Hinduism

Dead or just meditating? An Indian court to decide

wildmind meditation newsDean Nelson, TheAge.com.au: The family and followers of one of India’s wealthiest Hindu spiritual leaders are fighting a legal battle over whether he is dead or simply in a deep state of meditation.

His Holiness Shri Ashutosh Maharaj, the founder of the Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan religious order, with a property estate worth an estimated £100 million ($181 million), died in January, according to his wife and son.
However, his disciples at his ashram have refused to let the family take his body for cremation because they claim he is still alive.

According to his followers, based in the Punjab city of Jalandhar, he …

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What makes Buddhism & Hinduism distinct from other religions?

Tiffany Andras, Opposing Views: As two of the oldest sustained world religions that both developed in and spread from India, Hinduism and Buddhism have many similarities in basic beliefs despite their large differences. Though Hinduism, like other major religions, ascribes to a belief in God, Buddhism does not — one of the biggest points of divergence between the two. However, because of their parallels in origination, there are tenets that form the basis of both religions that make them discrete from most others, with the exception in large part to Jainism and Sikhism which have their origins in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy themselves…

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Behind the counter: Meet Sister Jenna from the Meditation Museum

Tamika Smith, Patch: In the heart of the bustling downtown sits a place that’s home to people of many cultures who find relaxation beyond its doors.

The Meditation Museum, located at 8236 Georgia Ave., provides a place for people of diverse cultures to attend courses on meditation and stress management.

Over the past decade, the director of the center—Jenna Mahraj, who is known as “Sister Jenna”—travelled the world spreading her positive message to more than 80 countries, including India, Egypt, Korea, Japan, Greece, and Italy.

Patch sat down with Sister Jenna to chat about her accomplishments and goals for working inside of the museum.

Patch: …

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What did J.D. Salinger, Leo Tolstoy, and Sarah Bernhardt have in common?

The surprising—and continuing—influence of Swami Vivekananda, the pied piper of the global yoga movement.

By the late 1960s, the most famous writer in America had become a recluse, having forsaken his dazzling career. Nevertheless, J.D. Salinger often came to Manhattan, staying at his parents’ sprawling apartment on Park Avenue and 91st Street. While he no longer visited with his editors at “The New Yorker,” he was keen to spend time with his spiritual teacher, Swami Nikhilananda, the founder of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, located, then as now, in a townhouse just three blocks away, at 17 East 94th Street.

Though the iconic author of “The …

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Maharishi foundation: Competitor violates trademark

wildmind meditation news

Jeff Eckhoff: A nonprofit Iowa-based educational foundation tied to the calming meditation teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has injected new stress into the life of a competitor.

Maharishi Foundation USA Inc. of Fairfield this week sued the Meditation House LLC, accusing it of infringing on the foundation’s trademark covering the teaching of “Transcendental Meditation.”

Paperwork filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Des Moines accuses The Meditation House of lying in its advertising about the benefits of “Vedic Meditation.” Claims about the studied health value of those techniques are “false on their face,” according to the lawsuit, and designed to confuse the public with research done on Transcendental Meditation, which has been actively taught in the U.S. for roughly 50 years.

“The Foundation has never had an affiliation or license with The Meditation House nor, on information and belief, has anyone connected with The Meditation House ever taken an authorized course on the TM technique, let alone acquired the skills and knowledge necessary or the authorization from the Foundation required to teach it,” the lawsuit says. “The Meditation House’s belief that the parties’ respective meditation services are equivalent is based on a self-serving desire to appropriate the valuable goodwill associated with the Foundation’s brand for its own commercial gain.”

A disclaimer on themeditationhouse.com insists that the company and life coach Jules Green “expressly disclaim any association with Maharishi Foundation Ltd.,” its trademarks or its practices.

Green, a “holistic life coach” who offers workshops in San Diego, New York and Des Moines, on the website lauds the “5000-year-old tradition of Vedic Meditation” and describes how her own meditation “led her to India to study with world-renowned Vedic scholar Thom Knoles in an ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas.”

Green did not immediately return a phone call to the Iowa number listed on her website.

Iowa corporation records show The Meditation House, LLC was formed in May 2010 by Jules Green Zubradt. The corporate address listed in state records belongs to an Ankeny home owned by Marilyn Green.

The Maharishi Foundation’s lawsuit accuses Green’s company of false advertising, unfair competition, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, false representation, unfair competition and unjust enrichment. Court papers seek “all profits wrongfully derived by The Meditation House” from its allegedly improper activities, as well as multiple changes in the content of the Meditation House website.

The foundation also seeks a court order requiring that Green’s company notify “each and every customer who purchased services” from The Meditation House that “there is no evidence that the technique taught by the defendant reduces the risk of heart disease or normalizes blood pressure, and there is no published scientific study that demonstrates any health benefit from the technique taught by the defendant.”

