Life can be full of fun and excitement! Inevitably, however, life can also be challenging, demanding, and even frightening at times. The conflicting conditions can create stress, which can be unbearable as there is a limit to what our minds and hearts can handle.

Sad to say, no magic pill has been developed to fix the problem. Wise men of old have therefore concluded that we must look within ourselves for the remedy. Among the methods developed are the practice of yoga and meditation.

How did yoga get its start?

Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism are among the cultures that embrace forms of yoga. The yoga of today has been influenced by all these cultures. In its essence, it is a cultivation of body and mind discipline, with goals ranging from improved health all the way to complete spiritual enlightenment. “Yoga” in Sanskrit, means “union” or “joining”, referring to union of yourself and the divine.

The practice of yoga includes a wide range of directives, for example in the area of breath control, meditation, personal ethics, diet, and physical exercises which is also known as hatha yoga.

Benefits of Hatha Yoga

Some of the benefits of hatha yoga include increased physical flexibility and strength, and improved heart health. It can help your body heal better. More and more studies reveal yoga’s many health benefits, and as a result hath yoga has become a favorite fitness program for health-conscious people. Some of the types of people who have a yoga practice include businessmen and women, actors and actresses, and professional athletes.

Do you know of any exercise that also massages the internal organs? Hatha yoga does! You might even experience better immunity from disease and improved awareness of the health of your own body.

Benefits of Meditation

What many people are aware of, is that meditation is actually derived from the yoga system of teachings, and as such provides many of the same benefits, such as relief from stress. A meditation practice can lead you to a state of calmness. The foundation of a meditation practice includes focusing attention on a single item. For example, it can be a point, a thought, a word or series of words, or even just your own breathing. While focusing your attention, your mind’s attention is taken away from the stressful things in life, leading to a more relaxed mental state. The amazing thing is that you can accomplish this without having to take pills or medication. Meditation can help you learn to manage your own stress, and there are several meditation techniques for beginners.

Regularly practicing these yoga and meditation techniques can help you relax your mind and body, and the relaxed state can be maintained at all times. And, if you so wish, you can use meditation to progress your own spirituality. Some may even liken it to salvation. The great part is that anyone can perform these practices, and they can be performed in your own home without having to join a gym.

He is risen in our minds, our hearts, our souls – there is no separation between him and us. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

Christianity is not the only spiritual tradition that finds meaning in Easter and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And I’m not referring to the pre-Christian celebrations that form the basis of many practices observed today – from the fertility egg and rabbit to the rites of Spring. No, I’m referring to the beliefs of yogis past and present, one being the Paramahansa Yogananda, who brought yogic teachings as well as the practice of Kriya yoga to the west.

And he had a few things to say about Easter and its importance to humanity.

Paramahansa Yogananda took the Biblical account of the story of Jesus quite literally, but his interpretation was not what you’d hear in a church. To many students of eastern philosophies, Jesus was an advanced yogi whose life provided an example of what lies ahead for all of humanity. Through the Biblical account, we see the progression that must be followed in order to achieve true freedom and salvation from the trappings of a life of illusion.

In his book, The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You , Yogananda describes a complex process by which Jesus withdrew his soul from the three bodies – physical, astral, and causal – in order to achieve a permanent resurrection from death, karma, and illusion. The process even continued after the day of his resurrection, and explains why he told Mary, “do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father”. He still had residual karma that needed to be shed, such as the karmic debt incurred in his moment of forgetfulness while on the cross as he exclaimed “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Is this accurate? One thing that Yogananda says in his book is that so much of his understanding of Jesus’ resurrection process came through intuitive insight gained during his own meditations.

It is impossible with mere intellect to comprehend fully the intricacies of the astral and causal passageways to liberation and their correlation with the spiritual eye. They are gradually revealed to intuitive perception by the practice of Kriya Yoga.

I do believe that spiritual insight has to be experienced first hand. You cannot benefit from blindly believing in the say-so of someone else. And based on my own meditative experiences, I do know that it’s possible to gain insights into all sorts of matters through meditation. Unfortunately, I must admit that this is a practice I’ve neglected for a number of months now. Perhaps the possibility of understanding the awakening process can be another motivation for me to rekindle this practice.

We each have our own unique experiences and spiritual perspectives. That said, we can all gain something from considering Christ’s resurrection on Easter day. If it moves us to grow in our connection with the spirit, then that’s what really matters.

As you consider Christ’s resurrection this Easter, may you grow closer to the Spirit, in whatever form that takes.
May your faith in your salvation be strengthened.
May you be strengthened in the hope that all things will be renewed.
And may you consider your own awakening.

Amen

Peace

This age of high-tech has had the unfortunate effect of favoring and fostering the practice of diverted attention. Young people these days MySpace their friends while checking out what’s on YouTube while texting while keeping an eye on the television … and we see and even experience the same flurry in the workplace.

On the surface it might seem as if this results in honing multitasking skills, but recent studies have shown that this is not true multitasking. This type of activity has at least two drawbacks – it actually adds time to the tasks and it also creates additional stress.

Now scientists have learned another lesson on the value of focused attention – this time from Buddhist monks.

Multitasking is not the best approach

During a recent Science for monks training seminar, San Francisco Bay Area scientists used hands-on workshops to train Tibetan monks about scientific methods and experimentation. This is part of an ongoing effort inspired by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to train highly educated monks to also be leaders in science.

