156. Sound

There is a music that permeates Existence – an unstruck sound. There are many techniques that help you hear this sound. When you can hear this sound, you have heard the music of Existence!

1. Follow the source of the sound

Merge with the very source of everything

Total Duration: 20 minutes

Close your eyes. Just inhale and exhale as slowly as possible.

Step 1: Duration: 5 minutes

Now start creating the sound, the vibration 'oooommm' intensely but not loudly. Create it from your navel center.

Step 2: Duration: 5 minutes

Now continue to create the sound as before, but begin seeking the source. Continue to create the vibration but locate the source from where the vibrations are arising, from where the sound is coming. Go into the source, search for the source.

Step 3: Duration: 5 minutes

Just enter the sound. Enter this source from where the sound is coming, from where it is arising. Then, slowly reduce the sound. Don't stop, but just reduce the sound, as you enter into the source from where the sound is coming. Become the sound.

Step 4: Duration: 5 minutes

Now relax with your eyes closed. Don't create any sound, but go to the source from where the sound was coming. Enter into that source. Just be with the memory of that sound.

2. Music

Listen to the unstruck sound and transform

Duration: 21 minutes

This technique needs a piece of soft music to be played.

Close your eyes and sit in a very relaxed way.

(Turn on the music)

Concentrate on the spot inside your head where you experience sound. Understand, sound may be created outside your head but you experience it only inside your head. The hearing happens only inside your head. Remember that spot, remember that space where you experience sound. Completely concentrate on that space, feel that spot where you listen, where you hear the sounds of the music that is playing.

Do not make any judgments about the music. Don't think it is either good or bad. Don't start thinking about all the music you have heard earlier. Don't start comparing this music with some other music. Don't start thinking about any other musicians you have heard until now.

Forget about all other senses. Forget about seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, just forget about everything else. Be filled with the space of listening. Feel the space where you experience sound inside your head.

Listen to this music, not from outside but from inside your head. Be in that space and feel the music. Do not allow any thinking.

Don't go away from the music. Go into the music. Along with the notes there is a center sound, a rhythm, the backbone of the music. Try to feel that center, that backbone of the music, you will relax into the base rhythm of the music.

Just listen every moment to the composite central sound, the backbone, that central thread of the music. Go into it.

Feel the vibration of the sound inside your head. Again, no thinking is allowed. Don't move away from the present moment. Be in the present moment, be in that music.

Play with this technique whenever you find time alone at home. Play some music

and enter into that music, don't start thinking. Give the music your total attention. Now, you understand the difference between listening to music as you normally do, and listening meditatively. Play with this technique as time allows for at least a month. It can cause a powerful transformation in you.

3. Omkaara

Enter into the thoughtless zone

Duration: 21 minutes

Close your eyes and just sit in a relaxed way.

Step 1: Duration: 11 minutes

Concentrate on the navel center, manipuraka chakra (a vital energy center in the body, located in the navel area). Just take a few moments to place your awareness on the navel center. Forget all other parts of the body, remember only the navel center.

Now from your navel, start creating the deep vibration of Omkaara or 'Om' sound. Start the sound from your navel center, as deeply as possible. Don't allow the mind to go anywhere else. Just be centered on the sound, go into the center of the sound.

Step 2: Duration: 10 minutes

Stop. Just sit quietly for a few minutes with eyes closed. Try to hear the sound without creating the sound.

Relax and open your eyes.

Try this meditation for just ten days. You will see that you are able to sit without thoughts. You will be filled by the sound, by the vibration that you create, and your mind will not move outside the vibration.

4. Anahata Dhvani

Feel the energy flowing in your body. Become completely energized.

Duration: 21 minutes

Close your eyes and use both your thumbs to close your ears. Close them completely so that you hear that uncreated sound inside you called the anahata dhvani. It is the unstruck sound of the cosmos that can only be heard by one who meditates.

Let your whole inner space be filled by the unheard sound. Once you feel your whole

body is filled with that unheard sound, just contract your rectum and stop all the movements. Remain like this for as long as you can.

When your body relaxes, take your hands away and relax completely for a few moments. Until your body relaxes itself, don't give up! Try your best to hold on as long as possible.

