Meditation & Kundalini

Tonight is not the end of the world. This our hot tip of the evening. (Audience laughs) (pause) (Rama laughs with them) Oh, well. Tonight we’re going to be talking about trigonometric ratios. (audience laughs) And kundalini and meditation and music.

We’re going to be doing three meditations tonight. You’ll be learning three meditation techniques to use the kundalini and essentially what I’m going to be doing with those techniques is using the kundalini, moving it through your subtle physical bodies to raise you into altered states of attention while showing you how you can do that yourself.

Tonight three of my friends and three of my students, they’re one and the same, are going to be performing some live music. As you see we have amplifiers, we have speakers, we have headphones, we have all kinds of things. And tonight we’re going to have some live music for the meditations. We’ll be doing three meditations of approximately 10 minutes to an hour each (audience laughs) about 10 minutes to 15 minutes each throughout the evening and so we’ll have some music to meditate to.

I like to use music in group meditations because it’s harder to hear the megaphones and (audience laughs) this is something they teach you in the spiritual teacher training academy (audience laughs) in another world. And so we’ll have lots of music tonight. Lot’s of sound. The kundalini is music. It’s energy, it’s excitement, it’s power. In the back someone heard that word, and they said (Rama amplifies his voice) “POWER” (audience laughs) – No, not that kind of power. Power, pure unadulterated power. Limitless. Mindless. (Rama laughs) Uh. No -- (audience laughs) Power. That’s the kundalini. The kundalini is the life force, is the essential energy of existence. It’s the hidden ingredient in life. (someone sneezes -- Rama says “bless you”) It is what makes it all work.

So tonight we’re going to be talking about meditation and kundalini. How many of you, if any, are new to meditation – could you raise your hand please? A few, a few. Okay great. Good. Alright, well, then let’s begin at the beginning. That’s usually a good place.

Meditation.

Why do you meditate? I suppose it’s different for everybody. Some people meditate because they need more energy and when you meditate of course you get a lot of energy. A tremendous amount of energy. Some people meditate because they are sick and tired of their lives, of the world, of the way people abuse each other in this world and abrogate each other’s freedoms. And essentially they want out and sort of “Stop the universe I want to get off.” They just feel that there’s more. The life that we see on our small planet is not necessarily a great reflection of the entire universe. The planet is beautiful. The animals are beautiful. The people are beautiful. But they tend to destroy one another. And that’s not necessarily an operative principle in all dimensions. So some people meditate because they want to get the larger picture on life because it could get kind of discouraging if this was all there was. There are thousands of worlds. Thousands of dimensional planes. Billions. Endless. Life is endless. It’s discouraging. (Audience chuckles) It goes on forever. I mean that’s a long time. And you’re eternal which means that you have a great deal of time on your hands.

So tonight I’d like to use a little bit of that time and discuss just about anything that seems irrelevant and by discussing all things that are irrelevant we’ll find that what is left over is relevant. And what is relevant? That which you can’t discuss which is why we meditate because when we meditate we enter into silence, stillness.

Meditation essentially means having a great time. Some people, they’ve applied a sense or a feeling to the meditative experience such that – I like that phrase – such that (audience laughs) yeah, just trying to loosen everybody up a little bit, such that meditation has become a quantifiable religious experience. Which means that it’s not any fun. (Audience chuckles) In other words meditation has been turned into a tool of the (Rama says in different voice) bourgeoisie (audience laughs) no I’m sorry (audience laughs) wrong incarnation. (audience laughs) I get, you know, I’m in different ones at different times and I (snaps his fingers) got to bring it around and get it straight; sorry this is the, this is the, right, America.

Meditation is wonderful. It’s just terrific (with Jewish intonation) it’s so wonderful I don’t know, why don’t you do it more? (audience laughs) It’s just -- it’s the best, I mean, you know, it’s the best thing since sliced kundalini, you know, it’s terrific. How do you meditate? You should never ask. (returns to normal voice) It’s easy. All you have to do is stop all your thought and you’re -- that’s it! (Audience laughs) See, now you know. Admission -- $7, meditation -- taught, mission accomplished. (Audience laughs) That is the secret. Now you might of course ask well, how do you stop all your thought Rama? And I would say “Well that’s the art isn’t it?” (Audience laughs)

Tonight we’re going to have three very talented musicians playing and I assure you that the first time they sat down and played they never thought they would end up where they are (audience laughs) tonight I’m going to fry them with the kundalini. They’re going to be within the 12-ft. range, that’s the kill range on the kundalini level (audience roars). These guys have never been on stage with me. They have no idea what they’re in for. But we’ll all be very chic and casual and hip about it, you know, and just (audience laughs), I like it.

So anyway, you’re trying to meditate. How do you do it? Boy we’re gonna learn. (Rama changes his voice to be rough) We’re gonna learn how to do this meditation thing. When you leave here tonight – you won’t. (Audience laughs) How do you meditate?

