Bhoomananda Foundation

Swamiji thunders, “Is there not a presence in your body? If there is a presence, why don’t you realize it? It is there – otherwise you would have been dead. You are not dead. So you are alive. What makes you alive? Something within the body. What is that? A thought arises, it subsides. Another thought arises. It is that source from which the emergence and subsidence, both take place, both are facilitated.”

One must take to the jnana-drishti and judge matters on the basis of spiritual wisdom alone. Any experience is inner and subjective. Based on the fact that something is experienced in the sentient mind as a sentient note, is not the entire world simply Brahman, and not a matter-energy aggregate? Swamiji explains.

Repeated introspection over what we have read or heard from scriptures and great people will allow those values to get infused into our system. This is viveka, and then dispassion or vairagya develops over time.

When by spiritual or philosophical introspection, the mental activities, mental functions, become subtler, feebler, lighter, slower, there comes a stage when there is cessation, and the whole introspectional process will come to be still. In the same manner, as the mind is active and vibrant now, it will become non-vibrant, buoyant and still. It is a state of a wonderful absorption.

In this track, Swamiji exhorts seekers to practice infusional introspection. When the intelligence does this introspection, the mind becomes stress-free and peaceful and the intelligence becomes more perceptive.

For times immemorial, man has remained the same, with the same set of faculties. With the help of intelligence, one can plunge into the depth of one’s personality and identify the source of all experience. He will find altogether a single presence that gives rise to the thinker and the thought alike.

The process of introspection, as it becomes briefer and briefer, lighter and lighter, shorter and shorter, until at last the very introspectional process will stop. Such introspection, when it is closely followed, it becomes meditation.

The purification of mind and intelligence is an internal process. When there is purification of the inner being through repeated contemplation, then one will be able to meditate upon the Truth.

For any seeker pursuing spirituality, it is imperative to introspect over and discern the Spiritual Truth, the presence 'I', which is different from the Pancha Bhutas, but yet which acts on them. At the same time observe and comprehend the external truth - the sun, moon and the world. Everything external is transitory. So, a seeker has to leave all of them and then identity with and become the 'I'.

Sadhana can be done in the physical level - going to a temple and praying in front of a deity; in the oral level - singing and chanting; and in the mental level - thinking about and repeating a mantra.