Rhythm.
Life has a certain rhythm to it.
Music has a rhythm which changes and moves.
And rhythm is a good word for the nature of practice.
It's developing a rhythm in your life.
It's a way of life.
The path of Ramana Maharshi,
The mountain path,
Is a way of life.
The more you apply the teaching in your everyday life,
The more progress you make.
The more you realize deeper and deeper the love,
Peace,
Happiness,
And freedom that you are.
The more you're able to see through the illusion of you or the ego,
The reflective consciousness of ego,
Right?
It's challenging because the body is filled with senses,
The five senses,
Right?
Emotions and reactions.
So emotions and reactions to your life is what generates your feelings,
Your thoughts,
Your actions and reactions.
All come from how you perceive the events of your life.
If it's good,
Then you feel good.
If it's bad,
Then you feel bad.
It's really that simple.
So it's no small challenge to give your attention to the source within you that is pure bliss because we are constantly distracted by life,
The events of our life,
The people in our life,
The events of our life.
And those events seem to generate a certain rhythm in our life,
Whether it's a positive rhythm or a chaotic rhythm,
A sad rhythm,
An angry rhythm.
It's constantly moving like music moves with highs and lows,
Ups and downs.
So when you apply the practices of Ramana Maharshi,
Which are very simple,
It turns your attention inward to the stillness that never changes.
The silence that doesn't move.
The presence that is always here and is overlooked because we're distracted by the rhythm of our life,
The events,
The feelings,
The emotion,
The roller coaster of life that we are on until we turn inward to discover what is always at peace.
What is always happy,
Content and still.
So it's a purification of mind,
A purification of karma and destiny,
Which are infused with the genetics of your body.
This is contained within the physical form.
And Ramana's teaching is simply cutting through all of that and turning your attention inward to the source again and again and again until that becomes your predominant point of view.
The predominant point of view is stillness,
Bliss and peace.
Once you become established in the bliss of pure being or pure awareness that resides in your heart,
Right?
So developing a rhythm of practice is what enables you to make progress.
And progress is best described as you don't react to life circumstances in the same way.
If you have a propensity to get angry,
You no longer are easily angered.
Or if you find yourself sad a lot,
You're no longer saddened by the events of your life or frustrated or stressed out.
You're calm,
Content and at peace the more you give your attention inward,
Happy beyond all ideas of happiness.
Right?
This is the nature of pure being.
But you literally have to rewire your brain because the human brain is wired based on what we think and how we react to life circumstances.
So if you're angry a lot,
Your brain is wired for anger.
If you're sad a lot,
You've wired your brain unconsciously to constantly create sadness.
We can become addicted to sadness or fear or stress,
Anxiety.
So developing a practice that has a certain rhythm that brings you in alignment with the truth of yourself is what brings about peace and harmony,
Calm.
If you think of the beat of your heart,
There's a natural rhythm or beat to the human body.
The breath has a rhythm,
Whether it's a shallow breath or a deep breath or a running breath,
There's a rhythm to your breath.
And the practices bring in your consciousness in alignment with the rhythm of the life force,
The life force of your heart.
What is it that is beating your heart?
What is breathing your lungs?
What is circulating the blood?
What is the blood?
What is the life force of the blood moving throughout your physical body?
There's a rhythm to your body and there's a rhythm to your thoughts.
And our natural tendency is to focus outward towards our circumstances,
Towards the people in our life,
The memories of our life,
The plans for our future,
The fear of the future,
The fear of death,
The fear of life,
The fear of rebirth.
So life itself has a rhythm and nature has a rhythm and a movement and a constant change.
And really the practices help purify the mind so you become aligned with the stillness.
You become aligned with the presence,
The omniscience that's within you and all around you with the laughter of the heart,
The joy,
The happiness,
Which is your inherent nature.
But when you give your attention to the rhythm of life,
The circumstances of life,
Then you can become out of balance,
Right?
Your mind is extremely active,
Constantly thinking,
Constantly texting,
Constantly on social media,
Checking Facebook,
Checking this,
Checking that,
Constantly talking inside and outside,
Right?
There's this movement of mind that's constantly happening from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep.
There's a movement and rhythm of your mind.
And for most people,
It's incoherent.
It's a chaotic or erratic movement of mind.
And it's the erratic movement,
The chaotic movement of mind that leads to stress,
Sadness,
Suffering,
Anxiety,
Fear,
Shame,
Doubt.
All of this comes from a chaotic rhythm or incoherent rhythm of your own mind,
Which can actually over time generate disease in your body.
You actually generate in your physical body dis-ease because the mind itself never rests,
Is chaotic in its movements,
Is constantly spinning in circles until you finally have enough of that,
Until you realize that everything you've attempted to do in your life to produce happiness has only worked maybe 1% of the time,
Right?
You're happy for a while,
But that's always replaced with anger,
Fear,
Sadness,
Stress,
Something else,
Right?
So how do you get to the place of constant peace regardless of what's going on?
And this is the great challenge.
The mind itself,
The ego itself cannot keep you in the abode of peace which is alive in your heart.
Even if you tell yourself,
If I just go in to the heart,
I will find peace,
You won't be able to do it because the mind is wired to focus outward to the world,
To the events of your life,
To the rhythm of your life,
Right?
It's wired for that.
So the practices begin the process of literally changing the structure of your brain,
Right?
