Meditation Support

The Daily Meditator: April 2008

Selections from The Wisdom of Yogananda Book Series

This month’s Daily Meditator offers selections on meditation from Volumes I and IV of The Wisdom of Yogananda Series. These two books by Paramhansa Yogananda, the bestselling How to Be Happy All the Time, and How to Be a Success (available this summer), by Crystal Clarity Publishers, are filled with sparkling gems of spiritual insight and encouragement. May Yogananda’s words of wisdom inspire us all to meditate ever more deeply and earnestly.

From How to Be Happy All the Time

Meditate regularly, and you will find a joy inside that is real. You will then have something you can compare to sense pleasures. That comparison will automatically make you want to forsake your sorrow-producing bad habits. The best way to overcome temptation is to have something more fulfilling to compare it with.

That devotee who forgoes the pleasure of the body to feel the ever-new joy felt in ecstasy in meditation will find that all material prosperity and pleasures of earthly life will be added unto him. He who forsakes earthly happiness for God happiness will find earthly happiness, too, but he who seeks material happiness only will lose it because of its short-lasting nature.

The joyous rays of the soul can be perceived if you interiorize your attention. If you have made up your mind to find joy within yourself, sooner or later you will find it.

Don’t waste the perception of God’s presence, acquired in meditation, by useless chatting. Idle words are like bullets: they riddle the milk pail of peace. In devoting time unnecessarily to conversation and exuberant laughter, you’ll find you have nothing left inside.

Fill the pail of your consciousness with the milk of meditative peace, then keep it filled. Joking is false happiness. Too much laughter riddles the mind and lets the peace in the bucket flow out, wasting it.

Deep meditation keeps the consciousness always on God, and lack of meditation keeps the consciousness on the senses.

We have to work to reach the Infinite, and work in the right way. No one can give you Self-realization. You have to work for that reward. All the spiritual teachers in the world cannot give you salvation unless you make the effort to receive it.

From How to Be a Success

Contact with God can remove all human limitations that impede success. By the power of concentration and meditation, you can direct the untold power of your mind to accomplish what you desire, and you can guard all doors through which failure may enter.

All men and women of success have devoted much time to deep concentration and meditation—though some of them may never have used the word “meditation” to describe their mental processes. They were people who could dive deeply into their problems and come out with the pearls of right solutions. If you learn how to withdraw your attention from all objects of distraction and place it upon one object of concentration, then you will know how to attract at will what you need.

When you want to create something important, sit quietly, calm your senses and your thoughts, and meditate deeply upon what you want to do or acquire. You will then be guided by the great creative power of Spirit.

A man striving for permanent success must meditate every morning and night. When the peace rays of superconsciousness pierce his restlessness, he must concentrate these rays in the brain and mind, scorch the lurking seeds of past failures, and stimulate the seeds of success.

During meditation, the yogi feels the power of concentration in the will center at the point between the eyebrows, and also experiences a feeling of complete peace throughout his body. When he wants to scour from the brain cells the seeds of past failure or sickness, he must direct that peace-and-concentration power to be felt in the entire brain. In this way the brain cells become impregnated with peace and power, and their hereditary chemical and psychological composition is altered.

For the purpose of burning seeds of lurking and chronic diseases, the body-battery charging Energization Exercises must be practiced with deep concentration and followed by the Hong Sau technique of concentration and the AUM technique of meditation. In practicing these techniques, the consciousness of health, energy, and power must be kept predominant. When this power is felt all over the body as an unquenchable flow of vitality, it must be concentrated in the brain and mind uninterruptedly for a long time. In this way the vital power will destroy all lurking disease tendencies from the past.

Divine Will can change the course of destiny, wake the dead, and change the course of the solar or stellar systems. By deep meditation and by wisdom-guided, never-discouraged determination, we can revolve our will around all our noble desires with success, and then our will becomes Divine Will.

Your business engagements have always come first in your consideration. They can remain the most important until you are called away into the Mystery beyond. But I advocate evenness of development and prosperity. I do not believe in spiritual aspiration being chloroformed by business madness.

Don’t say that you are too busy with keeping the wolf from the door to have time for the development of heavenly qualities. Break your self-satisfied, immovable bad habit of idolizing your less important engagements and utterly ignoring your most important engagement with wisdom.

Your soul’s message cannot reach God through your mental microphone if it is broken by hammers of restlessness, so you must repair it by practicing deep silence both in the morning and before sleep, until all restless thoughts disappear. When the mental microphone is repaired by calmness, affirm deeply: “My Father and I are One,” until you feel the response of God through ever-increasing peace in meditation.

Do not will and act first, but contact God first and thus harness your will and activity to the right goal. You cannot get an answer by simply calling to someone through a microphone and then running away.

So, also, you must not pray once and run away, but you must continuously broadcast your prayer to God through your calm mental microphone until you hear His voice.

Take a spiritual or material desire and float it in the Cosmic Vibration, which you can hear and feel in the practice of the AUM technique of meditation. Desire is realized when you are in conscious contact with the Cosmic Vibration.

Try to have one desire above all: “To contact God always, in everything.” Share this supreme desire again and again with the cosmic vibration. Having Him, you will have everything.

Meditation is the laboratory in which you know that God is with you and His magnetism is with you. Wherever you go, scatter kindness; let your heart be charged with God, your feet charged with God, your eyes charged with God.

Ananda Meditation Ministry
14618 Tyler Foote Road
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530-478-7561 ext 7014
meditation@ananda.org
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