Find your spiritual path inside you. Any true spiritual path must be one in which you are led to spiritual transformation that is permanent. Spiritual growth that is more than just a mere glimpse requires a means to permanent spiritual transformation. For this you need a time-honored, proved spiritual path to spiritual enlightenment that is founded on verifiable, inner experiences of your true nature – the Self. In this way, you will find your spiritual path right where it is – inside you.
The only thing required for spiritual growth is detachment from worldly pleasures. If you don’t listen to this, you will fail in the end. The thoughtless state, the state of detachment, is the highest state. How can there be desire in the state of detachment? It is not the world the yogi gives up, it is desire for worldly sense pleasure. The true yogi is full and content whether he is a pauper or a rich man. If pleasurable things come your way, experience them, but never go looking. Always be content in yourself wherever you are and whatever your circumstances.
~ Bhagawan Nityananda of Ganeshpuri
The understandings you reach for are vital for you to find your spiritual path. Right understanding is that which is the most useful for directing your attention and focus to dwell on the highest. The highest is that supreme intelligence, That Shiva-Shakti power that threads through everything that you perceive through your senses. It is everything that is beyond sensory perception. That supreme intelligence is also known as the Self or God. That is your true nature. It is an ocean of Love, a palace of Peace and an unwavering state of Joy.
Find your spiritual path in a way that leads to the experience of the full expression of humanity, in the delight of the inner Self. To attain such a path and state, you have to begin with the understandings you reach for and embrace.
To find your spiritual path it’s important to examine where you get our understandings from. This is important because understandings always dictate your feelings. How you are vibrating, from moment-to-moment, is dictated by the feeling you experience in that moment and the subsequent emotions that follow.
Your vibration immediately begins to attract to you the people, places and things that will reinforce that vibration. A single understanding has a host of other understandings connected to it. This causes you to embrace even more understandings (that will dictate other feelings) that will keep you wedded to whatever state you find yourself in. This happens by way of the understandings you have been holding and the subsequent feelings and vibration that manifest out of those understandings.
For this reason, if you want to change how you feel, you need to change your understanding. You can take from this that understandings are vital to whether or not you will experience your true nature from the vantage point of the Self. The understandings you reach for and embrace either keep you bound to lack, limitation and contraction, or they will free you to experience the Joy and Peace of the true Heart. In the experience of inner peace and joy you are able to invoke changes in your life that enhance your living, without compromising your peace and your true worth. And without compromising your Human Dignity that is the essence of the experience of the Absolute.
The understandings you embrace often come from popular and widely-accepted notions about who you are. You will find that these are based on what society, the collective consciousness of the masses, your husband, wife, friends, family members, lovers – based on what they all tell you.
For example, if you believe yourself to be a ‘liberal,’ you identify with what the liberals tell you. If you are a ‘conservative,’ you fashion part of your identity after what the conservatives tell you. If you have a favorite celebrity, you accept the ideas and notions that the celebrity has made popular. You may even believe that the roles celebrities play on the Internet, in movies, TV and other popular media have an important message for you.
You may believe that you are the body, just a person, just ordinary, an individual who has to make his/her life happen. And you accept these things without even questioning them because these are the understandings you have been taught by the company you keep. They are also the understandings you embrace by way of the society and collective consciousness that you choose to embrace.
It is these understandings that cause you to feel passionate about those things that you have accepted without questioning. As a result, you vibrate in a way that continues to attract the people, places and things to you that reinforce these understandings. In this way, you have created karmas for yourself that continue to dictate the mental conditioning that controls your life.
Even when this is the case, many complain that the spiritual path that embraces a living Master is a vehicle for brainwashing. Yet they are already so thoroughly brainwashed by the understandings given them by society, collective notions and the company they keep. They question the instruction of spiritually-perfected beings. But they never question the understandings they have come to embrace, simply because those understandings are popular and have been affirmed by collective notions. For this reason, the great beings say “O man, O woman, please wake up! When will you awake from this dream!?”
The Truth is this entire world is a play of the Shiva-Shakti power. This understanding and direct experience leads you along the only true spiritual path. The great beings tell us that gold fashioned into bracelets, earrings and necklaces is still only gold. The sweet known as Halva is still sesame seeds. In the same way, this one Shiva-Shakti power has become all the forms, from a blade of grass, to an insect to a human being. Furthermore, this same power becomes your ability to perceive and name objects. This is also what leads to the imaginary sense of duality and diversity.
Gold fashioned into various objects with different names remains gold. In the same way, the Shiva-Shakti power, that Supreme Principle, fashions itself into the multitudinous forms of this world-appearance. In doing so, nothing is added to it or taken away from it. It remains that One Shiva-Shakti power – the Self.
That inner Self pervades all people, places and things. That same power is the witness to your mind. This power contracts and expands of its own free will, bringing countless universes into being. It then sustains those universes and withdraws them back into the cosmic, formless Absolute. It does so without any materials with which to do so, and without any dependence on anything or anyone. This power is supremely independent, and That is your true nature. The true spiritual path is that which reveals this truth.
For this revelation to be realized, you must understand it in such a way that leads to your direct, inner experience, in the laboratory of your own existence.
One of the most important practices taught in Nityananda Shaktipat Yoga is the practice of The Arc. In order to keep your attention on That which gives the direct experience of your own sweet Bliss in every moment of your mundane lives, you have to reach for the highest understandings. These understandings are borne of the wisdom of the sages of steady wisdom who have attained Self-realization. This is the way to permanent spiritual transformation.
A star athlete becomes a great champion by way of the training he/she receives from another star athlete. That training is comprised of the understandings that will keep the trainee engaged in the feelings, emotions and vibrations that make the trainee vigilant in his/her training. A great musician was made by another great musician whose understandings about music and the musical journey influenced that person to become great. In the same way, you can take the understandings imparted by the Self-realized Love Beings over your own, so that you too can be influenced and led to their state. This state is the witness to your mind – what is experienced beyond the mind and beyond the senses.
To go there, you need an authentic spiritual path in which you can test the practice of The Arc for yourself. Understandings always dictate feelings. How you feel in the moment (and the subsequent emotions you embrace) dictates how you vibrate from moment-to-moment. How you vibrate in this way, dictates who and what you attract into your life and the inner state that you wind up with.
In the Nityananda Shaktipat Yoga curriculum, you are taught the practice of The Arc. You are also taught powerful methods for using this practice to attain permanent spiritual transformation in the present moment.
That is simply beautiful and very profound.
The essence of the entire inner journey. Thank you Kedarji.
Om Guru Om!