Boons: Aligning with Cosmic Desire

Boons: Aligning with Cosmic Desire

[00:45] Guru Purnima

The word boon, B-O-O-N, is a beautiful old English—I don’t mean Old English with a capital O and a capital E, but rather an older English version of the word wish or a blessing. It is a boon to humanity that Vedic Meditation exists. Or there could be someone who would like a boon granted—that is, something that you conceive of, which, if it came into being, is perceived by you as a blessing to you and perhaps to many others.

And so, it’s interesting that once a year in the Vedic tradition, the pinnacle of Vedic culture is the celebration of the full moon night that happens in the lunar month of Shravan. Shravan is spelled S-H-R-A-V-A-N, Shravan. Shravan almost always coordinates easily with the solar month of July.

When the full moon, the waxing full moon, occurs, there are always two nights that contend for the full moon night. One is the night during which the fullness of the moon is growing into fullness, or has perhaps reached it, and this is called the waxing full. Then there is the next night, which is the night where the moon is pretty much full but beginning to wane—the waning full.

On the waxing full moon evening of roughly the month of July, there’s a night known as Guru Purnima. Guru means a teacher, a remover of darkness, an illuminator, and Purnima means fullness, as in the full moon. The full moon celebration of one’s great good fortune at being a Vedic meditator, and someone who is enjoying the accrual of daily benefits of practicing this wonderful technique.

On this night, it is also considered, legendary, in fact, that if you hold in your awareness, or in some cases even write down (though holding it in your awareness is just fine), a particular boon that you would like to enjoy the granting of, some deep wish or desire that you’ve recognized, that on that night in particular, the likelihood of you laying that at the door of the unmanifest, laying that at the door of the cosmic field of Being from deep within your heart, will allow that boon to come into being.

[04:12] A Blessing

So what is a boon? A boon is a blessing. A wish fulfilled in the form of a blessing. 

The interesting thing on Guru Purnima is that the boon is instructed by the guru of the day—who is holding the ceremony of Guru Purnima—that it should be a wish, a blessing, a granted wish which, should it come about, would bring maximum benefit not just to the one who’s wishing it but to as many people or as many forms and phenomena as possible.

In other words, one can’t just say, “I want world peace.” It’s not specific enough. And one can’t just say, “I want my auntie to give me a hundred and eight dollars.” It’s too specific. But could there be a way of finding something which, if it came into being, would benefit you individually in a way that is unambiguous—very clear—and also, by virtue of it benefiting you individually, would bring about the greatest possible life-supporting effect for the whole world, as many people as possible anyway?

And this is the challenge. Can you think in specificity and globally at the same time in the one wish? It’s a very interesting proposition to consider and one that is, by the way, a lot of fun to contemplate, and eminently doable.

And so, this is not just something one holds in one’s awareness on the night of Guru Purnima, but I’m using Guru Purnima night as the one time where it’s incumbent upon us to consider such things.

We have a night of demonstrating our natural gratitude for the well-deserved, self-created good fortune that has accrued to us by being Vedic meditators. We have a natural gratitude for that, but at the same time, we give the gift of acceptance that, according to the tradition, we’re supposed to do some contemplating. What would you like to happen? What would you like to happen?

[07:18] Channeling a Cosmic Desire

And so, the bringing about of that, using our individuality as a means to channel a cosmic desire. A cosmic desire is one which, if brought into being, will benefit you, the desirer of it, and as many others as possible, not just for now, but for all time into the future.

This is a very interesting thing to contemplate—a good mental exercise. It brings together the two sides of our human brain: the analytic and the synthetic, the specific and the global sides of the brain—into one coordinated function.

A boon. What would be your boon? Where does your desire for a particular thing come from? In the Vedic worldview, we teach that all desirable outcomes, all things that are desirable, are obedient to there being one indivisible whole field that causes a proposition to a desirable thing to become charming to you. It’s coming from deep inside you somewhere.

Sometimes, we get the message a little bit twisted. If our nervous system is filled with accumulated stress, for example, then, as the old story goes about the World War I English captain in the trenches who said to his runner, “Run this message to the next trench over and get it back to HQ—to headquarters. Send reinforcements. We are going to advance.”

The runner runs, tells the story; the next runner takes up the story and relays it; the next takes it up and relays it. And everybody is going very fast—pretty quick. By the time it gets to about the twelfth, at the end of the relay, the message is no longer, “Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance.” It has become, “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance.”

And the legend is that the general who received the final message had to assign some of his code breakers onto it because he thought it was a coded message. Meanwhile, way up on the front lines, the captain is waiting for reinforcements, wondering what’s happening. Something like that occurs when our nervous system is laden with stress.

[10:10] The Qualities of a Pure Desire

The Unified Field breaks its symmetry and causes a particular experience to be desirable. An experience is desirable, it dawns deep inside of one’s consciousness, but by the time it filters and percolates through layers of stress, layers of assumed neediness, layers of lack of knowledge (we call that ignorance), by the time it gets up to the surface of the mind, that desire, which was pure in its original conception, may have turned into something quite distorted.

How do we know that it’s not a pure desire? Well, it lacks these qualities: Is it life-supporting not just for the doer and experiencer of it, but for as many people as possible? And not just for now, but for all time forward?

If it’s lacking in any of those four areas, the experiencer benefiting, many people benefiting, not just for now, but for all time, then likely the desire has been polluted and distorted by accumulated stress in the physiology. A person may end up having a conscious thought which, if acted on, would cut across the interests of the many and perhaps bring fleeting, unsustainable pleasure only to the thinker of it.

[12:30] Purifying the Desiring Mechanism

How do we purify our desiring mechanism? Through regular practice of transcendence. Learning the technique; Vedic Meditation is the technique par excellence.

Sitting comfortably in a chair, as a strategy twice every day, allowing one’s individuality to settle down and melt into Unified Field Consciousness. To actually become one with the Field, which brings into being all the parts and their relationships into a progressive storyline.

This is the process, and this is the boon. And the greatest boon is the ready availability in this particular age of humanity, the ready availability of the knowledge of how to practice Vedic Meditation.

Jai Guru Deva.