A class given by Paramacharya Sadasivanathaswami during the 2014 Mauritius Innersearch. He discusses the challenges and benefits of meditation. He talks about fourteen secrets to meditation. He says how deep you go into meditation depends on what you do and what you are. He illustrates this through Gurudeva's teachings and story about karmic limitation preventing one from going into deeper meditation. [transcript in complete... to be finished later]

Unedited Transcript:

So this is Tirumantiram verse 583. This will sound very familiar. Closing the gateway below the Mooladhara center. So, closing off the lower chakras, your thoughts on the door of Brahama above the Sahasara chakra , meditate on that into the oneness. Fix your lance like vision on that vast inner space and thus practicing Kundalini yoga, you should vanquish time, vanquish time. What a beautiful idea! and vanquish time and vanquish space too, and vanquish form, you vanquish all of that, you are then who you are. So meditation has a lot of [uh]dimensions to it and I am gonna read to you 14 secrets about meditation in a minute and have you to write them down, and [uh] but, what people don't always realize is that meditation is equal part what you do and equal part what you are . So if you are a frantic, upset, emotional person and you are trying to meditate. No matter how good your technique is , you are probably not going to do good job at it.

Whereas, if you are deeply refined, balanced person with lot's of metaphysical, philosophical understandings and you go into meditation and use the right technique you are probably you are going to dive into the core of the universe. So, its part of being a good meditator is developing in your life a good person.

That really is a much a more important than people often realize, and Gurudeva had a nice little visualization. People would come to him and say you know I am trying to meditate, I just get into certain point and then can't get any farther than that. So, always go to the same point and then I get stopped. Why is that?

Then Gurudeva said , well that's the karma . So, you can't in a sense meditate beyond your Karmic limitations. So what's happening, he would say, as you are going in and in and in, but Karma is like a rubber band and as you further and further in, rubber band gets harder and harder and tighter. So when you get to a certain point it gets brings you back out to the external mind. Your own, your own Karmas and your own limitations. Then you have to work on your Karmas so that the rubber band gets bigger and bigger, and it allows you to go deeper and deeper before it brings your back. So, you can see how that would work.

Karmic limitation, you can't just go into Sivaness on day 1. Why? You have to go through all these things. So, want to tell you another little story. It's a very short one. It has to do with one of the Monks. [uh] In those days we were talking about a minute ago was [uh]didn't do very well sitting in a full lotus. He had some anguish in his legs whenever he was in full lotus and Gurudeva required us to sit there in front him for the full hour in lotus, and so this monk [uh]was really hurting [uh]and he typically, he would be sitting in lotus and we would be meditating and he would reach down to his foot and he was gonna you know release his foot and Gurudeva would just go like this. Didn't say anything but just stay there. So , he would stay there , we would go to the meditation and he would have tears running down his cheeks from the pain but he couldn't relieve it. That was Gurudeva's teaching to him for at that particular time. And then, so, he came to Gurudeva and he said I don't know what to do. My body doesn't want to sit there like some of other bodies or happy to sit there in lotus and forget that you have a body. So, my body doesn't seem to want to do that, and what should I do? Gurudeva said, well, here is what you can do. So, you feel that a strain and pain in your legs, during the meditation that's an energy, this goes back to Gurudeva's