Thursday, November 19, 2015

The Meditator - Swami Dayananda


The content of the word ‘I’ is pure awareness,
without any form or thought.
When you hear, you become a hearer.
So too, when you think, you become a thinker;
doubt, doubter; decide, decider; inquire, inquirer.
All these are so many roles you can play-
walk, walker; speak, speaker; drive, driver.
In these various roles that you play,
Consciousness, Awareness, is invariable,
not really affected by what happens to the role.

As long as you are just a perceiver or thinker,
you have no problems;
but when you interrelate with people, or even objects, assuming
different roles—
like father or mother, son or daughter, husband or wife,
neighbor or friend, member of a religion, citizen of a country,
person of a given race—
these roles bring about certain reactions on your part.
Since to be father is a role,
the problems of a father belongs to the role, and should be
confined to the role.
It takes self-knowledge to make a role simply a role.
Lack of knowledge makes the role yourself
and because of the non-recognition of oneself playing a role
reactions come, and become very real.

The reactions, everyday, leave behind a personality.
When as a father or mother
you want your son to behave in a manner acceptable to you,
and he doesn’t,
it does leave a hurt.
For a husband and wife,
when in an interaction with each other there is frustration
due to lack of mutual understanding,
there is anger, often locked up inside because of the over-
riding values.
As a citizen of this country,
when policies and actions of the government are not in
common with your values, you are going to react—
with despair, anger, frustration—
and all of them have no vent. They all get embedded in the person.
A number of prejudices against races, against other beliefs and religions, customs and manners of different people in the world again find no expression,
and they again create a personality.
There are persons in your life whom you have to suffer-
like an employer.
You cannot say much, for obvious reasons, against the person
to his face,
but there is anger, unreleased anger.
That you control your anger is prudence,
but that you are angry is an indelible fact.

It is this person, with all these reactions, who sits in meditation.
That is why meditation doesn’t take place.
If meditation is to be yourself, you must get rid of the left-overs
of all these roles;
to be yourself is not to play a role.
At this moment you are not father or son, husband or wife,
employer or employee, neighbor or friend, American or Indian.
You are just a person.

This is what you pay attention to now, in meditation.
You don’t play roles now; but the angry person whom you saw
as yourself while playing a given role is not gone,
the anger being there, sadness being there, regret,
disappointment, failure being there, despair and frustration
being there.
There is no way of being yourself unless you strip yourself
of all these left-over roles.

How do you get rid of these left-overs?
Just to be a person, free from all these left-over roles,
is to look at yourself as a person,
a simple person.
First, visualize the blue sky. How do you relate to the sky?
As a person who has no complaint against the sky being what
it is,
you find yourself  as a simple, conscious person,
seeing the sky and the stars therein.
You are an appreciative, a conscious, person.
You can be so in all other situations, too – even situations that
cause problems in you – by being objective to situations.

When you are meditating, you can command this objectivity,
the situation not really being there but only visualized on your own volition.
Think of the clouds or the absence of them;
the rains,  the absence of them.
You accommodate. You accept the situation as it is—
that there is air, that there is sun, that there is moon, does not
become a source of botheration for you.
In fact, you appreciate these things.
Because there are planets, our system is filled with further beauty.
Earth is not alone;
Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Saturn – all these do not create
any kind of reaction in you.
That the earth is a globe doesn’t create any reaction in you.
That it has mountains, valleys, oceans, islands, islets, minerals,
trees, plants, weeds, doesn’t bother you.
Varieties of flowers and fruits, varieties of animals, including insects,
they are to be accepted first and dealt with.
You cannot react with hatred to a mosquito,
but you can act to exterminate the mosquitoes.
Action without hatred to achieve a given result which enhances the
quality of your life is necessary.
Act. But take into account when you act that there is no reaction.
An insect is just an insect, whatever it does, in whichever
form it is, that is how it was made to be.
Accept it, and act.

Now visualize different races—
the Mongolian race, the Polynesian, the Negro, the Caucasian,
and the mixtures all over the world—living in different parts of
the planet.
They have their language, their literature, their music, their
dance, their dress and their eating habits.
What is wrong in this?
Their beliefs, their customs, their manners, their forms of prayer,
and their concept of God,
take them as they are.
Why should they bother you?
Take them as they are.

Come to your own country.
The people—accept them as they are.
The southerner, the northerner, the Polish, the Irish, the Indian,
the Mexican—
accept them as they are.
There is no use being frustrated.
Accommodate your employer, or employees or co-workers.
Remember, as you have a mind, each of them has his or her own mind.
That makes a difference between you two.
Take the person as the person is.
Change the person if you can, and if you are convinced
that such a change is beneficial for both.
Accept your neighbor.
If you cannot stand your neighbor, seek other neighbors—
leave the neighborhood.
But let that neighbor not have handle on your mind,
to make you regretful and angry.
Accommodate the person as the person is.
Let the person be not in a position to hurt you.

Accommodate.
All people struggle with their minds, with their fears, anxieties,
insecurities, complexes.
Accommodate.

Accept your father and mother as they are.
If you think they have not understood you, communicate.
If you think you have failed, accept.
Accept them as they are, and do whatever is to be done.

Accept your partner in life.
It is this person with whom you share your life.
Take the person as the person is, at all levels.
If you think a change would be better, for both, do what you
can to make the change,
but first accept.
If you say, “Unless you change I cannot accept,”
there is reaction.
If you accept, and work for change,
there is love, there is understanding, there is care, there is
concern.
And there is something done.

Accept your own body—
its height, its weight, its looks, its color, its sex, its illness, its
inabilities, inadequacies, its strength, and virtues.
Accept the body as it is.
If you can cure the illness, do.
If you can reduce your weight, and if you want to, do.
But do not reject it just because it has a weight problem.
When you reject, you react.
When you accept, you act.
Accept with love, with understanding.

Now accept your mind—
Its moods and its movements, its prejudices—accept them.
Only then can you change.
Accept the limitation of knowledge, and work for what you
want to know further.

And last, but not the least,
accept your memories.
Let there not be a memory which compels you to
escape from it,
by singing or driving or going on a spree of buying—
hundreds of diversions all to escape from the skeletons of
your memory.
Memory does not harm. Every experience leaves an impression
meant for use.
Be objective toward memories. No piece of memory is going to
frighten you or make you regret what happened.
There is no use in regretting.
There can be learning from what you have gone through;
you can be wiser for what has happened.
Bring up those memories that haunt you.
Look at them as left-overs of a dead past.
Let there be not a single piece of memory that you are afraid
to face.
Now you are yourself.
You are a simple, conscious being,
a person who is endowed with memories, mind, sense organs,
body,
all to see the world, to experience, to make your life in this
world, to interact with situations, people.
This is all that is there—
to act, to know, to think, to see, to hear.
You are simple person.

This is meditation.
Be yourself.
Know more about yourself.
Even without Self-knowledge you can be so simple and
relatively free;
and when you turn your attention to learning about yourself,
the words of the teaching ring true all over.

It is the meditator that counts in the meditation.

                                                                       
                                                                        September 1, 1983