August 2019 Chitra Puja

Aum Namah Sivaya

Yesterday afternoon we gathered in Kadavul Temple for a padapuja to Gurudeva's granite paduka. While monks chanted Sri Rudram, Yogi Mayuranatha and Nirvani Tejadevanatha performed the abhishekam. Aum

\"The higher states of consciousness very few people are familiar with, having never experienced them.\"

They are very pleasant to learn of, and yet out of our grasp until we have that direct experience of a higher state of expanded consciousness.

The mind, in its density, keeps us from the knowledge of the Self.

And then we attain a little knowledge of the existence of the Self as a result of the mind freeing itself from desires and cravings, hates and fears and the various and varied things of the mind.

I say \"things\" because if you could see hate, you would see it as a thing that lives with one as a companion.

If you could see fear, youd see it as a thing, and as understanding comes, that thing called fear walks away down the road, never to return.

As you unfold spiritually, it is difficult to explain what you find that you know.

At first you feel light shining within, and that light you think you have created with your mind, and yet you will find that, as you quiet your mind, you can see that light again and again, and it becomes brighter and brighter, and then you begin to wonder what is in the center of that light.

\"If it is the light of my True Being, why does it not quiet the mind?\"

Then, as you live the so-called \"good life,\" a life that treats your conscience right, that light does get brighter and brighter, and as you contemplate it, you pierce through into the center of that light, and you begin to see the various beautiful forms, forms more beautiful than the physical world has to offer, beautiful colors, in that fourth-dimensional realm, more beautiful than this material world has to offer.

And then you say to yourself, Why forms? Why color, when the scriptures tell me that I am timeless, causeless and formless?

And you seek only for the colorless color and the formless form. But the mind in its various and varied happenings, like a perpetual cinema play, pulls you down and keeps you hidden within its ramifications.

In your constant striving to control that mind,your soul comes into action as a manifestation of will, and you quiet more and more of that mind and enter into a deeper state of contemplation where you see a scintillating light more radiant than the sun, and as it bursts within you, you begin to know that you are the cause of that light which you apparently see.

And in that knowing, you cling to it as a drowning man clings to a stick of wood floating upon the ocean. You cling to it and the will grows stronger; the mind becomes calm through your understanding of experience and how experience has become created.

And as you come back into the mind, you not only see the mind for what it is; you see the mind for what it isnt. You are free, and you find men and women bound, and what you find you are not attached to, because binder and the bound are one.

You become the path. You become the way. You are the light. And as you watch souls unfold, some choose the path of the Spirit;

some choose the path of the mind. As you watch and wonder, your wondering is in itself a contemplation of the universe, and on the brink of the Absolute you look into the mind, and one tiny atom magnifies itself greater than the entire universe, and you see, at a glance, evolution from beginning to end, inside and outside, in that one small atom.

Again, as you leave external form and dive into that light which you become, you realize beyond realization a knowing deeper than thinking, a knowing deeper than understanding, a knowing which is the very, very depth of your being.

You realize immortality, that you are immortalthis body but a shell, when it fades; this mind but an encasement, when it fades.

Even in their fading there is no reality.

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