God gives the rich and the poor, the king and the subject, the president and the common man equal opportunities to commune with Him in blissful meditation and find their seats on His sovereign throne, says OSWALD PEREIRA
You don’t have to be a king, a president or a businessman to meditate. You don’t need an ornate palace, a stately official residence or a big bungalow to meditate.
You don’t need the ambience of a holy place or a sacred monument to meditate.
You don’t have to be rich or powerful to meditate. God doesn’t bar the rich and the powerful from reaching out to Him in meditation. But they can commune with God, only when they shed their worldly trappings of richness and power and seek Him in all humility.
In God’s eternal divine kingdom, a king, a president or a businessman is as welcome as a so-called poor person.
For in the house of God, the office you hold, the assets you own, the power and influence you wield don’t really matter.
What matters in meditation is your devotion to God. He wants you to give Him more importance than yourself. In God’s kingdom, it is quite possible for a rich person to seem poor and for a poor person to feel rich.
In meditation, a rich person, who doesn’t do it right, may seem poor and a poor person may feel the richness of God’s grace and bliss if he attunes himself well to the divinity within him and without.
“In the ecstasy of meditation, God makes the humblest of his servants to sit on a sovereign throne,” says the great sage and yogi, Paramhansa Yogananda.
Put differently, royalty, a high government office or rich worldly possessions are poor substitutes for the ecstasy of meditation and the bliss of God contact and communion.
It is said about charity that God loves the silent giver. Similarly, in meditation, God loves the silent meditator.
If you would like to show the world that you are a holy, spiritual person and meditate amidst great fanfare, with your followers watching you in admiration, then you are in the wrong house of God.
God’s kingdom is quiet and peaceful. There is no pomp or showing-off in God’s domain. It would be foolish to imagine that God who owns and rules the earth and many other galaxies would be impressed by your pomp and pageantry.
“The omnipresent God, who lives in the temple of the cosmos, with the star-decked dome of Eternity, illumined by the suns and moons, is not lured by a display of pomp and wealth of man-made edifices,” says Yogananda.
“He is easily coaxed, however, onto the altar of meditation by those who establish the temple of God within themselves,” he adds.
God is in the temple and He is under the tree. But he is perceived only in interiorised meditation when the inner sanctuary door of silence opens. Neither pomp nor penury opens the door. It swings open wide, as if on magical hinges, when the high vibration of the worshipper’s soul turns the key.
“Devotees who by meditation interiorise the outgoing consciousness, withdrawing their attention from identification with the mortal body and material nature, discover through direct experience what God is,” affirms Yogananda.
Meditation is the path to Cosmic Consciousness.
Yogananda concludes: “When the devotee, through protractive devout endeavour, is able to enter the ecstasy of meditation and become one with the superconscious state, he then attains an expanded ecstasy in which he perceives himself as a vast light and endless consciousness, in which he finds all galaxies, stars, rivers, and vibratory objects glimmering like glowworms within his omnipresent Self.”
Oswald Pereira, a senior journalist, has also written eight books, including The Newsroom Mafia, Chaddi Buddies, The Krishna-Christ Connexion, How to Create Miracles in Our Daily Life and Crime Patrol: The Most Thrilling Stories. Oswald is a disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda, and practises Kriya Yoga.
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Featured Image Courtesy: Mikael Blomkvist from Pexel