SLOKA 105 FROM DANCING WITH SIVA
WHAT OCCURS WITHIN THE SIVA TEMPLE?
Activities within a Siva temple vary from the daily round of pujas to the elaborate celebrations on annual festival days. Even amid large crowds, our worship is personal and individual, not congregational. Aum Namah Sivaya.
BHASHYA
Besides the daily round of pujas, many other events take place within the temple: pilgrims offering vows, priests chanting the Vedas, processions, elephants giving blessings, garlands being woven, weddings or philosophical discourses in pillared halls, devotional singing, feedings for the impoverished, dance and cultural performances, ritual bath in the stone tank, meditation, religious instruction, and many festival-related events. Generally, there are seven times when pujas are held: at five, six and nine in the morning, at noon, and at six, eight and ten in the evening. The outer worship is approaching God properly, presenting ourselves acceptably. It is to offer our love, our adoration and then to speak out our prayer, our petition. The inner worship is to enjoy God’s presence and not rush away, to stay, to sit, to meditate awhile and bask in the shakti, endeavoring to realize the Self within. The Vedas say, ” ’Come, come!’ these radiant offerings invite the worshiper, conveying him thither on the rays of the sun, addressing him pleasantly with words of praise, ’This world of Brahman is yours in its purity, gained by your own good works.’ ” Aum Namah Sivaya.
LESSON 260 FROM LIVING WITH SIVA
WE MOLD OUR OWN FUTURE
Every action that we perform in life, every thought that we think, has its reaction. We may or may not be conscious of the reactions that will result from what we are doing or thinking. Many people spend a great deal of time acting only with the purpose of covering up the reactions to prior unsatisfactory actions of their own making. Hurt or puzzled, they often ask, ”Why is this happening to me? What did I do to attract that? What did I do to cause that? Do I really deserve this? It doesn’t seem fair!”
Were they to become enlightened and find the ability to live in their own intuitive, superconscious mind, they would see in that expanded state of consciousness all of the ingredients that came together out of the forgotten past to create the conditions through which they are passing in the now. They would observe that every action is like planting a seed. The fruit of that seed, harvested perhaps years later, is reaction. Like the seed, actions remain vibrating in the mind until fulfilled. It is not possible to trace past causes to current effects through analyzing or through the ordinary processes of reason, which result in uncertain conjecture. Only superconscious insight can accurately portray the chain of cause-and-effect relationships as a picture of what is.
Thus the wheel of karma continues, on and on and on, creating and recreating. The wheel of karma is simply the mechanism of the mind’s action–your mind, everyone’s mind. Through the study of the wheel of karma, which is a meditative study, you realize that you have created everything that is happening or has already happened to you. Everything that is coming your way in the future you will have created. Everything you will acquire your own wants will have brought into being. You are right now a sum total of millions of thoughts, feelings, desires and actions–all of them yours. Circumstance is not responsible for your condition, for you have made your circumstances consciously and unconsciously. There are no outside forces imposing themselves upon you. Whatever you attract to yourself of the world, though it seems to be external, is but a manifestation of your own inner nature. You are the author of all of your creations; and yet in the inner recesses of your being you are already the finished product at the same time. To understand this fully, you need yoga.
The study of yoga is reserved for the few who have the courage to seek the depths of their being, for the few who can overcome their experiences and their desires in deep meditation. Now, you may meet in your own subconscious, as soon as you sit down to practice meditation, all of the worldly desires latent within you, including several of which you perhaps have no conscious idea. If your meditation is successful, you will be able to throw out the unnecessary experiences or desires that are consuming your mind. When you do this and you travel past the world of desire, you will begin to break free of the wheel of karma which binds you to the specific reaction which must follow every action. To break free of this wheel of karma, you must have a strong, one-pointed mind. Your only key to help you attain this one-pointedness, this steadfastness, is your devotion to God, your devotion to the realization of the Truth. Few people remain steadfast enough under all circumstances and tests that life offers to realize the many causes and effects that are linked together in their lives. It is easy to study the law of karma and to appreciate it philosophically, but to realize it, to apply it to everything that happens to you, to understand the workings of it as the day goes by, requires an ability to which you must awaken.
Attachment, desire, craving, fear of loss–these are the self-created ropes that hold man in bondage to his lower states of mind. It is because man chooses to live in the ignorance of unfulfilled craving and unsatisfied desire that he suffers. How many of you have suffered over something that was anticipated and may never have taken place? You will remember then waking up out of the dream of your suffering and finding that things were all right after all, and that through your experience something within you remained the same.
SUTRA 260 OF THE NANDINATHA SUTRAS
APPROPRIATE PLACES OF WORSHIP
My devotees worship at their home shrines, dharmashalas, Kauai Aadheenam and all Saivite temples. They do not attend temples of other denominations except on pilgrimage or as required socially. Aum Namah Sivaya.
LESSON 260 FROM MERGING WITH SIVA
THE IDA AND PINGALA CURRENTS
In the esoterics of unfoldment on the path of enlightenment, there are some mechanics about what happens inside of the human body, its nerve system, that you should know about. There are two basic forces working within the body, as I have explained, the instinctive area of the mind and the intellectual area of the mind. Within these are two forces working that flow out from the central source of energy through their respective currents. They are called the ida and the pingala forces.
The ida current is pink in color. It is the vibration of the physical body. It is the Earth current. When the energy is flowing through that current, or nadi, we are more conscious of the physical body, or more in physical consciousness. We are not in the world of thought but in the world of feeling. We feel very strongly and experience very strong emotions when the energy is flowing through the ida current.
In some people the energy flows through the ida current constantly. They have very strong emotions and deep sentiments. They live in their emotion most of the time, emoting over one thing or another. They emotionally and deeply feel through this ida current how other people feel. They take other people’s feeling onto themselves and have a preoccupation with their physical bodies. This is the current that can produce another human being in a woman, or develop athletic abilities in a man.
When the vibratory force of energy flows through the ida current, the entire physical body responds. It is physically active. We like to work. We like to move. We like to exercise. We like to do things. We enjoy equally the base emotions and the movements of the physical body.
When the energy flows through ida in some people, they actually enjoy suffering. There are people deep in this current who if they did not have something to suffer over would not feel whole. They would feel they were not living fully enough on this planet. They would not feel human, for the ida current is the current of being human. It is very base. It is very earthy. Still, those living in this current are intuitive. They do have intuition, but their intuition conflicts with their heavy emotion, so intuition comes through periodically, in intuitive flashes. They may even become superstitious because of this. The ida current flows most strongly through the left side of the physical body.
The pingala current is quite different. Blue in color, it is the current of the intellect, flowing mostly through the right side of the body. When the pure life energy is flowing through the pingala current, we are not as conscious that we have a physical body. We are aware in the mind. We are inquisitive. We like to talk a lot. We like to argue. We like to reason. We enjoy discussion. It is the intellectual current. We like to read. We like to memorize the opinions of other people. We like to memorize our own opinions and tell them to other people. We like to do business. When the energy is flowing through the pingala, we do not emote much. We think over our emotions. We analyze our feelings and thoughts. This is the aggressive human current.
People living in this current do not pay much attention to the physical body. They let it take care of itself. They also are inclined to let other people do the emoting. They become powerfully strong in that aggressive type of intellectual force. When we are in the pingala current, we are headstrong, somewhat pushy, pushing ideas across to other people, and inclined to be argumentative. We have a strong facility of reasoning. It is a very positive and powerful current.