Original article no longer available.

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Ex-banker turned Hindu monk urges Wall St to meditate

Tom Heneghan: Rasanath Das, an ex-investment banker turned Hindu monk, was spending recent Sunday afternoons leading Occupy Wall Street protesters in meditation until police cleared their camp at New York’s Zuccotti Park this week.

The 32-year-old monk isn’t sure now where his next session will be. He’ll keep following the protesters to lead meditation, though, convinced they will only roll back the inequality around them if they find equanimity deep inside.

“Anger won’t solve anything,” he told Reuters. “We have to work from the heart … there is so much distrust now.”

Das has been a discreet presence at the protests, leading short sessions …

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Gainesville Meditation Guide: at the Hare Krishna House

Every day, the Hare Krishnas chant a melodic meditation and serve food to students in UF’s Plaza of the Americas. A decent number of students usually line up — especially on Spaghetti Wednesdays — but no one seems to know much about the people who serve the vegetarian-friendly fare.

An hour and a half before the sun rises, the Hare Krishnas gather for meditation, called japa, in the temple of the Krishna House, just off campus on Northwest 14th Street.

They recite their mantra with the help of Japa Mala beads, a strand of beads — not unlike the rosary — that helps devotees keep track of their chanting. Each strand has 108 beads, one for each time they chant to Krishna, and they do it 16 times. That means every morning, they recite the mantra 1,728 times.

They believe the god Krishna and his…

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name are one and the same.

“When you chant Hare Krishna, you’re actually associating with God through his name,” said Caitanya, a devotee who’s been chanting for 19 years.

They also serve Krishna through cooking and cleaning.

They devote themselves so stringently because they believe the material energies of the world cover the spiritual soul, effectively blocking them from being one with Krishna. They have their sights set on a higher plane.

“If you want to really feel free in the material world, you refrain from activities that bind you to the material world,” Caitanya said.

They use the material energy in his service to prevent becoming entangled in the material life. The van they use, for example, is used to serve Krishna food to other people instead of being used as, say, a way to get to a party. And because the food is served with love and devotion, it’s karma-free, as the side of the van reads.

Even if you don’t wish to wake at 4 a.m. to chant, Caitanya said non-devotees can still reap the benefits of the Krishna beliefs.

“We just encourage people to chant the holy name and take Krishna lunch,” she said. “By doing that, the purification of the heart happens, and then, automatically, everything else that doesn’t help them in their spiritual life melts away.”

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Meditation For the Love of It, by Sally Kempton

‘Inner spaciousness is always there, with its clarity, its love, and its innate goodness,’ says Sally Kempton in her new book. Our task is learn how to connect with it, and in Meditation for the Love of It, which has garnered rave reviews from such spiritual luminaries as Lama Surya Das, Kempton sets out to show us how love and enjoyment should be at the heart of our experience.

A shame then that although the book contains much of value, it’s hard to love it, and at times, hard even to enjoy it.

Parts are written with sensitivity, imagination and a sense of who the reader might be. Kempton offers an excellent explanation of how to work with a mantra. She successfully combines practical advice with metaphors that foster intuitive understanding (‘after a while the mantra begins to act as a sort of magnet that aligns the particles of your scattered attention’).

The meditation exercises – which come towards the end of each chapter, in ones, twos, threes or more – are varied and imaginative. ‘Become Aware of your Awareness’ was one I found particularly good, to the extent that I now incorporate it in my practice.

But there were two aspects of the book that I found very difficult.

Firstly, Kempton talks a lot about bliss states and refers again and again to where our meditation practice will eventually lead us.

In those chapters where the meditation journey itself is the subject, such as ‘Where Do You Find Yourself?’ and ‘The Process of Ripening’ – chapters offering a kind of road map to help the reader assess his or her progress on the meditation journey – this is all well and good, and actually very interesting.

But the emphasis on transcendental states in the rest of the text is draining and counter-productive. It’s as if ordinary experience is being continually presented as something to move away from.

Maybe this is the case. But there’s a problem inherent in talking about it too much. As the poet Antonio Porchia said, ‘he who makes a paradise of his bread, makes a hell of his hunger.’

It’s something of a paradox, but the meditation teachings I find most helpful are those that barely mention any future state but help one to focus unconditionally on the here and now with all its pains and pleasures.

This may be just me, and Sally Kempton may be writing for more experienced meditators. But here was the second problem: I couldn’t see who the book was aimed at.

Kempton’s teachings are based on Kashmir Shaivism, a ‘philosophical system’ that she describes in the chapter ‘Moving Inward’ (pg 109 onwards). Nothing wrong with that, except that the book, with its frequent quotations from spiritual leaders of all traditions, seems to be marketed at the general reader.

