Knowledge and Religion

How to find the right meditation technique

Recently, I’ve received many emails asking, “How can I start a meditation practice?” I hope that the information below will help you to sort out the possibilities that are in store for you in your meditation practice. Also I hope that you will get a sense of how to evaluate a meditation practice and then get to the place that you want.

The most important tip for starting a meditation practice is to decide where you want to end up. Then you can look into what techniques to use, and what teachers will help you to find an answer to your questions.

I am always surprised when people just randomly pick a meditation technique or a teacher and start practicing. That’s because there are thousands of meditation systems and they can take you to millions of different places. The realm of meditation experience is even greater than the realm of physical experience.
However, in one lifetime, you can only practice a tiny fraction of the techniques in any of these systems. So it’s important that before you just start practicing a meditation technique that you get a broad sense of what you hope to accomplish through your meditation.

The three categories of meditation practices
Roughly, there are three categories of meditation practices: First, those that affect the mind such as for quieting it, relaxing, concentrating the mind or improving the memory. At its heights you can develop blank states of mind where time and space disappear, like in Samadhi.

Secondly you can develop subtle energy for curing physical illnesses, or for obtaining states of Kundalini or chi. If you hope to levitate or accomplish physical actions like bending spoons with your mind, this is the energy you will need to develop. There are also energy states like the raising of Kundalini that can barley be described by words. Although you may not be able to see a person's Kundalini rise, this experience is very real to the person meditating on it.

And thirdly at its heights, meditation can help you to find liberation and put an end to suffering for good. This is the path that I would recommend and I’ll talk more about this path in the second half of this article.

Obtaining Energy States
As an example, if you want to obtain one of the subtle energy states that I described above, here’s what you must do. You must find a subtle yogi or Kundalini master as your teacher. The trick, when choosing a teacher is to make sure he or she has obtained the state that you desire. After all it is easy for someone to think about these subtle states. It is much more difficult to be in the place from which subtle powers emanate.

I have heard of many teachers who claim to have these subtle powers. Yet, I have seen very little of it. If you hope to obtain physical states like levitation and moving objects with your mind you can just watch a teacher to make sure that he or she can do these things. If you want a more subtle state like an out of the body experience I’m afraid that you will have to guess if your perspective teacher has actually obtained that state. In the teacher’s presence, try to feel if he or she has what you want. Use your intuition.

Once you find your teacher then you have to follow his or her teachings to the letter. This could be a full time job. You may have to control your breath, remain celibate, and watch the amount and types of food that you eat. You may have to do this for many years.

Even then there is no guarantee that you will obtain the state that you want. The one person who I think probably had subtle powers was the founder of Aikido, Morihei Uyeshiba. He had many students who are still alive, and although I heard about teachers who reportedly have his powers, I have not met one who could demonstrate the powers that Uyeshiba was reputed to have.

There is one more drawback to attempting to obtain subtle powers. Since it is you, a limited person, attempting to get these powers, at some point as they began, they will end. This might be at the death of the physical body, or at the death of a subtle body that could last for millions of years. But at the time that your powers pass away it will seem like they did not last long enough.

So, of course you can still go after these subtle powers. But at least now your eyes will be wide open, and you will see the obstacles that you may face.

The Path of Liberation is Different
There is one state that is so close to everyone that they just overlook it. It is the very source of Consciousness and Bliss that never comes to an end, “The peace that passes all understanding.” You did not create this state and it will not pass away. You merely have to discover who you are even now, and what you have always been. This is the path of liberation, sometimes called Self-Discovery.

In your path of Self-Discovery it is also helpful to find a competent teacher. You can use the information here to help you find this teacher.

For instance, if your aim is self-discovery you won’t go to a teacher who teaches you how to reach subtle energy states. If the teacher emphasizes breathing techniques, mind control, or posture you should know that this is not the path to Self-Discovery.