Well you have to learn to be very, very gentle to start with, with yourself essentially. Because meditation is not something that you force, you see? It’s something that happens to you because, I don’t know, life gives you a gift. There are billions of people out there walking around and they wear a lot of shoes. (Audience laughs.) Have you ever thought about that? (Audience laughs.) But anyway. There are billions of people out there walking around and they don’t meditate. You can tell. They’re not having a good time with their lives. It’s bad out their friends! You know, it’s just people are not happy. It’s just not working. You know? One nation trying to destroy another. One race trying to destroy another. One religion trying to destroy another. It’s the same old story over and over again. It’s because they don’t meditate.

Now I’m not suggesting everyone should meditate. Far from it. Meditation is for very few individuals. When I speak of meditation of course I’m speaking of something that’s a powerful experience. Some people speak of meditation as kind of relaxation (snores) and you do the mantra (snores). (Audience laughs.) Okay. That’s, nah, that’s not, that’s not what I’m talking about, nah.

Meditation is the entrance into alternate planes of consciousness. (Dzoouu.) (audience chuckles) Yeah. It’s fun. So the way, the way you do it is by not trying to be too good at it too quickly. This is essential. Because otherwise you won’t have fun with it. If you expect anything in particular to happen – the stars to spin in the sky, light to flood your being, the kundalini to surge through you (audience chuckles) uh, give it a month (audience laughs) don’t expect that to start out with. Because you’ll be very discouraged because it probably won’t happen. At best at the beginning you’ll just kind of be kind of confused and you’re not sure what you’re supposed to do. And you’re trying to do the stuff that they say and you don’t even know why you’re doing it. (Audience chuckles.) And I don’t know why you’re doing it either. (Audience laughs.) But I do know that if you do that for a long period of time, you will change in ways that I can’t understand. But that’s neither here nor there.

So how do you meditate? Well, the way you meditate is, well there’s not just one way. There’s a lot of ways. That’s why it’s difficult to talk about because there’s so many ways to meditate. A good way to start is with love. Love is perhaps the strongest force in the universe. When you meditate with love what you do is you feel love and love is like a bird you kind of ride it. You get on it’s back and you ride it up very very high above the thought level. You’re trying to stop thought but all your life you’ve been thinking. You’ve been taught to thought, to analyze, to look at things, facts (voice sounds like Sgt. Friday on Dragnet) “gotta have the facts ma’am”. Remember Friday on Dragnet? (Audience chuckles.) Yeah. So you’ve gotta have the facts, right. But here we’re gonna do something, app-the word facts, who could-I could care less. What facts? You call those facts? Wh-where I don’t see a fact. You see any facts? (Audience chuckles.) I’m looking for a fact. (sounds like he is looking under things) This is called fact finding? Ohhhhh. (Audience laughs.) Bad. Bad. I know.

So, I don’t know anything about facts but I do know how to meditate. And all you have to do is stop your thought and if you stop your thought for a sustained period of time you’ll enter into other states of attention. But fortunately the good news, I know this is ridiculous, but bear with me. I’ll get through this phase. The good news is that you don’t have to stop thought completely to be able to meditate well. Isn’t that good? Whew! Because it takes a long time to be able to stop thought impeccably. What you need to do is to detach yourself from thought. The serious part of the talk.

There are essentially three stages in learning how to meditate. In the beginning you’re simply sitting and trying to practice without any concern of what is happening, what is not happening, whether you’re gaining benefit from it, and so on. You’re just trying to do it. And this is the stage of ignoring thought. In the second part of the practice we stop thought for limited periods of time and we don’t stop thought, what we’re doing is learning to think specific types of thoughts. In other words – thought control, (changes voice to sound like mad professor) mind control. (audience chuckles) Thought control. Sorry, it slipped again.

The third stage is no thought. Now no thought is not the end of meditation. That’s the beginning of higher meditation. That means that you are about to experience the other aspects of your being. You are an endless conglomeration of awarenesses. You’re not one singular self. You’re a corporation. Inside you is eternity. Everything’s there. A human being is not so simple. You know, we’re told that we’re Ted or Sally or Willie or whatever and that we grow up and have experiences and we die or maybe we go to heaven I don’t know but I do know that has nothing to do with what life is. You’re eternity.

You have thousands of selves inside you. And meditation is a process of peeling back the layers of the self. We start with peeling back the personality form from this lifetime, your current one. The mental conditioning, the things that they told you. (changes voice to nasal) “Girls wear pink” (voice back to normal) you know, that sort of thing. Because these are ridiculous ideas that human beings have come up with. And in ever culture they’re different. I mean there’s no arbitrary standard of truth. And what they do is block you from being the totality of yourself.