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Meditation
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Meditation Wisdom from Revelations of Christ
Excerpts from Revelations of Christ: Proclaimed by Paramhansa Yogananda, Presented by Swami Kriyananda.
Divine grace is essential to true inner communion. Nothing man can do will ever oblige God to respond. On the other hand, even trying to bring about divine communion by will power alone is a sign of egotistical presumption, not of the humility that comes with true openness of heart and mind. Most of the warnings against meditation, especially (in the West) against yoga meditation are based on the thought that meditation implies presumption. The warnings are either mischievous or simply ignorant.
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It is an absolute fallacy to insist that meditation leads to self-deception. Meditation is in fact the best way of testing one’s religion. It is scientific, for it offers the test of actual experience.
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There are false as well as true experiences in meditation. To avoid meditating from fear of false ones would be like refusing to go out of doors from fear of being hit by a truck. In meditation, take care that your efforts to surrender the ego to God involve openness to higher awareness, not the false “openness” of a blank mind. Never, moreover, surrender passively to stray thoughts and fantasies. Inner surrender should be upward, toward the superconsciousness, not downward into subconsciousness.
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Without subtle [meditation] techniques it is difficult for people to develop spiritually. They may try, for example, to direct love toward God but, despite their best efforts, find their feelings being dispersed in a thousand different directions of restless emotion. They may try to concentrate on God, but, having no idea how to do so, find their thoughts running riot.
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When we give of ourselves outwardly to others, we expand our self-identity, but that act can’t altogether release us from identity with the little ego. To free ourselves completely from ego-involvement, we must “give” also (and primarily) upward, to God, rather than only outward, to others.
When the heart’s energy is offered up through the spine, and is allowed to flow freely through the medulla oblongata (instead of being blocked there) to the spiritual eye in the forehead, the ego-sense (which is centered in the medulla) is released, and spiritualized, becoming soul-conscious.
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The upwardly moving kundalini, or “serpent power,” is blocked from further ascent by the outward flow of energy in each of the respective chakras, or spinal centers.
These centers must, each in turn, be “opened.” That is to say, their normally outward flow of energy must be reversed and redirected upward, with kundalini’s passage
up the spine. Only as each chakra “opens its door” to the upward-moving energy can the kundalini continue on its upward journey.
Until the heart has been completely cleansed of all worldly attachments and desires, the increased focus of energy in the spinal centers may stimulate any one of those centers in such a way as to flow outward, and to reawaken latent delusive tendencies.
All of us have the same highly developed and sensitive nervous system, the same intelligence, and the same latent spiritual possibilities as have the saints. The only thing preventing people from realizing God as their own Reality is the simple fact that ego-motivated desires direct their energy outward, away from their own divine center.
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Jesus, in referring to the “keys of the kingdom of heaven,” alluded to the
techniques of meditation—especially, Yogananda said, to the technique of Kriya Yoga—which “open the doors, or chakras, of the spine” and allow all the body’s energy to rise toward the highest centers in the brain, where, truly, “the kingdom of God” exists in man.
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Kriya Yoga magnetizes the energy in the spine, first by deliberately controlling the energy-flow in the two superficial nerve channels (ida and pingala), and then by neutralizing that superficial flow in breathlessness. Complete inner, bodily stillness then causes a withdrawal of one’s energy into the central, or deep spine.
The deep spine contains three concentric channels of energy, each of which must be entered and passed through in turn. They correspond to the ring of golden light, the circular blue field inside of it, and the silvery white, five-pointed star in the center, all of which together form the spiritual eye.
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