Of course you must also put energy into the process of Self- Discovery. But it is a different kind of energy. It is the kind of energy that questions; that doesn’t take anything for granted. It’s the kind of energy that catches thoughts like, “Because I think it, it must be true,” or, “I know how things are,” and then allows you to look afresh like a newborn baby. There is no room for dullness on the path of Self-Discovery. You want to reexamine your experience to determine if your direct experience is actually the way you think it’s supposed to be.

The difference is that the energy for Self-Discovery is not based on you controlling the breath or the mind. It is rather based on throwing off assumed limitations, so that you can become the Awareness and Bliss that you really are.

If you can see the value of meditation, why not make an attempt to discover Wisdom and Joy that is so deep that it even transcends death; yet it is just who you are. Why not embark on the path of Self-Discovery that will take you to ultimate liberation? On www.Light-Up-Your-Life.com you will find some resources to help you embark on this journey.

Other resources available to you
If you need a more basic understanding of this Self-Knowledge or if you just want support for your practice, go to www.light-up-your-life.com and read down the main column. Also check out the different links that we provide as resources. They can help you to sharpen the focus of your meditation practice.

Another resource that we offer is the book, Making Your Wisdom Come Alive, a step by step guide taking you from your everyday experience to the highest wisdom and truth. To find out more, click on the link below:

wisdom.light-up-your-life.com

To join our mailing list go to: http://www.light-up-your-life.com/join.html

Please Tell Your Friend
Please tell you friends. Although we don’t have an advertising budget, we hope that everyone who wants to can find out about and wake up to this wisdom.

You have my best wishes,

Michael Gluckman

The key to finding lasting happiness

The key to finding lasting happiness is to notice where you actually experience happiness. Is it in an object that you see like your spouse, your children, your car, or your house? Or do you experience happiness right in your own heart?

The place where you actually experience happiness is the source of  happiness. At the most an object can only remind you of what you already have. But your happiness does not arrive with the presence of an object, and does not disappear when the object changes or passes away.

When you abide as the source of happiness you will find the key that unlocks the door to lasting happiness. What a relief whan you can finally rest as the source!

The secret of the quest for the Holy Grail

Although it is out in the open, here in this little niche on the web, Self-Knowledge seems hidden. At first glance it may seem like it’s hardly worth the space it takes up on the server. Besides that we give this knowledge away for free. You may think, “What is the value of something given away for free?” Yes, you can help us out by getting our book, “Making Your Wisdom Come Alive,” but you can find everything you need to wake up to your original nature, right here in this blog and on www.light-up-your-life.com.

So Self-Knowledge may seem like its insignificant, but if you can find the meaning if these words you will not only discover the secret of finding the source of happiness, you will also discover the secret to eternal life. Indeed out of the mud grows a beautiful lotus. Similarly out of this tiny corner on the web you can find the secret to lasting joy.

What defies limitation?
If you ever felt that there was something in you that defied limitation, now you are about to learn how this is true. You can now find what always was, always is, and always shall be. In fact, you experience it every day and just look right past it. But if you just look to where these words point you will never suffer again.

The secret is to know where you really stand. You are the one who is aware of limitation, not the one caught in it. This means that whenever you see a limitation you can celebrate. That’s because what you see you are not. You have just moved a little closer to reality.

So what do you see anyway
To make this a little clearer let’s take a look at some of the things that you see. First you see your position in the world. “I am a father or mother to my child.” “I am a son or daughter to my mother.” I am a doctor or teacher.” Do these statements really describe you or are they just a description of an object that you see?

Ok, now let’s move in a little closer; what about the body and all its conditions: Yong and old, well and sick, tall and short, birth and death, these terms describe the body, don’t they? But are you limited to the body or are you the seer of these sets of limitations? Did you ever wonder where you stand so you can see the limitations of the body? Returning to this place is drinking from the Holy Grail. Here you will that you are free from death.

Where's the confusion? 
Now here’s where the confusion comes in: you don’t see yourself like you see an object. For this reason you have to know yourself in a different way. I call this way direct experience. You are the Consciousness that sees limitation. Consciousness knows itself by itself without the need for a separate knower. This is like the sun knowing itself without the need for a flashlight. The sun knows light because the sun is light. In the same way you know Consciousness because you are that Consciousness.

