Saturday, October 1, 2016

The battle of life

From the moment of conception to the last breath man has to fight numerous battles. There are many verities of inner and outer conflicts competing for victory.

In every encounter there are the forces for good and evil. The battle is for man to align himself with the side of righteousness.

The ultimate aim is Self realization. The realization of man’s true Self, the soul as made in the image and likeness of God.
One with the ever existing, ever conscious, ever new bliss of spirit.

At birth man brings with him self-created influences from actions of past lives.

In each incarnation, karma works itself out partly through hereditary forces; the soul of a child is attracted into a family in which heredity is in conformance with the child’s past Karma.

The child begins its first conscious struggle when it has to chose between his desire to play aimlessly and his desire to learn, study and pursue some course of training.
Gradually, more serious battles arise, forced on him by karmic instincts from within or by bad company or battles from the outside.
The youth suddenly finds himself confronted with a host of problems for which he often is ill prepared because he does not possess the necessary worldly experience.

As he turns to be an adult he finds that without cultivating and being able to draw on his innate powers of wisdom and spiritual discrimination, he succumbs to the temptation of wrong desires, destructive habits, failure, disease and unhappiness.

Few people realize that there is a constant battle happening within. It is the battle for sense gratification that lead them to view the outer world as the main playground for happiness and the forces drawing man back to the soul or Self
awareness, the often forgotten true nature of man.        

The yogi, the awakened man, is well aware of this battle. Not only with the external battles fought by all man, but also the internal clash between the forces of restlessness arising from sense consciousness and his effort to meditate.

This points out the value for nightly introspection to discern who won out, the good or the evil.
Good is that which expresses truth and virtue and attracts the consciousness to God;

Evil, being ignorance and delusion, that which repels the consciousness from God.



Man’s body and mind reveal in its detailed perfection the presence of a divine plan.
“Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” Corinthians 3:16.

The Spirit of God, His reflection is the Soul
The goal in meditation is to overcome the lower states of consciousness and dissolve the ego causing sense of separation from God in samadhi (oneness), the victorious union of soul and Spirit in cosmic consciousness.

Yogis may enjoy the blissful achievement of samadhi many times, yet find that they cannot maintain this union permanently, as they are drawn again into ego and body consciousness by their karma and remnants of desire and attachment.

But, through each triumphant contact with Spirit the soul consciousness becomes strengthened and more firmly established.

Maintaining a healthy body:
It is much easier to attain material success, mental efficiency, through the practice of meditation for the purpose of attaining Self realization if the body is healthy.


For the body to be healthy, we must use the proper food, exercise regularly, be in the fresh air, expose the body to the sun, try to live worry free, manage stress, practice self control, relax the body and mind etc.

Raising the level of consciousness:
We are not a master over our being if we still engage in the ordinary life battles of sensory temptation, uncontrollable desires, bad habits, identifying with our body and restlessness of our mind and remain ignorant of our soul.

The consciousness of ordinary man is subject to fear of death, poverty, disease and many other ills. He is bound by attachment to name, social standing, family and possessions.
Spiritually he cannot feel his presence beyond the body except in his imagination.

He is conscious only of his body and mind and of their outer connection. He remains hypnotized by the world of delusion.

Man must re-aquatint himself with the changeless sea of the all protecting Spirit by moving upward from body consciousness to cosmic consciousness.

How?
Through study, through discrimination we free ourselves from ego attachment, through expansion of consciousness toward all inclusiveness, through life force control, through concentration, contemplation & meditation.

In the state of super consciousness, our perceptions are internalized rather than externalized.
When in superconsciousness, the heart is calm, (we see visions of lights; hear astral sounds; we can become one with lighted space).
We can stimulate at will the medulla or point between the eyebrows; we can control the inner and outer perceptions.
Here we know that all matter, energy, and intelligent prana, is composed of thought force.

The person whose knowledge comes through books and not through intuition at times speaks of matter as thought, (thoughts are things, things are thoughts) yet he remains attached to the body and its material limitations.

The yogi who can withdraw his consciousness as well as his life force from the senses, taking them through the spinal centers to the point between the eyebrows has progressed enough to say: ”all matter is thought.”
Therefore unless consciousness and energy reach the medulla plane, all matter will be experienced as solid, or from a phenomenal perspective, real.

In superconsciousness the body which once seemed so solid and vulnerable, takes on a new dimension composed of energy, light and thought, a marvelous combination of currents emanating from the creative vibrations of earth, water, fire, air and ether in the subtle cerebro spinal centers.

The battle of consciousness everyone must fight, is the war between human consciousness and the ever blissful state of soul, Self consciousness.

The material man will know inner peace and happiness only if he sides with goodness and wins the battle between good and evil.
The spiritual aspirant of any true religious path must in addition win the victory on the inner plane, the subtle spinal centers.

The yogi, who seeks the ultimate goal of Self realization and kaivalia (liberation), leads a life of:
Self-control,
High moral standard,
Spiritual consciousness,
Avoids the pull of the lower ego nature and strives for
Interiorized God communication.

Each person, moralist, spiritual aspirant, and devotee should every night before retiring ask his intuition whether his spiritual or his worldly inclinations of temptations won the day’s battle between good and bad habits,
Between temperance and greed,
Between self control and lust,
Between honest desire for necessities or for excess,
Between forgiveness and anger,
Between joy and grief, between kindness and cruelty,
Between selfishness and unselfishness,
Between understanding and jealousy,
Between bravery and cowardice,
Between confidence and fear,
Between faith and doubt,
Between humbleness and pride,
Between desire to commune with God in meditation and the restless urge for worldly activities,
Between spiritual and material desires,
Between divine ecstasy and sensory perceptions,
Between soul consciousness and ego states.   

The Gita commands man to avoid mere existence. It stresses, that the practice of contacting God in meditation will enable man to keep the state of blissful consciousness ever present with him, even during the performance of his daily duties.

Discontent, boredom, and unhappiness are the harvest of a mechanically led life, whereas the infinite spiritual perceptions which are gained in meditation bring man countless inspirations of wisdom and enliven every aspect of his life.

It teaches, to use the senses with discrimination and self-control, to lead an upright, honest family life. Yet it also teaches, not to let our obligations in the material world crowd out our supreme duty to seek God and Self realization.

    

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