And yet, among passages written in a down-to-earth colloquial style, the text breaks out into esoteric language and liberal use of the symbols of Kempton’s yogic tradition. This shuffling between registers is disorientating and made me wonder who was talking. I would feel on board with the ideas and concepts, only to feel crestfallen when I was suddenly excluded by alien words and concepts. Hope was offered, but it was also snatched away.

I was thrown by assertions like ‘the radiance of supreme Awareness is present inside the [mantra] syllables’ (pg 92), and ‘Oneness is the Truth’ (pg 110). The capitalizing of words made me uncomfortable, and sometimes I was invited somewhere I just plain didn’t want to go, as in the meditation exercise, ‘Seeing the Mind as Shakti, the Energy of Creation’ (pg 151).

Having said that, the book has something to offer both secular readers and readers from different spiritual traditions, if you approach with caution. For yoga practitioners out there, it is probably a godsend. For Kempton’s followers and fellow Shaivists, it may even be a Godsend.

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Mataji Nirmala Devi passes away

Mataji Nirmala Devi, founder of Sahaja Yoga movement and sister of former union minister NKP Salve, passed away in Genoa, Italy, on Wednesday, her family sources here said. The spiritual leader was 88. Her body will be brought to Delhi on Sunday and funeral will be held there on Monday.

Nirmala Devi, who was born in Chhindwara in 1923, started Sahaja Yoga propagating it as a method of meditation and claiming it to be a breakthrough in evolution of human awareness. It was started in 1970 and attracted followers in thousands across the world. The movement now has centres in about 120 countries.

In her younger days, Nirmala Devi had stayed with her parents in Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram in Sewagram, Wardha, and had also participated in freedom movement including Quit India movement of 1942. That had resulted in her getting arrested and put in jail along with other freedom fighters. Many followers of Sahaja Yoga have expressed their shock and grief over her passing away.

The Times of India

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Sally Kempton: Living from the center

A month after I started meditating, I went home to visit my mother. This was back in the day—only a few years after the Beatles visited Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, and caused a storm of mostly satirical press commentary. Meditation was still considered an activity for eccentrics and hippies, and my secular humanist mother found my insistence on sitting every morning hilarious at best. In the mornings, while I was sitting in meditation, she would walk past my closed door every few minutes and call out, “Aren’t you done yet?”

I rolled with it on Saturday. But on Sunday, when she knocked on the door for the third time in twenty minutes, I lost it. Bursting with anger, I got up from my seat, opened the door, looked at my mother and said, “Can’t you leave me alone?” And my mother smiled a ‘Gotcha!” kind of smile and said, “I knew you hadn’t become a saint.”

That was the moment when I realized that effective meditation practice is not just what you do when you’re sitting on the mat. It’s also about how you react when your loved ones (and not so loved ones) do all those things that have historically annoyed or frustrated you. It’s not that meditation will turn you into a saint overnight. (The fact that you haven’t turned into a saint is one of the best reasons to keep on meditating!) Yet, one of the gifts that meditation can give you is the ability to use certain inner skills—skills like self-inquiry, substituting a loving thought for an angry one, gentleness, and especially the insight to notice a reactive emotion before you act on it—in difficult moments.

Meditation is for living. The inner practice is meant to radiate outward until your whole life becomes an ongoing training in living from your own center. As the intrinsic alchemy of meditation works…

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its subtle changes in your consciousness and character, it simultaneously challenges you to take action on what you are becoming—to bring your meditative skills, insights, and experiences into the rest of your life.

The strength of your practice is tested in every single moment and interaction. Are you able to bring the love you experienced in meditation into your actions? Are you able to stay in touch with Awareness when you are working, when you are moving into a new house, or when someone you care for disappoints you? Are you speaking and moving from that deeper level of being, or are you on automatic pilot, perhaps even doing the right thing but with no sense of contact with your deeper being, no access to its inspiration and love?

Certainly there will be times when the inner world with its inspiration and broader vision seems to be at your fingertips, moments when love sweeps over you all on its own. You may suddenly find yourself in the state called “flow,” acting unerringly without any apparent effort and with a quiet mind. The witness may rise up in the midst of an argument or crisis, holding you steady and poised in a situation where you would ordinarily go off the emotional deep end.

You might have mornings when the world shimmers with sacredness, when you find meaning in the blown leaves on the sidewalk, when the newspapers in the gutter seem to pulsate with the overflow of your own happiness. You will experience the ongoing magic of synchronicity, when a conversation overheard on the bus or a message seen on a billboard seems to give subtle spiritual teachings. At such times, work is transmuted into worship, and a walk in the woods turns into a processional up the nave of a cathedral.