Just consider these words and endeavor to stand in the place that they point. Here ‘I’ is not a thought. ‘I’ is the consciousness that sees thought. Just make the effort to stand here in your original nature, and your life will change in ways that you would not have thought possible. Here is where you get to drink from the Holy Grail. Like the knights of old you will have discovered the most important thing of all: The thing that takes you beyond death, and that’s your Self-Nature.

Other resources available to you
If you need a more basic understanding of this Self-Knowledge or if you just want support for your practice, go to www.light-up-your-life.com and read down the main column. Also check out the different links that we provide as resources. They can help you to sharpen the focus of your meditation practice.

Another resource that we offer is the book, Making Your Wisdom Come Alive, a step by step guide taking you from your everyday experience to the highest wisdom and truth. To find out more, click on the link below:

wisdom.light-up-your-life.com

To join our mailing list go to: http://www.light-up-your-life.com/join.html

Please Tell Your Friend
Please tell you friends. Although we don’t have an advertising budget, we hope that everyone who wants to can find out about and wake up to this wisdom.

You have my best wishes,

Michael Gluckman

Untying the knots that seem to bind us

Once we see that the frameworks that seem to bind and limit us are really made of the flimsiest material called thoughts, we can easily find our freedom. That’s because we find that we are always outside of limitation. A misunderstanding can never really bind us. We are the seer of a limitation. Not the one caught in it.

wisdom.light-up-your-life.com

How to find your directions

If you want to find your directions in life just know yourself.
Then whichever way the winds of life blow you will come
out standing on your feet − with a big smile in your heart.

You can never lose what you are!

wisdom.light-up-your-life.com

Fires, Floods, Earthquakes, and Tornados

I noticed that if you want to make the headlines in the newspaper just write about natural disasters. It seems like we are enamored with destruction. And since my wife and I live about 5 miles from the Santa Cruz Mountains fires in California , I suppose that we have a personal interest in this topic.

You may wonder, “What’s the fascination that people have with destruction?” So today I thought we could discuss this topic and get a sense of how destruction points to life. The best thing about this article is that you will be able to verify it right in your own meditations.

I think that people have a deep intuition that when everything gets destroyed there is something that remains unscathed. When people talk about their house burning down and their family history and possessions being destroyed it is like a big chunk of their identity is swept away. All of the sudden the things that held their world together and gave them a sense of meaning and a place in the world are gone.

 When everything is gone what remains
And yet despite this, somewhere deep inside they have the intuition that the really important thing is all right and in tact. This intuition comes from our own being. So if we can find where we really stand, we will see what destruction points to. Not as some theory but as our immediate experience.  

To find this place that is perfectly at peace no matter what the condition of the world may be, you have to look for a state of being, not for a state of mind. This is obvious because a state of mind changes much faster than even a tornado does.

It is stillness that knows change
But fortunately we know about the changes to our mind and in the world. It is surprising how few people wonder where they stand so that they see change. Are people the changing objects that they see, or are they the seer, the still reference point that allows them to be aware of change? You do not know this stillness like you know an object that you see. You know this because it is here that you feel right at home.

Remember you are not trying to find a new identity or impersonate an identity. It is just a matter of returning to the light that you always are. From here you will see that catastrophic change is just a pointer to that which doesn’t change at all, and that’s who you really are.  

This is why if you can get right to the heart of destruction you will get right to the heart of life. The essence of life is the one thing that never changed, even as the world seemed to speed by.

What never Dies?
Waking up is just standing in the place that the intuition, “I will never die,” points to. This is your joy and this is your identity. Find this place in your meditation and you will stand free forever. As they said in the Upanishads, “Wind cannot destroy it and fire cannot burn it.” This is who you really are.

Other resources available to you
If you need a more basic understanding of this Self-Knowledge or if you just want support for your practice, go to www.light-up-your-life.com and read down the main column. Also check out the different links that we provide as resources. They can help you to sharpen the focus of your meditation practice.

