Selections from: "Merging With Siva," "The Clear White Light," with bhashya on components such as: Our own greatness and spiritual potential, worry and how to overcome it. An excerpt from Gurudeva's Shum Language of Meditation focuses on balikana: The light of the mind without thought pictures; and then how to go step by step, even deeper, to the destination: The Clear White Light.

Unedited Transcript:

Good morning everyone. Our daily lesson from Gurudeva and the Master Course, the "Merging With Siva" chapter, is currently Chapter 8. "The Clear White Light" which is certainly a mystical and powerful chapter. So, I thought I'd read from it and make a few comments.

"Occasionally young aspirants burst into inner experience indicating a balance of intense light at a still-higher rate of vibration of here-and-now awareness than their almost daily experience of a moon-glow inner light: the dynamic vision of seeing the head, and at times the body, filled with a brilliant clear white light. (period) When this intensity can be attained at will, more than often man will identify himself as spiritual or actinic force flowing through the odic externalities of the outer mind and identify it as a force of life more real and infinitely more permanent than the external mind itself.

"Occasionally, through his newly exercised extrasensory perception, he may hear the seven sounds he previously studied about in occult lore. The sounds of the atomic structure of his nerve system, his cells, register as voices singing, the vina or sitar, tambura, or as symphonies of music. Instruments to duplicate these sounds for the outer ears were carefully tooled by the rishis of classical yoga thousands of years ago, including the mridanga or tabla, and the flute. He will hear the shrill note, likened to a nightingale singing, as psychic centers in his cranium burst open, and then an inner voice indicating to his external consciousness -- like a breath of air -- direction, elucidation. This inner voice remains with him as a permanent yoga of the external, with the internal consciousness an ever-ready guide to the unraveling of complexities of daily life.

"Occasionally, in a cross-section of the inner mind, when light merges into transcendental form, the young aspirant may view the golden actinic face of a master peering into his, kindly and all-knowing. He is looking at his own great potential."

So that's a point that's important to comment on, cause, it's not generally understood. "He's looking at his own great potential." So, the context in which I regularly stress this point is, it's in one of my talks about our Paramaguru Yogaswami, and it's the standard talk I give to Yogaswami devotees when, particularly when we're up in Canada. And it's to balance out the general perception that Yogaswami's way up here on a pedestal and here we are way down here. And so, we're just acknowledging the greatness of Yogaswami. He's great, we're humble, we're trying to be pure and devoted and so forth and he's great. So that's good but, it's not enough. In other words we also need to realize that the greatness we see in Yogaswami or any other person is also in us. It's our own spiritual potential. So, we never want to just stop and leave someone on a pedestal and ourselves down here; we also want to utilize that insight into their greatness to give us a little more momentum in moving toward our own greatness, shall we say. And look at it that way, that it's our own potential, as Gurudeva says.

"As the clear white light becomes more of a friend to his external mind than an experience or vision and can be basked in during contemplative periods of the day, the nourishment to the entirety of the nerve system, as ambrosia, bursts forth from the crown chakra. This is identified inadequately as 'the peace that passeth understanding,' for he who reaches this state can never seem to explain it.

"The highly trained classical yoga adept intensifies, through techniques imparted to him from his guru, the clear white light to the brink of God Realization, the void. His entire body is faded into a sea of blue-white light, the akasha, where now, past and future are recorded in the linear depths or layers, sometimes seeing himself seated or standing on a lotus flower of shimmering light in an actinodic clear, transparent, neon, plastic-like-body outline as his consciousness touches, in tune with a heart's beat, into the Self, God Realization."

So it keeps going here, it's kind of deep. There's a part I wanted to also read.

"The uninitiated might ask: 'What is it like to be in the clear white light?' The young aspirant may reply, 'It is as simple as sitting in a darkened room, closing the eyes in deep concentration and finding the entire inside of the cranium turning into light.' At first it may be only a dim, moon-like glow, a pale flicker of several different colors, but then it becomes as bright and intense as the radiance of the noonday sun, then crystal clear and white. It all depends upon the composition of the mind states of reactionary patterns as to how the light in the cranium will first appear.

"Of course, clear white light is not absolute, for light invariably implies the existence of shadow. The shadows that sometimes fade out inner light are the instinctive functions that hold the physical body intact. They are represented as attributes in the external mind and character of man.

"Attachment, for instance, holds our cells together; it is also the root of much suffering, for attachment to material objects or people keeps man's awareness externalized, incapable of expressing itself in full freedom. Man who is caught in the magnetic forces is prone to resentment. Not being able to cognize various fears as they occur, he stores them up into a conscious resentment of all threats to the false securities found in attachment. Resentment burrows deeply into the outer mind's layers, undermining much of a person's creative endeavor. The reactionary conditions resentment is capable of agitating are subconscious and cast many shadows over clarity of perception for long periods of time.

Those who resent are often jealous, another shadow or character weakness which stems from feelings of inferiority, a limited view of one's real Self. After one burst of clear white light has occurred, the force fields of attachment, resentment and jealousy are shattered. An increased control of the mind, an expanded consciousness, is maintained which frees man, little by little, from ever again generating the magnetic holds consuming his consciousness in these shadows. When man allows himself to routine his external thinking and action to settle into uncreative, static conditions, pressures of various sorts build up, and the undisciplined mind releases itself to the emotion of anger, a state of consciousness which renders a man blind to the existence of inner light to any degree.

