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Mauni Amavasya, Silence Day – February 11, 2021

A Message from Swami Ritavan Bharati

Just like the sentiments shared on Valentine’s Day, this week, i share this most loving and beautiful sentiment of kindness for all kindred hearts.

As Swami Veda has shared with you in the past:
“I would like many of my friends to set aside at least one day to share the silence with me just as you have shared the full moon day for an hour each month. If you plan from now, you can arrange your worldly affairs in such a way that they do not interfere with your one-day vow of silence.”

By way of this period of mauna and reflection, please read and listen to this short address given by Swami Veda in 2010 in California. Such a reminder will return you to the innocence and purity of stillness and silence. Honor that sentiment of love this week, and receive the blessings of the Lineage, with gratitude, srb

Listen to Swami Veda here, “Oneness in Silence”

Swami Veda Bharati
Oneness in Silence
Asilomar-Contemplative Alliance Conference
Monterey, California
October 11, 2010

Guided meditation

Each paragraph below is a stage, a step in meditation.
After each paragraphed step, allow yourself a few minutes remain in the suggested mode.
With a little method to the silence approach, if you would join me in balancing your body first. Placing both feet on the ground, hands apart, shoulders balanced, the mind drawn to the temple of God that is your body.
Un-wrinkle the mind.
Relax the forehead.
Choose one name of God or a sacred phrase.
Feel the flow and the touch of your breath in your nostrils. The divine breath flowing as grace through you. Breathing gently, slowly, smoothly.
Exhale and inhale with the one thought, the thought of the divine name or a sacred phrase. Vocal organs silent.
No break between the breaths. No break in the cycle in the thought of the divine name.
All the other bubbles of the mind subsiding and merging into this smooth stream of consciousness.
Now cease even this process and let the mind become a chamber of silence.
From that chamber again the word-thought, the mind and the breath flow as a quiet unified stream.
Without breaking this stream of consciousness, gently open your eyes but let the silent stream continue even with your eyes open.

Comment
In such silence a field of divine unity is experienced which is not a unification of many parts but parts exist in that one infinite field. For thousands of years many traditions have taught systematic methods as to how to enter this interior ekanta, solitudinous silence.

In my ashram we have people who do ten days of silence, forty days of silence, ninety days of silence, but it is done methodically, and is scientifically guided. In that silence sooner or later the true face of God makes its appearance. It is not a face with features. It may be, as described by Arjuna, the light of ten thousand suns shining simultaneously in the sky.

In our interior sky which is more minute than the minutest atomic particle, and, more expansive than all the expansive space. All within us becomes filled with that light, with that noor, with that jyotih of which the Vedas have recited, of which the Quran has spoken, of which the Christian saints have sung hymns and psalms.

On the other hand it may not even be the proverbial light. Just a field of infinity in which all sciences become one, all philosophies become one.
From the mineral through the plant through the animal to human and super-human, angelic, all mind is experienced in one simultaneous oneness and then one walks in that awareness. One walks in that union and then such a oneís words and actions become the guide to others and his voice is heard deep in the interior of the hearts of many.

• It is that one, That –
• taj jalaan iti, shaanta upaaseeta –
  -Upanishad

When one has reached the shanta, pacific stillness, one sits together with that one from whom the entire universe is created, in whom it is sustained, into whom it dissolves.

It is the One from whom our minds have emerged, in whom our minds are sustained, into whom the minds merge and become only pure consciousness.
Whether we believe in a God or do not believe in a God, whether we call it God or not, whether we call it paramaartha-shunya, Transcendent Null, or paramaartha-satya, Transcendent Truth, there is this transcendent experience of being, God, that the highest contemplative sage experiences, sees, realizes.

To such a one transcendence becomes not an intellectual pursuit ñ not something to be imagined, but becomes real.
To such a one in that moment of realization God is not how God has been described in words. One knows that reality beyond words, beyond name, where even the divine name falls silent.
What is it like then if itís not the way it is described in words?

[here, the speaker went into silence for a few moments, then continued]

Only silence can convey it or personal experience of contemplative heights and depths which then create a planet wide field. Not in just one nation because there are no nations. There are no countries.
These are all artificial imaginations. Even not many religions but the religion of transcendent reality. When we dwell in that reality at all hours, we become the vehicle for what needs to be altered in humanity.

Through that power of silence, the collective silence of many, many, many minds going deep into their practice will merge these generated fields, which are all unified . A united consciousness will become more and more intense and the true golden age of interior peace will dawn.

May we realize that God who is beyond verbal descriptions. Who is only in His silent, brilliant light.

Thank you.