Another resource that we offer is the book, Making Your Wisdom Come Alive, a step by step guide taking you from your everyday experience to the highest wisdom and truth. To find out more, click on the link below:

wisdom.light-up-your-life.com

To join our mailing list go to: http://www.light-up-your-life.com/join.html

Please Tell Your Friend
Please tell you friends. Although we don’t have an advertising budget, we hope that everyone who wants to can find out about and wake up to this wisdom.

You have my best wishes,

Michael Gluckman

Please Take Advantage of our New Forum

First I just want to remind you that we have a new Light Up forum. We envision this forum as being a new discussion group where people from all over the world can participate. If you have poetry, comments, questions, or beautiful meditations please share them with us.

Here is the link to this forum: forum.light-up-your-life.com.

Remember, we are not looking for that which is extra special. Our deepest experiences come from that which seems very ordinary. Here we do not have to pretend to be great. If we just discover who we are even now, we will see how great we really are.

The ordinary mind is the Tao.





















We are looking forward to hearing from you.

With Best Wishes,

Michael

Is there an end to karma?

Lately people have been asking me questions about karma: “Are these situations in my life the result of bad karma?” “I don’t mind dying because I know that I will be born again.” I don’t usually sit around trying to define technical terms but since karma has almost become an English word, I think it is worth knowing what it means and how you experience it.

As far as waking up to your original nature is concerned, any limiting concept that you need to examine and let go of, you can do in this lifetime. Whether the concept apparently came from past lives or from this one is irrelevant. You only need to see that limiting conceptual frameworks are unnatural thought patterns that you can let go of in an instant.

So what is karma anyway?
So with all of this being said, let’s take a look at karma. It is often said that karma is the result of your actions that fructify over time. But karma is more subtle than that. After all people can do the same action for completely different reasons. For instance, killing to protect your grandma is different than killing as you attempt to rob her. So karma is really the effect of your motivation as you act. 

The karmic results of your actions could affect your physical environment such as the type of body you are born in, human or animal, the family you are born into, and your county etc.

Karma can also affect your mental environment such as your fears and desires, your talents, and how your concepts will affect you in this life. Any parent can tell you that children born in the same environment can have completely different personalities. This may be due to different Karma.

The three types of karma
There are three types of karma. Parabda karma is the karma that plays out in this lifetime. Then, as you exhaust the karma in this lifetime, you desire new things and fear new things too. Thus you create new karma to be resolved in the future called agami karma. This agami karma gets put in your bank account so to speak, which is your storehouse of karma for the future called sanchitta karma.

And thus, according to the laws of karma you go from lifetime to lifetime in an endless cycle fulfilling some karma and taking on new karma. Sometimes you are born as an animal, sometimes as a human, sometimes rich and sometimes poor, sometimes happy and sometimes sad, sometimes sick and sometimes healthy, all to fulfill a certain measure of karma.

Can you put an end to karma for good?
But now that I described the law of karma, here is the good news. There is a way out of this cycle of births and deaths. The key to finding your way out of the ups and downs of life is to know yourself. This is not an identity that you create. It is what you were in the past when you appeared to experience karma and what you are even now.

It is the discovery that the happiness you thought came from the world actually comes from your own being; that the sense of reality that the world seems to have comes from you and not from the world, and that consciousness, which seems to come from your mind actually comes from your own being, which is the seer of the mind. That’s why sages sometimes call your identity existence, consciousness, and bliss.

Seated firmly in your real identity you gain everything that you thought you would get from things in the world. You gain the kind of freedom that is so rich that it cannot be put into words.

Fate or freewill?
And finally you get to resolve the age old controversy, is your life a matter of fate or free will. You get to see that when you resolve the conceptual frameworks that seem to box in your mind, you gain a freedom that you could not have dreamed of. And that is the end of the story. The body may live on until this life draws to its natural end. But you know for sure that the suffering of the body is not your suffering. Indeed nothing can ever bind you again. You are now and free for ever.

