Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Namaste, and welcome to another episode of the Esoteric Teaching. I have so much fun doing these videos, I can’t tell you.
Well, the last two videos—and I’ll put a link up here if you didn’t see them—are the prelude to this one, so you really should watch them first.
Now we’re finally going to get around to the questions, which was the whole point of these latest videos. I got several very interesting questions, and I want to address them here. Now that in the last two videos I’ve given the context, the background, then you’ll be able to understand the answers.
The first question is from Oscar. Oscar says,
I wanted to ask you a question about your past yesterday. When was the point in all this when you started to see the white light, and what was your meditation schedule at that time?
Let’s start with one question at a time here, okay? When was the point that I started to see that? It was back around 1980. In 1980, I was on the west coast up in Portland, Oregon, and I ran into Thakar Singh.
Sant Thakar Singh is one of the sons of Kirpal Singh, who I had met down in the Bay Area in San Francisco while looking for a guru. And for one reason or another, it didn’t work out with him, and I wound up becoming a disciple of Prabhupāda.
But anyway, Thakar Singh was a very nice sādhu, beautiful man, and appreciated my music very much. So I wound up spending a few days with him in a retreat in the woods of Oregon, and that’s when he gave me the initiation that turned on the lights, allowed me to see the light that was already there.
It’s just a manner of looking, a different way of looking. You’re not looking for an object. You’re not looking for a thing. You’re looking for energy.
Now let’s consider the mechanism of seeing. Light comes into the eye and it hits the retina, and there are cells in the retina that generate electrical signals. Those go along the optic nerves to the visual cortex, and the visual cortex constructs an image and classifies that image based on memories of previous things seen.
So that’s the usual process of seeing. But what about when we close our eyes and go into meditation? What kind of seeing is going on then? I would suggest that the visual cortex has more than one function, that it can also show movements of consciousness. And that’s what we’re seeing when we see light in meditation.
I mean, of course, we’ve all had, or should have, visions in meditation. And these visions are simply thoughts, or actually, everything that we perceive is just a thought, except for the perceiver. The perceiver is real, and perception is real, or rather awareness.
And then there are all these different channels of perceptics that we can be aware of. But the most important one is being aware of awareness itself. So I would say that the light that we see in meditation, especially the pure white light, the blinding light, like thousands of suns rising up in the sky, except they’re cool, like the moon.
It’s hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. So I would say that is a result of seeing movements of consciousness. And indeed, even when you see the light, sometimes there are like black clouds passing in front of it. And if you observe for a while, you’ll notice the correlation between those clouds and thoughts, that thoughts are like clouds in the mind that obscure the light.
This is a very important insight because it leads to pursuing thoughtlessness, the silence of the mind. And of course, that’s a very important factor in advanced meditation. But anyway, I want to bring out this theme again and again, which pops up in these questions.
When real people talk about their difficulties in meditation, I think in this day and age, it’s all traceable back to their eligibility as a disciple. In other words, when I started meditation, even after years of chanting, going to India and the whole thing, I still saw nothing but blackness when I closed my eyes. It wasn’t until I approached a teacher of that specific method, inner light and sound.
I already had the sound since childhood, but my vision was closed. Even though, this is a funny story, at age 11, I had a bike crash, and the gearshift on the bike hit me right here, right on the third eye. Still have a scar there. I don’t know if you can see it. Can you see it if I knit my eyebrows?
That scar came from the handle of the gear shift going, actually breaking the skin and hitting the skull right here on the third eye. So for some time after that, a year or two after that, I could leave my body at will. I suppose that’s a kind of inner light or inner vision anyway. But that eventually faded, and by the time I started seriously meditating, I couldn’t see anything.
Now, we also see light and objects in dreams. So don’t anybody tell me I can’t see light inside, because you see it in dreams every night. It’s just the way you see it. You want to see it by your will when you sit down to meditate. And indeed, the reflection of the light of awareness in the purified mind tells you something about the condition of your mind.
And if you can’t see that light, well, it means something is wrong. Your mind needs more purification. I can’t think of any better purification than approaching a guru and serving him.
What was the difference between the time I met Kirpal Singh in 1967 or 1968 and when I met his son a few years later? Well, the difference was I had been serving a guru. I had been chanting the name of God with love and devotion. I had been serving in a bhakti movement, went to India, went to holy places, did all this service, cooking in the kitchen, distributing food to needy people, and so on.
So I would say the big thing that changed between the first teacher I met of inner light and sound and the next time was that I had done all this guru-seva, guru-pūjā, guru-bhakti, and worship of God.
I’m going to start stressing this because it’s a really crucial, important insight that according to the esoteric teaching, you have to be complete or at least relatively advanced in bhakti before you can meditate effectively, before you can move on to rāja-yoga. And of course, before you can even attempt actual bhakti, you have to be complete in karma-yoga.
So I was very fortunate, my guru, Śrīla Prabhupāda, recommended and taught karma-yoga leading to bhakti-yoga: seva leading to love.
So this loving service is really important on the Path. And if you don’t have it, if you don’t do it, you really can’t get through meditation. You’ll hit so many blocks.
And the next question:
Also, can you give some guidance on what to avoid in meditation practice and how to go on with it so that the result does not escape you like it does for so many. I don’t want to be another one of those guys who meditate for 30 years and still not even a glimpse of the light. Not that the light is important. I hope you get my gist. Love to you, my friend.
Thank you; Love to you, too. So what to avoid in practice? Egotism, mentalism, getting caught up in the idea of things instead of the thing itself, debating and trying to solve problems on the mental platform with words instead of by testing them with experience.
All these things will lead to deep, deep problems in meditation. Because we don’t know enlightenment in the beginning. We don’t understand it. We haven’t experienced it. So any kind of thoughts that we have about it are just guesswork.
So trying to go in and make decisions on how I’m going to practice or what I’m going to do based on this incomplete knowledge, incomplete experience, it’s just guesswork. You may be right, but it’s much more likely that you’ll be wrong and go down some blind alley.
So the best way, the best approach to meditation and the way in which I’ve had my greatest breakthroughs and successes, is to just sit down without any expectations whatsoever, without any plan, without any particular technique, and just be aware of whatever comes up.
I’m serious.
After trying so many techniques and basically getting nowhere, in 1984, after living on ‘The Ranch’, Rajneeshpuram, for over six months, doing all these different meditations every day, I finally just left The Ranch, went back to my apartment and sat down all alone in my room, took the phone off the hook, or unplugged it actually, and just sat and waited and sat and sat and sat.
I gradually worked up to about 15 or 16 hours a day of just sitting, doing nothing and dealing with whatever came up, and some very interesting things came up. A lot of times there was nothing at all happening, but that didn’t last too long. As soon as you sit there for a while with your eyes closed, stuff is going to happen. So eventually, of course, that led to First Path—Stream Entry, which is a big, big deal.
Stream Entry, according to the Buddha, means that you will reach final enlightenment within seven lifetimes at the most. That’s a really big deal, considering that we have had millions or billions of lifetimes previously and we still haven’t got it.
So as soon as we actually get to do something right, as soon as we get the knack of meditation, then Stream Entry can happen. And what is that knack?
Doing nothing.
The famous koan, or not koan—what’s that called, Buddhist poetry—Haiku, by Joshi:
Here I sit, doing nothing, and the spring comes and the grass grows all by itself.
So next time I’ll get some more questions.
Namaste, ĀŪṀ Tat Sat, ĀŪṀ Hari Hi ĀŪṀ.