Yet there will be other moments, many of them, when the gifts of meditation are there only if you work for them. The mere fact that you meditate will not suddenly make you immune to psychological pain. It won’t eliminate mood swings, feelings of inadequacy, or problems with other people. In fact, people who meditate can be just as subject to ups and downs as anyone else. The major differences lie in their attitude toward their mood and tendencies and in the resources they have to deal with them. When sadness, anger, and frustration arise, they have learned how to separate their intrinsic sense of self from their moods and feelings. They know that a core part of them is untouched by the emotional weather. Not only that, they have learned some skills in meditation that can help them through a difficult encounter or a mental traffic jam. They have more choices about how they deal with their feelings, how they work with the desires, fears, and crises, which might otherwise derail them.

Living from our own center takes effort, but it is also exciting. When we see life as an ongoing spiritual training, we live inside a view that lends significance to even the most ordinary interactions. We don’t think so much in terms of winning or losing, success or failure. Instead there is only the training, the consistent effort to come back to the love and lucidity we carry inside and to bring the values of the inner world into our outer actions.

This, then, is the second level of practice: the waking practice of staying in touch with our center, cultivating our character, contemplating and learning from the situations life presents to us, and discovering the techniques, teachings, disciplines, and forms of open-eyed practice that will allow us to live from the developing awareness of the Self.

Maintaining Inner Attention

In the Shaiva yogic tradition of northern India, an enlightened being is said to live in shambhavi mudra, a state in which, even when her eyes are open, her attention is centered in the inner field of unchanging luminous Awareness. This is a powerful depiction of the enlightened state; it is also a key to open-eyed practice. Open-eyed practice is a kind of “as if” game. You are practicing to be an enlightened being by acting and thinking as you would if you were actually in that state. A key practice for this is to maintain inner awareness—a steady current of attentiveness to your own Awareness, to the sense of being or Presence that you tune into when you turn attention back on itself.

Like most essential practices, this one is extremely simple without being at all easy. Inner attentiveness has a frustrating way of dissolving at crucial moments, when you are worried, excited, or under pressure. Even on ordinary days, you naturally move in and out of it, since that essential Awareness tends to be experienced in flashes, in glimpses that come and go. That is why it is helpful to work with different practices at different moments. At times you will face directly into the light of Awareness. At other times you will approach it sideways, through the breath, a positive thought, or even a physical posture.

To maintain inner attention in a steady way demands a threefold effort:

First of all, you need a set of practices for inner focus or remembering the Self. They should be practices that work for you, and you need to do them regularly.

Second, you need to be doing “character work,” examining your motives and attitudes and learning how to express the qualities of the Self—compassion, gentleness, kindness, steady wisdom, truthfulness, and the rest.

Third, you need to develop the habit of checking in with yourself to monitor your state so that you can recognize when you have slipped off center and then discover how to return.

Many meditation practices—practices like mantra repetition, awareness of Awareness, focus on the inner witness, attention to the breath, seeing thoughts as energy—are also meant to be practiced in day-to-day situations. So are the different attitudes you work with when you meditate. Just as you can begin meditation by offering your practice to God, or for the benefit of others, you can also offer your daily actions as service and see how that simple act shifts you out of self-centeredness and unknots the tendency to grasp at outcomes.

Your sitting practice of becoming aware of Awareness, or being the witness of your thoughts, can become an inner baseline that you return to during the day. It helps you move out of heavy emotions, distractions, or neurotic thinking patterns. Remembering oneness, holding the understanding that the seemingly solid world is essentially energy, will let you act in the world with more openness and fluidity, and with a sense of your kinship with others, with nature, and even with inanimate objects like your computer or your car.

Walking-Around Practice

It can be helpful to create set times in your schedule for your practice of mantra repetition, awareness of Awareness, or remembering oneness. You could make offering your actions, thoughts, and feelings a daily ritual at the beginning and end of the workday. You could make a habit of remembering to place your attention in your heart once every hour, or you could set your wrist alarm to ring five minutes before the hour, and then use that five minutes to bring to mind a teaching you are contemplating, or to ask yourself a question like “What would love do now?” or “What would kindness do now?”

You might work with a different practice every day until you find the practice or practices that feel like yours, and then spend some time exploring them deeply. As you practice this open-eyed meditation, you will see its effects. First of all, you should feel more integrated. There will be less of a gap between sitting meditation and the rest of your day. It will be easier to go into meditation when you sit; and you should need to spend less time “deprogramming” yourself from the stresses of the day. Then, during your waking, working hours, there should be a certain sweetness to life, a sense of openness and space in your world. You’ll find yourself feeling closer to others, less afraid, calmer, and more inspired.

During anxious moments, busy days, and periods when life seems to be caving in on you, these practices can become a real refuge. They help you stabilize your state.

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