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Kriya Yoga/Advaita Vedanta
Now we see, but through a glass darkly. This is due to our sensory impressions and value judgments about them.
Meditation essentially says that it is possible for us to see clearly—no matter which meditation technique, or mantram practice, we employ. The important thing is that all of them serve the same purpose—which is to help us push beyond the limits of the mind, the intellect, and the ego consciousness. Meditation helps us to reach that state of peace, calm, stillness, and balance. We finally can see clearly and also experience the totality of reality—that which is beyond the jurisdiction of the mind, senses, intellect, and all dualistic notions. There are those enlightened beings like Buddha, like Jesus, and like Krishna, Rama, Chaitanya, and Sankaracharya--who have moved through and overcome these barriers of the mind. Many of them choose to return from that state of bliss to speak and teach from their own experience. They avoid intellectualizing the truth. They know that you cannot realize the truth just by talking about it. But we can inspire someone to hunger for and persist in the search for the truth.
The idea of good and evil stops the moment you choose to drop all judgments. What are you left with when there is no judgment about anything or anyone? That nonreactive, nonjudgmental state allows you to deepen your meditation. And not to fear anything that comes up in your meditation. Now you no longer judge; you observe. You do not dwell on anything. You observe what would again limit you, or tempt you, to make a judgment.
Meditation is finally a very pure way of knowing that connects you with this stream of pure joy and bliss, and love, and freedom, and peace. The moment you experience that you want to go deeper and deeper. You are transformed on all levels, and you return with this influx of energy, consciousness, and stream of bliss. You are not experiencing the same level of consciousness that you had before you started the inner journey.
L.M.: Is meditation like death, like dying?
S. SHANK: Meditation is the willing, meditation is the process of discovering that you can never die. Meditation is finding out that death is the last grand and horrifying illusion.
L.M.: Yer most of us fear it so.
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