"Fear is another shadow which causes man to have an inability to face a critical moment, even in the intimacy of his deepest meditation. But fear is a protective process of the instinctive mind, allowing time to temporarily avoid what must later be faced. Fear, being an intense force in the mind's, as well as the body's, structure, must be handled positively, for when man thinks under the shadow of fear, he causes his fears to manifest. The flickering shadows of worry brought on by allowing the mind to irrationally jump from one subject to another, never centralizing on any one point long enough to complete it, must be handled through disciplining the flow of thought force, for worry provokes a darker shadow -- fear."

So that's one of my best, favorite explanations of worry. Read that again cause quite often, one point or another, we find ourselves worried about one thing or another.

What causes worry? "Allowing the mind to irrationally jump from one subject to another never centralizing on any one point long enough to complete it." So that's what causes worry; we're just allowing the mind to think about something without coming to a conclusion, we jump somewhere else. And then without coming to a conclusion about that, we jump somewhere else. Cause when we're leaving all these loose ends in our thinking. So, how do we overcome that? "Disciplining the flow of thought force." In other words, we don't allow ourselves to do that. If we're going to think about something we stick with it and complete the thought. And in completing the thought then we avoid the worry.

"Fear when disturbed causes anger, submerged anger, resentment, causing a jealous nature. Hence the constant play of the clear white light versus its shadows.

"By becoming conscious of the way in which the mind operates in even a small degree, the young aspirant to light finds it easy to fold back the shadows into shafts of clear white light."

So, how do we accomplish all of that? That's when we pull out our Shum. Quite often "Merging With Siva" gives the goal but it doesn't give you all the details of how to get there. So it's one of the beauties of Gurudeva's language of meditation, the Shum Language, is that he explains, takes more time to explain, the step by step process by which we can achieve these experiences.

So, the basic meditation teachings in the Shum Language are found in what are called the Mamsani which are twelve meditation diagrams. And just to make sure we didn't forget them Gurudeva had them carved into the pillars of Iraivan Temple.

So they're good for a thousand years and at least for the next thousand years we'll all remember the twelve Mamsani. So the January one touches on the subject we were looking at about: "The Clear White Light" So, let me read that explanation.

"Our first Mamsani tells us to not only meditate upon it during vigil, after our worship and before sleep, but all through the day. Yes, we must constantly be looking within ourselves all month during our waking hours. Throughout each day try to see the light within the mind. Have you ever stopped to think that the light that lights up your thoughts, even when you are in a darkened room, is the light of the mind? That is true. Try taking the image out of the mind and you will see that only light is left. Just before you go to sleep each night, while you are thinking and visualizing the happening of the just completed day, the images that you are seeing are set apart, distinguished by light, shadows and color. This is the light of the mind that you are seeing but this light is taken for granted. We do not often think about it. We are too involved in the pictures that we are making. The practice to be mastered this month is to consciously remove the pictures and only see the light of the mind, called in Shum: Balikana. Even in our dreams there is light which lights up the colors of the scenes that pass before us. Truly each and every one of us is a divine being of light. Yes, you are a divine being of light and this you will truly realize by becoming aware of this light within you. Adjust yourself to the realization that you are a divine being, a self effulgent radiant being of light."

And then the meditation goes into the "how to" more which Gurudeva touched on there. The idea is -- and we were practicing this at our recent meditation retreat -- that we can see different images in the mind. One of the one's we took was trees because we were surrounded by trees in our Mill Valley Hillside Retreat Center there, so we were visualizing different trees and then stopping the visualization of the trees and looking at the light that was lighting up the trees. And that's what Gurudeva's calling the "moonlike glow." So if you can hold that without any images in it that's the first experience of inner light. For it's a very simple process and to make it even easier it's done with the eyes open. So, we're looking inside and outside at the same time. Why is that? Because it's easier for the mind not to wander when the eyes are open. But, when you close your eyes you can go anywhere.

But when you keep your eyes open, the mind doesn't tend to just go off anywhere cause it's looking at something outside so it harnesses it to some degree. So, certain meditation exercises therefore, are done with the eyes open. So this one is done with the eyes open. You're, you're looking out then looking in and seeing different images such as the trees. And then you stop seeing images. You say: "O.K. I don't want any images," and you're looking at the light which lights up the images. And if the images come back you quiet the mind down again so there's no images there. And then when you can hold that with some continuity, then you can go even deeper, into the clear white light which is much more brilliant. Then, if you can hold that you can go even deeper, you know there's other exercises that the monks do that take it even further. So, but it's so nicely mapped out in the Shum language. As Gurudeva says in that quote: "To take a journey we need both a means of travel and a destination." Remember, I said that one before. So the Shum Language gives both. Gives us the destination, we're trying to get into the clear white light. And it gives us a means to get there. In other words, first we do this, then we do this, then we do this, then we do this. Then if all went well, we should be there. It's like one, two, three, four, five steps, each one a little more subtle than the other. And that's the nature of meditating in the Shum language. It gives you a step by step way of getting to a destination in this case: "The Clear White Light."

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