If your body relaxes, take a few minutes break and start the process again by closing your eyes and ears, hearing the unstruck sound, contracting the rectum, and relaxing when appropriate.

Do not repeat this process more than five times. After every repetition, take at least thirty or forty seconds to relax. Let your eyes be closed even during the break. After you have finished the meditation, just sit for few moments with eyes closed, and experience the energy flow happening throughout the body. Relax into it.

5. The sound of your name

Enter into enlightenment

Duration: 10 minutes

Close your eyes and just sit. First, choose the word or words with which you are going to work. If you have a spiritual name (given by your master), that is best, or choose the god or the master with whom you feel deeply connected.

If you have a Sanskrit spiritual name, this technique can be really powerful. Understand, Sanskrit is not just a language of communication, its phonetics also have a vibrational value. This means that the actual sounds of the words have a purifying effect on both the speaker and the listener. Your name is your unique mantra or chant. Chanting or just listening to the mantras revealed by enlightened masters will simply create the effect in you of what the mantra stands for, what your name stands for.

Enter into the sound of the chosen name. Understand: do not repeat it out loud, just repeat it internally. The chanting should happen internally and you should just enter into that vibration. Your tongue should not move.

Create the sound of the name like a vibration, and keep repeating that sound, that

name, internally. Be filled with that sound. Let your whole inner space be filled with that sound.

Repeat the sound intensely and at a high frequency. No other thought should rise in your mind.

You will see, suddenly you are in soundless space. You are in wordlessness.

Just play with this technique for one month, practice it every morning for ten minutes and again, in the evening for ten minutes. Even while you are driving, this can be done with open eyes. Try it while you are driving, walking, or sitting and spending a few minutes with yourself.

You will understand the power of this special mantra for you, just this one sound. Suddenly you will see new doors opening in your consciousness, and you will enter into the soundlessness that we call enlightenment.

6. Center of the sound storm

Find the center of all sound within you, and transcend all sound

Duration: 21 minutes

We always live in a storm of sound. Sounds are constantly moving towards us, crashing in upon us, engulfing us. But at the center of this sound storm, there is a silence we haven't heard. This meditation makes us aware of the silence in the center of this storm of sound.

Sit down somewhere, anywhere. The noisier the place, the better! Look for a place with continuous sound. It could be a natural sound, like the gushing of a river or a waterfall or the crashing of the waves on a beach or it could be a railway station, or a marketplace.

Sit silently. Feel the sounds coming at you from every direction as sound waves. With sounds flowing at you from all directions, feel yourself to be at the center of this storm of sound. You are at the center, and sounds are flowing towards you.

Feel clearly, at the center, where you are, that there is no sound! At the center is total silence. If there were sound at the center, you would not be able to hear the sounds outside. The sounds are entering you, penetrating you, but they stop at the center.

Inside you, there is a point where all sounds stop. It is from that point that every sound is being heard. Try to locate that center.

When you locate it, suddenly, your awareness will turn inward from the outer world of sound. You will be at the center where there is silence, the point where no sound can enter. That point is your center.

Once you have heard that silence, you will never again be disturbed by any sound, you will never be touched by sound.

We always think that we are hearing sounds with our ears. With this technique, you discover that sounds are not heard in the ears or even in the head. The sound is always heard at the navel point, that is the center of sound.

You cannot try this technique with songs because the lyrics will have meaning for you, and you will focus on the meaning. So it needs to be just some noise.

7. From sound to feeling

Feel bliss through sound

Total Duration: 21 minutes

Close your eyes. Sit in a relaxed way.

Step 1: Duration: 10 minutes

First choose the sound with which you are going to work. It can be anything, so decide which sound gives you most excitement and joy.

Create that sound out loud and enjoy the feeling created by it. In a mild way, you should be able to create that sound, listen and enjoy the feeling. Just continuously create that sound and enjoy the feeling. Be centered on that feeling.

Step 2: Duration: 11 minutes

Now don't give any volume to the sound you are creating. Repeat it internally with just your tongue movement. Keep repeating the sound internally with just the tongue movement, and experience the feeling. Be centered more on the feeling than the sound itself. Be centered on the excitement created by that sound.

