Advanced Techniques: The Path to Accelerated Wisdom

Advanced Techniques: The Path to Accelerated Wisdom

[00:45] Foundations of Vedic Meditation

Vedic Meditation is an introduction to a world of consciousness-raising techniques. It starts with its most primary consciousness raising technique. A simple mental technique that you practice for 20 minutes twice a day, sitting comfortably in a chair with your eyes closed, making use of a bija mantra.

Bija, B-I-J-A, it means seed in Sanskrit, something that can germinate. We use this adjective bija in front of the word mantra. Mantra, man, mind, tra, vehicle, a mind conveyance. Bija mantra, to distinguish it from other kinds of mantras, which are known broadly as Vedic mantras, they are mantras like what you would hear in a yoga studio, Om Namah Shivay or Om Mani Padme Hum, if they have a Tibetan bent to them.

Like that, all of those mantras that start with Om, or maybe even just Om, these are not bija mantras. They’re not designed for and will not create an experience of transcendence. Transcendence means your individual awareness goes beyond thought. They may create thoughts, beautiful thoughts, but they’re thoughts, and we want to experience the flat, unbounded, transcendental state of pure Being, pure Being.

We make use of a bija mantra, and different bija mantras apply to different people. So everyone is individually a bundle of vibrations, and there is a bija mantra that suits that particular bundle of vibrations and causes sympathetic vibration with that. Such that when you have properly learned your bija mantra from a qualified teacher of Vedic Meditation, when you practice the technique effortlessly, the mantra becomes subtler, fainter, finer, vaguer, softer, until it just vanishes and the mind is left for a moment at a time in this state of consciousness standing alone.

That’s you minus all the thoughts. You minus all the thoughts, is your spirit, your essence. This is the essence of you, Being. Having captured that, at the end of a year of practice of that twice a day for 20 minutes, one has an opportunity, at the earliest one year, to partake of what we refer to as an Advanced Technique.

And in an Advanced Technique, we learn something which may have to do with a change in our mantra, or it may not. I don’t refer to it as as advanced mantra, or that thing that sounds like you’re buying new tires, mantra upgrade, sometimes I hear people say. It’s not always to do with the mantra. It might have to do with a different change in the technique of using the mantra. And that’s all left up to your Advanced Technique teacher.

I learned how to train people in Advanced Techniques from my master, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who learned it from his master, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, also known as Guru Deva, and Guru Deva learned from his master in an unbroken tradition dating back centuries and centuries and centuries. Untold centuries.

[04:31] Advanced Techniques and Transcendence

And so what I teach, and what my colleague teachers teach, who’ve been trained by me in this methodology, is how to train the mind to settle down in the direction of Absolute Transcendence, but just before absolutely transcending, for the mind to hover on the cusp of Pure Transcendence.

And why? Why would we hover on the cusp of Pure Transcendence? Because in the process of experiencing that which is almost Absolute, we’re experiencing the finest level of the relative world. The experiential world stops when the mind goes beyond the subtlest and experiences the source.

You see, the mind doesn’t really experience pure Being, per se. What it does is it becomes pure Being, and pure Being experiences itself. There in that state of pure Being, first Initiation technique of Vedic Meditation, in that state, there’s no taste, touch, smell, sight or sound. Everything gone.

Individual awareness like a wave settling into the ocean and then going flat, it becomes one with the ocean. Now, ocean is experiencing itself. There’s no wave anymore. But what if we could bring the wave down to the last flop of the wave, almost flat, not quite flat. There we have a curvature going right over the entire unbounded surface of the ocean.

And anything that is manifesting out of that unmanifest ocean has to pass through this very, very wide, very low curve. Taking our awareness almost to The Absolute, and then hovering there, we become one with that field where Being is becoming, where the unmanifest is manifesting. And there we get to experience everything that is coming into being in aid of making the story progressive, meeting the need of the time.

[07:07] Ritam and Higher States

And so we have a name for this layer. The name in Sanskrit is ritam, R-I-T-A-M, bhara, B-H-A-R-A, pragyan. P-R-A-G-Y-A-N, pragyan. Ritambhara pragyan. It’s a big mouthful. We just say ritam for short. Ritam, R-I-T-A-M.

In ritam, our individuality is almost unified with The Absolute. Almost. Not to the extent of losing individuality entirely, but where our individuality is unified, almost completely unified, with that Absolute state, then our individuality and our virtual unboundedness are married together. In that union, we have a marriage of all of that which could be known, inquiry, let’s call that inquiry, and the entire knowledge base of the entire Universe. Ritam, ritam, ritambhara pragyan.

So in ritam, we’re now experiencing something much deeper and more profound than what we’re going to say about first technique, not advanced, initial technique of Vedic Meditation, than mere transcendence. We’re calling it mere now because by comparison, it’s mere. Mere transcendence.

Mere transcendence is a very, very good thing to experience for beginners, but after one year of practice, if one’s been doing it every day regularly, one can learn an Advanced Technique, and then with each day of practice of the Advanced Technique, new phenomenon begins to occur.

