MAXIMIZING YOUR🔗

MEDITATION

Triggering the Psychological Revolution Within

When the psychological revolution happens in you

suddenly you find

you are awake to your own self.

A tremendous awareness arises, about who you are

the identities you are carrying

and why you act as you do.

A clear understanding is awakened

about the Source of self, world and God.

In every decision, you flow towards meditation and clarity,

and a deep restfulness happens in you.

Sometimes, people come and tell me, “Swamiji, I have tried so many types of meditation, so many techniques. But nothing works!”

Understand, to really enter into meditation, an important thing needs to happen in you - a psychological revolution! What do I mean by psychological revolution? It means having a clear understanding about yourself, about the world, about God. Who are you? What are the identities you are carrying? How are you connected to others? What is your place in this universe? When the psychological revolution happens in you, you enter a space of total relaxation, where you are able to find your own life solutions. If you enter into meditation without this basic clarity about life, your meditation is going to be just one more ritual! If you enter into meditation with this clarity, meditation will lead to more clarity, and so on - in a virtuous circle! Understand: without the psychological revolution, meditation is also a ritual. With the psychological revolution, even a ritual can become meditation.

The first step in initiating this psychological revolution is having a clear understanding of how our mind works, and how we are functioning in this world. A simple clarity about this can trigger a powerful revolution in the way we handle our inner and outer worlds. Let me try to give you a simple diagram so you can understand what meditation can do for you.

Each of us experiences two states of mind in our day to day life - one with thoughts, another without thoughts. For example, we know we have thoughts when we are awake. But in deep sleep, do we have thoughts? No. So there are two states of mind: with thoughts and without thoughts.

What we don’t know is, our being also experiences two states. In one state, we have a clear identity of ‘I’. When we are awake, all of us clearly experience ourselves as ‘I’, we carry a clear identity about ourselves. In the waking state we remember our identity - I am this, I am that. When we are awake, our ‘I’ consciousness will be like an undercurrent – alive all the time.

But in deep sleep, we don’t experience the ‘I’ consciousness, am I right? When we are in deep sleep, we don’t have the feeling of ‘I’. In deep sleep, we don’t remember our identity.

Now let us understand how these two states of mind and the two states of being connect with each other and create different states in our consciousness. The first state is when we are with thoughts and with ‘I’ consciousness. This is what we call the jagrat state or waking state. In this state, we are conscious of our identity, and we have thoughts also.

In this waking state, the frequency of ‘I’ is more than the frequency of thoughts. That is why we are able to control the thoughts in this state. If we wish to, we can control a thought - we can expel a thought or create a thought. This is possible in the waking state.

The next state is the dream state (swapna). In this state also, we have thoughts, but there is no ‘I’ consciousness.

We are not conscious of our identity in our dreams. That is why, in your dream, you could see yourself studying in college, but sitting with your son next to you! This shows that you have no clear, logical identity in the dream state.

In the dream state, the frequency of ‘I’ is lower than the frequency of thoughts. That is why you are not able to control the thoughts in our dreams. That is why the dream state is full of erratic and illogical thoughts. If we had the freedom to dream about whatever we want, we all know what kind of dreams we would be choosing!

The third state we experience is deep sleep or sushupti. In this state, there is neither ‘I’ consciousness nor thoughts. These are the three states that we constantly experience in our lives – the waking state, the dream state and the deep sleep state.

But there is a fourth state that we have not experienced. It is called turiya. In this state, the ‘I’ consciousness exists - but without thoughts! Very few people experience this state continuously in their lives. Sometimes, we experience it for a few seconds and then go back to our regular waking state. If you receive a sudden shock, or if you are sitting with nature in a completely relaxed state and in deep silence, you may experience a state where the identity is alive, the ‘I’ consciousness is aliv,e but there are no thoughts. This is the fourth state or turiya.

All our physical and mental illnesses take root in the dream state! When I say ‘dream state’, don’t think dreaming is just what we do at night. Most of our waking hours are also spent in the dream state! The dream state can penetrate and overlap both the waking and deep sleep states. If our waking state is penetrated by the dream state, it is called daydreaming or fantasizing. We will be living and moving with hardly any real awareness of the world around us.

On some mornings, on your way to work, you get into your car, drive ten miles and reach your office. But only when you stop in your parking lot, take your keys and get out of the car, do you suddenly realize that you have driven for so many miles! You would have taken hundreds of decisions from the time you got into the car and started driving: to press the clutch, press the brakes, press the accelerator, put on the indicator, watch out for the traffic light, take a turn, speed up, slow down... you would have made all these decisions, but without having any awareness of it! If this happens, be clear, your dream state is penetrating your waking state.

The more the dream state penetrates the waking state, the more the frequency of our consciousness comes down. We may be living in our human body, but we will not be living a truly human life. We will not be aware about the decisions we are making. We will not be aware of the kind of words we are thinking. We will not be aware of what is going on inside of us. It will be as if we are living in a house, but we do not know what is happening inside it!

When the dream state penetrates the waking state too much, we will not have the clarity to move further. We will not have freedom or energy to move further. We will feel like all the doors are closed on us, all the possibilities are exhausted. That is what we call depression. Living in the waking state which is continuously disturbed by the dream state is what I call living in hell!

With meditation, you can create an increasing influence and awareness over both your thinking state and the unconscious state. Instead of the dream state, turiya or the blissful state will start penetrating the waking and deep sleep states! The more we meditate, the more we raise our consciousness of turiya - the fourth state. Turiya itself only means ‘fourth’, because you cannot give an exact name to this state. You can call it by any of these names: samadhi, enlightenment, atmagnana, brahmagnana, nirvana... When this state starts penetrating and overlapping the waking and deep sleep states, we will see good health happening in the body, mind and being.

A simple understanding of the four states of consciousness can initiate the psychological revolution in you. It is your Master key! By applying this understanding every moment of your life, you will see that in every decision, your thought process flows towards meditation and clarity, and every decision is influenced in the right way! You experience a powerful cognitive shift in the way you receive information, process it and act on it in the best possible way.

The whole purpose of meditation is to bring more and more of turiya into our waking state and deep sleep state. Bringing yourself completely out of the waking, dream and deep sleep states for a while, is what I call dhyaana, meditation. If your waking and deep sleep states are constantly illumined by the fourth state, that is jeevan mukti - living enlightenment!