Visualization

1. Visualize the light

Go beyond the fear of death and live in eternal bliss

Duration: twenty-four hours a day, for 21 days

Visualize that you are light, that there is nothing else inside and outside. There is nobody, no world, there is only intense light. Visualize this from the moment you wake up until the moment you fall asleep, whatever you may be doing.

Slowly, after a few days, it will start penetrating even your sleep and dreaming states. In dreaming also, you will remember yourself as light. Even in deep sleep, you will remember yourself as light. You will be an eternal, shining light.

This technique is so powerful it will give you the clear experience that you will never die! Light never dies. If you think you are matter, you will always have the fear you will cease to be one day. If you realize you are light, the fear of death will disappear!

2. The lotus thread of light

Allow the intelligence, energy and enlightenment to awaken in you.

Duration: 21 minutes

Mentally scan your spine so that you will be able to visualize it easily in this meditation.

In the center, alongside the spine is a flow of energy like a slender thread, and that is what we call sushumna nadi* . It runs from the base of the spine to the crown, passing through each of the seven vital energy centers in our body called the chakras.

The ida nadi*, another slender thread, begins and ends on the left of the sushumna nadi* , and the pingala nadi* , a third slender thread, begins and ends on the right of the sushumna nadi. The ida* and pingala* spiral around the sushumna, crossing each other at every energy center, and all three meet midway between the eyebrows.

Whenever your energy is being sucked by the intellect, the ida nadi* will be active, and the subtle energy of your system will be flowing upwards. Whenever your energy is being sucked by the sexual center, the pingala nadi* will be active, and the energy will be flowing downwards. When enlightenment is activated in you, the central sushumna nadi will be activated, and your intelligence will be awakened!

All your intellectual thoughts suck the energy upward. All your thoughts of comfort or pleasure suck your energy downward. Now you are going to put your energy in the sushumna, the center, so that your enlightenment or intelligence is awakened.

Sit straight and close your eyes.

Let your spine be erect. Visualize your spine to be just like a lotus thread, a small thread from the root of your spinal cord to the top of the head, the crown area. Visualize a thin thread of light in the center of the spine, running continuously from the base of your spine to the crown of your head.

Put your attention on this thread of light. Just see the energy flowing from your root to the crown through this sushumna nadi. Let your whole awareness be centered on your sushumna nadi.

Try this technique for at least twenty-one minutes for ten days. In just ten or eleven

Sushumna nadi - One of the three major nadis, energy pathways in the body arising from the root energy center and ending in the crown center. The central pathway of the kundalini energy.

Ida nadi - Energy pathway arising from the root energy center and ending at the left nostril. Feminine, cool, represents the moon.

Pingala nadi - Energy pathway arising from the root energy center and ending in the right nostril. Hot, masculine, represents the sun.

Kirlian photography - High voltage photograms used to record auras of living beings.

days, you will experience the intelligence, the energy, the enlightenment, awakening in you!

3. Become empty

Become light and be in the present

Duration: 21 minutes

Sit and be as relaxed as possible. Do not put your weight on the spinal cord. You can support yourself with your hands.

Visualize energy leaving your body through your eyes, nose, tongue, ears and other sense organs. You are becoming completely empty.

Visualize that you have now become empty. Feel that you have become empty. Whatever you thought of as you is already gone. You are completely empty.

When you feel you are completely empty, stop visualizing. Be a witness. Witness your thoughts and the gap between your thoughts. Do not create any thought or destroy any thought. Just witness the thoughts and the gaps flowing in you.

4. Cleaning the inner screen

This is a powerful meditation technique for looking in and understanding that you are something more than the body.

Duration: 21 minutes

Whenever you look in, you see only the movie of the outer world on the inner screen. So, first we need to clean the inner screen.

Close your eyes. Sit straight. Inhale and exhale as slowly and as deeply as possible.

Visualize your inner screen as a blackboard. Whatever appears on that inner blackboard, start visually wiping it away. Just as an eraser is used to clean a blackboard, in the same way just wipe clean the inner blackboard or inner screen.

Now, visualize the number '3' on your inner screen. Visualize it very clearly and then wipe it away slowly.