Other resources available to you
If you need a more basic understanding of this Self-Knowledge or if you just want support for your practice, go to www.light-up-your-life.com and read down the main column. Also check out the different links that we provide as resources. They can help you to sharpen the focus of your meditation practice.

Another resource that we offer is the book, Making Your Wisdom Come Alive, a step by step guide taking you from your everyday experience to the highest wisdom and truth. To find out more, click on the link below:

wisdom.light-up-your-life.com

To join our mailing list go to: http://www.light-up-your-life.com/join.html

Please Tell Your Friend
Please tell you friends. Although we don’t have an advertising budget, we hope that everyone who wants to can find out about and wake up to this wisdom.

You have my best wishes,

Michael Gluckman

The difference between a state of mind and a state of Being

These comments from Huggie will help illustrate the difference between finding your original nature and changing your mind. This is important because a change of mind is only a temporary state. Your identity, however, takes you beyond change to that which always was, always is and always shall be:

I was doing a modified version, of Zen, which gave me great gains for several months. It was very simple. Just watch (everything). I started to "enter the Void" and rejoiced that I had achieved that goal.

However shortly afterward, my life started to TURN VOID! I lost my house, my wife left, my car blew up and my health was wrecked with serious spinal trouble and I can't walk.

Seems to me that meditation started this chain of events. Is that possible?
Huggie

Hi Huggie,

I am sorry to hear about your misfortunes. From what you told us we cannot tell if there is a relationship between your meditation practice and your misfortunes.

However, you should know that some meditation practices will tend to dull your mind, especially if you misunderstand the nature of watching. If you take watching to be a state of mind you will then bifurcate your mind. That means that half of your mind will attempt to watch the other half. The overall effect of this splitting up your mind is that you will appear to get duller. You will not feel really present in the experiences that you encounter in your life.

Consciousness is not a state of mind
But fortunately Consciousness is not a state of mind; it is your identity. That means you can allow your mind to be fully engaged in your relationships and in the things that you do like driving, and you are still aware.

To prove this the next time your have a conversation with someone, allow your mind to be fully engaged in that conversation.  Afterwards take a few minutes to meditate and notice how you were aware the whole time. This is the non-volitional Awareness that comes from your being.

You can also do this if you have a complex job to do. Allow your mind to be fully engaged in the job at hand. Afterwards meditate and notice how you were aware the whole time. Although your mind was fully concentrated on the task at hand, you were all of the time abiding as Awareness. Following this practice your mind will appear to get brighter and you will actually become more aware.

  And now to address your misfortunes:
Few people, when they choose a meditation technique ask, "What technique will serve me well when my life goes smoothly, and when I seem to face an unbearable amount of misfortune?" Or when they face misfortune they never ask, "Can I  find  freedom and peace right in the midst of these problems?"

When they practice they may feel good for a while but the test is what happens when they face an unfortunate situation. Can they still be at peace? When a you practice self-knowledge you step out of the ups and downs of the world, and into the place where you actually experience reality and peace. Here you discover a peace that was always there. You just looked right past it; now you have the opportunity to abide there forever.

So take advantage of the material in these blogs, the forum, in www.light-up-your-life.com, and if you wish, in my book, “Making Your Wisdom Come Alive.” Take the time to meditate and to learn until you feel that you can abide here at your source with confidence. Also feel free to ask questions when it is necessary for your growth.

Other resources available to you
If you need a more basic understanding of this Self-Knowledge or if you just want support for your practice, go to www.light-up-your-life.com and read down the main column. Also check out the different links that we provide as resources. They can help you to sharpen the focus of your meditation practice.

Another resource that we offer is the book, Making Your Wisdom Come Alive, a step by step guide taking you from your everyday experience to the highest wisdom and truth. To find out more, click on the link below:

wisdom.light-up-your-life.com

To join our mailing list go to: http://www.light-up-your-life.com/join.html

Please Tell Your Friend
Please tell you friends. Although we don’t have an advertising budget, we hope that everyone who wants to can find out about and wake up to this wisdom.

Best Wishes,

Michael Gluckman

You have my best wishes,

Michael Gluckman