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THE BLISS-GIVING FLOW OF ENERGY
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guidance which he will give result in a violent exploitation of others. It is, therefore, desirable to seek such a guidance which will inspire and lead him to the correct ideal of atonement with the supreme self. The ideal of paramātma, the highest soul, never lets him down.
When the soul of the practitioner identifies itself with the supreme spirit, his life acquires a new hue. Atoneis, therefore, a great prize. Having won it he gets rid of evil tendencies once for all. His former association with evil tendencies and deeds had kept him distracted and confused. Sāmayika begins with the feeling that the world we live in is qualitatively different from the self. He has realized that his association with objects and activities opposed to his self results in misery. We experience a state of sanayika only when we take things other than the self to be entirely different from and opposed to the self. Anger, pride, deceit and attachments and aversions which have become mixed up with life never allow sāmayika to take place. They simply lead to false consciousness. But once their alien nature has been understood, conciousness takes a turn for the better and having got rid of evils, the practitioner attains a state of sāmayika.
The first power of the mind is imagination. Only a man of imagination can achieve great things. The practitioner is time and again warned not to give a loose rope to the faculty of imagination during meditation. However, we need imagination when we are not meditating. Meditation needs a state of thoughtlessness. Thoughtlessness and imagination are not basically opposed to each other. Imagination is however, a hindrance in meditation. In ordinary life it is a very useful faculty. It is also useful in the progress of meditation. Before he sits down for meditation the practitioner must have a clear inage of the ideal he wants to achieve The arhat is an ideal and the practitioner should draw a clear image of of the arhat in his mind. He has to fix this image in his mind. Meditation has the power to transform the meditator according to the ideal he has imagined for himself. It is the medium of transformation of personality. It is also a medium of acqiring all sorts of powers, good as well
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