Next, visualize the number '2' on your inner screen, and then wipe it away slowly.

Then, visualize the number '1' and wipe it away slowly in the same way.

Now, repeat this whole process, starting once more with the number '3', then the number '2', and lastly the number '1'.

Next, just witness the empty screen. Do not create, maintain or destroy any thought. Just witness the empty screen.

Continue to be with yourself for a few moments.

When you look at your inner being without the movie of the outer world, not only what you are seeing will become different, even the seer will become different. In the outer world, the seer and the seen are two different things. In the inner world, the seer and the seen are both one and the same.

5. From words to feeling to being

Touch the inner space of vibrant silence

Duration: 21 days

This technique requires that you first cleanse your inner space.

Cleansing technique

Close your eyes. Sit and look into yourself. First, honestly examine all aspects of your life. Ask yourself exactly in how many areas of your life have you built your identity based on lies? When have you uttered words or made promises, knowing that you are not going to live up to them or not going to fulfill them?

No matter how painful it is, do this process honestly. Do not avoid facing yourself honestly. See this as a wonderful chance for self-analysis for introspection. At least be able to admit to yourself where you have constructed your identity based on lies.

Now, for the next 21 days, do not utter any word that you do not mean. Do not use any word or make any promise, knowing that you can't keep your word. Do not think that no one else can pin you down or corner you. Be absolutely straightforward in all your relationships and interactions. Then this technique will work beautifully for you.

Main Technique

Visualize a word like 'love', 'joy' or 'bliss'. Even negative words are okay. So, positive or negative, just choose a word to visualize.

Visualize the word. First visualize it with letters. For instance, for love, visualize L-O-V-E.

Next, drop the visualization of the letters. Repeat that word internally just as a sound. Hear the sound.

Then relax from the sound also. Just be with the feeling of that word. Only remember the feeling, neither the letters nor the sound, just the feeling. Put your whole awareness on the feeling.

Now relax even from the feeling. Just be silent. Do not create a thought of the letter or the sound or the feeling. Just be with yourself.

This is a powerful technique that can straightaway transform you and put you in silence, in bliss.

6. Weightless – technique 2

Transcend the gross body and enter into subtle consciousness

Duration: 10 minutes a day, for ten days

This is a wonderful technique even for beginning meditators. You don't need any training, understanding or belief for this technique.

First, remove whatever accessories or jewelry you may be wearing on your body.

Either sit or lie down. Be as comfortable as possible. You can also lean against a wall if you feel comfortable that way. You can stretch your legs in whatever way you want, but you shouldn't need to exert effort to hold your body. The idea is to feel very comfortable without supporting the weight of your body.

For example, if your head is straight, be very clear, you are exerting effort to keep it straight. It always requires effort to keep your head straight. This should not be the case here. In the same way, don't keep your spine erect, because that takes effort. No part of your body should feel effort or tension. Just drop your arms and relax; do not hold tension in any part of the body.

The weight of your body should not be felt anywhere. Otherwise you will be constantly feeling that you are heavy. Let your whole body be relaxed. Visualize that you are a weightless being.

Actually you are weightless. You only constantly visualize that you are heavy. When on a bed or chair, feel your self become weightless and enter the space beyond the mind.

Feeling you are heavy is one shaft of thought. We will now break that shaft with the thought shaft that you are light. It is like using one thorn to remove another. Then, we will throw both thoughts out!

Let your whole body be relaxed, totally relaxed. Just drop the body, let it be as it is. Let the body take its shape. Even when you stretch your leg, let it take its own shape.

Part by part, let your whole body just be. If you feel you are holding any part of your body, relax and stretch. Feel your legs are weightless. Feel your thighs are weightless. Feel your whole body is weightless. Just relax into that weightlessness.

Use your visualization power. Without any personality inside, just let your body be. See your body without any personality. You can function without any individuality or personality. Let your body be without any identify, just as the animals function without any personality or identity interfering.

Do this meditation for ten minutes a day for ten days. You will discover you are weightless! How will you know that this meditation is working? Mentally you will feel like your body is not on the earth, like you have to pull yourself down to the earth because you are so light! You will not feel like you even have a body. Just practice this technique for ten days, it can work miracles.

