for itself. There is no self like that to be mourned. It’s like the shirt that was no shirt, an illusion planted in the mind until the time arrives when it is right to hear.

The Guru Purnima, like all the other events at Shanti Mandir are meant to be a giant theater pointing to the inner contentment and the supreme inner state of consciousness. The meditation intensive requires us to sit as still as possible, repeat the mantra, vanquish the thoughts pulling this way and that, and to breathe in the sweetness of the guru’s presence, the taste of the lineage before him. We listen to Swami Nityananda’s inspired by his hope that he can impart to us some of the feeling he has acquired over the years of his sadhana so we may be roused to our search blessed with grace of his gurus Muktananda and Bhagawan Nityananda.