The perceptual phenomena that are experienced in ritam are like nectar. One goes into that state and it’s very, very abstract, very abstract. It’s not transcendental, it’s abstract. It’s very abstract, but it’s like nectar, and the senses spontaneously will hone themselves to a razor’s edge, to be able to get at the nectar, that which can be tasted, touched, smelled, heard, seen in that super, super subtle phenomenology.

One not only has the joy of experiencing that nectar during meditation, but coming out of meditation, one has the advantage of senses that have been sharpened to a razor’s edge. Coming out of meditation, one is really able to see the process of change in action.

[10:14] Adaptability and Enhanced Perception

What does that mean? Everything is changing. Everything is changing. You might leave this steel cup here for 100 years, 1000 years, maybe 10,000 years, and an archeologist would find it, and it would still look like a steel cup. But what after a million years? What about 5 million years? What about 20 million years? It’s not going to look like this anymore.

And so that steel cup, though it looks like it’s not changing, it’s definitely changing. But it’s a question of, in what way is it changing? At what speed is it changing? What are the qualities of its change?

The whole world around you is changing all the time. What happens when we get stressed? We get stressed because change was coming and we didn’t see it. Change was coming and we didn’t feel it. Change was coming, and we weren’t prepared for it.

And when change of expectation comes and we’re not prepared, then what happens? We get a shock, and we have to adapt. Adaptation to that which we did not expect might be fully adaptive, or, as is very often the case, we maladapt. Maladaptation is what stress is.

Stress is narrowing down all of your potential responses to two things. A binary response. Either you fight to kill the demand and make it go away, or you flee from it, and you don’t want to know about it and get away from it. But you can’t interact. It’s a non-interactive binary reaction. Stress.

What causes stress? Not change. It’s the inability to see change coming. When you don’t have lead time, when you don’t know what’s coming, then you get a surprise, and you get a shock, and then you have to use up your adaptation energy. What happens when, as a result of practicing an Advanced Technique of Vedic Meditation, you spend a lot of time in the state of ritam, having your senses sharpened?

When you come out of your meditation, you can sense the future in the making. Future is not something you see at the end of a telescope. “Oh, there’s the future down there.” Future is yielding itself up and giving you all kinds of perceptible cues constantly. Future is in the making, all around you all the time. To what extent can you detect it? To what extent do you have lead time?

If you have lead time, lots of lead time, because you can sense the future in the making, because you have hyper-acute sensory perception, if you can sense the future in the making, you’re going to minimize or even eliminate stress reactivity, because nothing unexpected ever happens to you. And so with each new Advanced Technique, after each year of practice of Vedic Meditation, there is further refinement and sharpening of our senses of perception.

Advanced Techniques are all about sharpening senses, senses of perception, awakening the deeper and then deepest layers of capacity to perceive within the relative world, all of that which is coming into being in aid of progressive sequential elaboration, progressive change. Progressive sequential elaboration means evolution. Everything that is manifesting in aid of evolution. What is that? You can sense it.

[14:11] On Becoming a Perspicacious Sage

Now sometimes what’s manifesting in aid of evolution is the destruction of a steady state. Because not everything, not every form, not every phenomenon, and not every relationship between forms and phenomena, is relevant forever. Nothing’s relevant forever. And so there is a certain point at which a form, a phenomenon or a style of relating is starting to become irrelevant.

And if you can perceive that decline coming in advance, then unnecessary and futile struggle is eliminated. The unnecessary and futile struggle to try to pump life into something which Nature has already decided it’s going to bring to a conclusion, then one less thing to do.

Maintenance operator, that which is maintaining anything that continues to be relevant. What is anything? Any form, any phenomenon, any relationship between forms and phenomena. Maintenance operator is that which maintains and sustains any of those three things, forms, phenomena and relationships between them, that continues to aid progressive change.

Creation operator function. The creation operator function is that which brings things into being, either absolutely fresh, inventive, or innovative or improvisational, or the discovery of new relationships between things. Creation operator.

When, as a result of practicing Advanced Techniques, you have super-acute sensory perception, you can detect the way in which a thing is changing. Is it changing because creation operator is about to pump it up? Or make it more innovative? Or something new is getting invented? Or is it maintenance operator that’s continuing to sustain and maintain something? Or is destruction operator at play?

If destruction operator is at play, then we have the capacity to let Nature do its work without inadvertently resisting and wasting time in futility. So basically, you become wiser. That’s just another way of saying you become wiser. You become wiser because you’re more perceptive.

There’s a word for this in English that’s very rarely used because it’s such a rare condition. Perspicacity. Someone who is perspicacious is someone who has the capacity, through perception, to become sagacious, to become wise. Perspicacious. Perspicacity, a very seldom used word in English, because it’s not something that people experience very frequently.

Just like the name for the smell of rain coming. Everybody knows the smell of rain coming, but you don’t experience it very often. So you can’t turn to your friend and say, “There’s that smell of rain coming in. I know the one word for it.” There is one word for it, petrichor. Petrichor. But people don’t use the word petrichor because we don’t look at dictionaries often enough and we don’t have subtle perception frequently enough.

So those who have increasing wisdom due to enhanced perceptual capability are those who are perspicacious. And so in short, Advanced Techniques turn you into a perspicacious sage.

Jai Guru Deva.