7. Etheric connection

Expand your consciousness and conquer your emotions

Duration: 21 minutes

Visualize you are a huge body of light. Visualize all your emotional relationships, loving as well as not so loving, as part of your light body (also called etheric body). If you have somebody who is emotionally connected to you, say in another country, visualize that you have a huge body that extends out to that country, and that person (or persons) is also inside your light body!

Let all the emotional connections, hateful or loving, be inside your etheric body. Secondly, add along with the visualization of the etheric body, the awareness of your center.

Carry this visualization for ten days.

8. Burn down your conditionings

Liberate your self from your mental setup and be free

Duration: 21 minutes

Visualize that all your inner thoughts and feelings about people, situations, experiences, anything and everything, are all burning! Visualize continuously that whatever you think about the world, about anything, is burning… it no longer exists. Your attitudes, your interests, your passions, your greed, your desires and your fears are all being consumed in the fire.

This will drastically break your conditioning, and lead you to enlightenment.

LIVING ENLIGHTENMENT

Nithya Spiritual Healing is a gift that I received along with my enlightenment, that I pass on to you. It is not any meditation program. It is an initiation that a master gives you. The initiation puts you in tune with the Existential energy and provides you the energy to heal.

What is healing?

The enlightened master Buddha gives a beautiful explanation or definition for the word 'healing'. He says healing is our way of expressing our compassion, our care towards somebody to help restore his health to him.

Healing is nothing but helping a person restore his physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.

Health

Good health is not just absence of disease. It is a presence of ease, a sense of wellbeing. We are not mere humans who are meant to fall sick and then get cured. We are embodiments of bliss. We were created to live with a blissful feeling at the being level all the time. This is what good health is meant to be.

Chakras and the science of healing

According to Patanjali, an enlightened master and the father of yoga, there are seven major chakras or subtle energy centers in our body.

These seven energy centers influence our physical, mental and being level activities. They lie in the metaphysical plane within us, and are associated with seven major glands in our physical bodies. They strongly influence the working of the corresponding physical gland.

Each and every one of our chakras is related to some emotion in us. For example, love is related to the anahata chakra, the heart energy center. Worry is related to the manipuraka chakra, the navel energy center. That is why if you receive some news that worries you, the first blow will be to your stomach. You will say, 'I can't digest it!' or 'I can't stomach that!' These expressions can be found in many languages around the world.

Kirlian photography* has recorded the effect of these emotions on the chakras. If an emotion is handled properly, the corresponding chakra functions well, expanding to the size of even a cartwheel. If the emotion is not handled properly, the

Kirlian photography - High voltage photograms used to record auras of living beings.

Our mental setup is what is the root cause of disease and imbalance in our body-mind system.

corresponding chakra shrinks to the size of even a coat button, which causes low energy in the system. This

lower energy ultimately manifests as disease in the mind-body system.

Several factors like childhood problems, societal conditioning, improper habits, physical and emotional injuries, or even just lack of attention, affect the energy flow through the chakras.

It is only when our chakras are affected that disease happens in us. If our body and mind are at ease with each other, we feel this ease as a sense of wellbeing. If our body and mind are not at ease with each other, we feel the dis-ease, otherwise called disease. The state of the chakras reveal this level of ease or dis-ease in us.

Mind over body

The body is like the hardware and the mind is like the software. We try to fix the hardware when the software is what is causing the problem! The software is corrupted, so it continuously gives the wrong instructions to the hardware, the body. Please understand that it is our mental setup that is the root cause of disease and imbalance in our body-mind system.

Energy healing

The science of giving energy to a person who is diseased, sick or who is feeling a lack of energy, is what we call healing. The energy can be given to any chakra, any energy center that needs it, and the energy center will respond to it.

If we can get the right technique and make enough time to use it, we can heal ourselves and restore the chakra to its energy balance, and come out of the disease resulting from the imbalance. There may be various reasons why we are not able to do this all the time. We may not know the right technique or may not make enough time to meditate. Because of poor health we may not have enough energy for meditation and spiritual practices.

In such cases, someone who is a meditator can meditate and pass the energy to us, energizing the chakra and restoring health in us. This is the essence of the science of energy healing.