And they've studied this in neuroscience,
Right?
If you meditate,
Your brain actually changes,
It physically changes.
There's new synapses that form,
That align your consciousness,
Your awareness with consciousness itself which is by its very nature still calm and at peace.
But what's funny about the human mind is that even though we might know that peace is alive in our heart,
We don't choose that.
We choose to give our attention to the activity in our mind which is usually chaotic.
A lot of thoughts and some of them are good and some of them are bad and some of them are really bad,
Really negative,
Right?
And that generates a wide range of emotions.
But if you're entering into the path of Ramana Maharshi or if you've been on the mountain path for a long time,
You have to develop the rhythm of practice which Ramana maintained had to be continuous for it to have any noticeable result in your life.
And the result is you simply don't react the same way.
You are always at peace.
You are always happy,
Not just some of the time or part of the time,
But all of the time.
Certainly,
Initially when you have the first taste of the pure consciousness of your being,
The bliss can be there for a short period of time and then disappear.
And that's because the mind is extremely powerful and the ego is equally as powerful and in tandem,
The mind and the ego work in tandem to focus your attention on the outer world.
And the reason for that is survival.
So your mind and your ego are naturally wired for survival and the brain is wired for that as well.
So the practices are simple and that is confronting this idea of you,
The ego,
The feeling that you are the body.
It's confronting that directly,
Intimately to discover who is this me that you think you are?
What is the nature of ego?
So this is one aspect that's known as inquiry,
Questioning the meditator.
Who is it that meditates or who is it that's sad?
Who is it that's angry?
And that question,
Who am I or who is angry or who is sad,
Annihilates the story about your sadness or the story about your anger because there has to be a story for there to be any kind of anger or upset in your life.
First you have to be identified as a person and then secondly you have to weave a story about what happened in your mind in order to generate whatever you're feeling.
So if you're angry,
Something made you angry.
Something made you maybe very angry.
Maybe you are raging,
Right,
Ranting,
Furious.
And what generates that seems like it's the outer event,
What somebody did or said.
But it's really what's going on inside the thoughts and the story that you create about the event.
So there's the event and once it's finished it falls into the past.
But the past remains in the present as long as you think about it and create a story about it and tell that story again and again to anyone who will listen,
Right,
To justify your point of view.
The ego and mind always want to be right.
In fact it's certain it is right and the other person is just dead wrong.
And it's this certainty about your perspective that keeps the suffering in place.
But all of this happens so quickly because the mind and ego agree about a story or a thought instantaneously.
Six hundred and seventy million miles an hour is the speed of your mind.
It is light,
Right.
The body is made up of light,
Light energy,
Light frequency.
The life force of your body that animates the energy that animates your body is electromagnetism.
It is invisible light and it has a rhythm and a movement.
But we are so focused on the outer world and the events in our life and the people in our life that we don't notice this energy,
This presence,
This consciousness,
This awareness.
Why?
Because we're focused on the events that are happening,
The people,
The conversation,
The conversation in our head,
The story that we're creating,
The story that we're maintaining.
And the story even changes over time.
We don't always remember things exactly as they happened,
Right?
So suffering is complicated.
It requires your participation.
You have to generate a story which keeps it is the fuel.
The story is the fuel that keeps the energy of the emotion intact.
And you can test this for yourself if you think of something that was really funny or made you laugh,
You can laugh right now.
Or if you think of something that made you angry in the past,
You can get angry right now because you are generating it.
Even though it seems instantaneously and it is moving at an amazing speed,
It seems like you have no control over it,
That it's just instant.
But the truth is you are generating it.
You're just not aware that you're generating it.
So the practices bring your attention in so you can start to notice what's actually going on.
So you can notice that you are responsible for your anger,
Not the whatever happened outside of you.
That you generated it based on what you thought and the story that you told yourself about it.
So the practices help you see through the story.
It actually ends the story,
The question,
Who am I?
But in the silence,
You can become aware in meditation,
You can become aware of awareness itself.
Sat-Chit-Ananda,
Being consciousness bliss.
The mind can't grab a hold of consciousness because consciousness exists before thought.
It is a vast omniscient presence that is vast and intelligent,
Always here and always now,
Always at peace.
Love beyond all ideas of love.
Peace beyond all ideas of peace.
It is still.
It has a silent rhythm that is unmoving.
And it's that presence that sets you free from all the different complexities of mind that generate fear,
Anger,
Sadness,
Anxiety.
It sets you free from the mind itself and from the ego.
You can see through the ego as an illusion of reflective consciousness that reflects what you perceive in the world around you.
But it also reflects your eternal nature.
And the more you align through practice with your eternal nature,
The happier and happier you become.
And the less and less the events and constantly changing movement and rhythm of life affects you.
Life becomes a joyful play of consciousness when you align your consciousness with pure awareness and you develop the skill to stay as that.
Because it is a skill to stay as that.
The mind is powerful.
The feeling me in your body is strong.
It's infused with the feeling nature of your body and your senses.
So the feeling me is very strong.
And this has to be seen through all the way so that happiness and peace is constant,
Not something that comes and goes.
You are the constant presence of peace,
Love,
And happiness.
You are that.
Om Shanti,
Shanti,
Shanti Om.
Shanti,
Shanti,
Shanti,
Shanti,
Shanti.