The scientists found the monks to be ideal students, primarily because they were “excellent single-taskers”, as one of the staff at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco put it. Even though the monks were not experienced with such hands-on learning, their skills in mindfulness enabled them to take to the activity with a focus that amazed the scientists. When faced with a novel situation, the monks were able to explore it without getting bored or without the need for a diversion, and in the process came up with some novel solutions to the engineering problems presented to them.

This is clearly evidence of the benefits of meditation and other spiritual exercises that involve focused attention. If you are able to focus for extended periods of time on a single task or problem then:

• You can come up with creative solutions.
• You gain a deeper and more complete understanding of the issue.

Self-improvement proponent Steve Pavlina believes that the best way to learn a new skill is to “condense your learning into a shorter period of time.” According to his experience, this is more effective than spreading out your study sporadically amongst other activities. While I don’t believe that following his approach 100% is practical for most people – it is incredibly unbalanced in my opinion – it does speak to the value of being able to stay focused on one task for an extended period of time. Or at least to try to spend as much time as possible on one task before switching to another. This flies in the face of the “multitasking” flurry that many of us find ourselves involved with in our daily lives. Is there much we can do about it?

Breaking the Habit

Most of what we do is a product of habit. Even if there is no need to switch our attention, if it has become a habit then we’ll find ourselves having to “take a break” from one task and spend a little time on another. Like any habit, though, it can be broken with a little effort. Every time we catch ourselves getting ready to switch attention unnecessarily, we can fight the urge and stick to the immediate task. Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it?

This is where meditation comes in. No, not while you’re working, but the benefit comes as a byproduct of a meditation practice. One way to think of meditation is as a way to exercise your attention muscle. As you focus on your breathing, or repeat a mantra, your mind naturally wanders but you repeatedly bring your attention back to your center. This cements a new habit that you can call upon to help you maintain your focus on specific activities outside of meditation.

Another byproduct of meditation that helps in this area is achieving the ability to live in the present moment. In that state you don’t worry about the future nor dwell on the past. Consequently you become more in touch with who you really are inside, without the trappings of ego, and so you become more secure with focusing on your current task without worrying about what’s around the corner. In fact, you learn to appreciate the beauty in the present and so have a reduced need to look to the future for fulfillment.

But all this comes with time. Some good books to read are Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
and A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. Other practices, such as yoga in its various forms, also facilitate this state and are worth exploring.

So don’t feel that if you’re not an enlightened monk then there’s no point in even thinking about trying to practice focused attention. Even the slightest shift away from habitual diverted attention can be beneficial. Any amount of additional uninterrupted time spent on a task can help by reducing the amount of time wasted in shifting gears. Once again, ancient wisdom has a thing or two to teach post-modern society.

Read the article Bay Area scientists teach and learn from Tibetan monks in India.

See also my post on meditation.

“Where is the one born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east …”

Is it possible to see the star of Bethlehem today? To this day, there is no definite explanation for the star of Bethlehem. According to mainstream Christianity, this star was God’s way of identifying the birth of His son. Jehovah’s Witnesses might tell you that it was Satan’s attempt to kill the child Jesus.

Was the star of Bethlehem a comet? A constellation? A conjunction of planets? There are plenty of theories and claims – one group has a website where they claim to have figured out scientifically what the star was. You can check it out at The Star of Bethlehem. It’s actually pretty fascinating. See also a report from John Mosley, program supervisor for the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, which contains similar information.

But are these viewpoints based on too literal an interpretation? Could there be something much more profound contained within this story – something with more universal lessons? Something which opens up the possibility of seeing the star of Bethlehem today?

There are several reasons to believe that there is much to the story that cannot be taken literally.

One vital clue lies in the identity of the Magi.

Who were the Magi?

The consensus among researchers is that they were Persian astrologers. However, the archeologist and historian Henry Heras, in his book The story of the Magi: The first Indians at the feet of Our Lady (Studies in Indian history of the Indian Historical Research Institute, St. Xavier’s College, Bombay ; no. 21), makes the case for another identity of the magi:

• If the word magi truly indicated the well-known Persian Magi, then Persia would have been identified as their home. Yet tradition, and the scriptures, only state that these magi came “from the east”.
• There are centuries-old traditions in India that claim that the Magi were “Wise Men”, or rishis (patriarchal sages), who came from India.
• The gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, were from ancient times traditional gifts offered to parents of the newly born in India. As far as we know, there has never been that tradition in Persia.

So there is good reason to believe that the magi were sages from India, known for their intense search for spiritual truth.

Let’s examine what the scriptures say about the star itself.

The Star in the East

The magi said they saw the star “in the east”. The magi came from the east and later saw the star over Bethlehem, so eventually the star had to be seen in another areas of the sky other than “in the east”. What kind of star exhibits that kind of movement?

Of all the celestial theories, the most plausible ones involve a conjunction of planets. And even those theories describe the planets taking different positions in the sky and eventually being seen in the western skies. Yet nowhere is the term “west” used in the scriptural account. Instead, all we read are references to the east – the account emphasizes the fact that the star was “in the east”, as if being in the east was a fundamental feature of the star.

Why is that? And why is it never described in any other way? Never “in the west”, or even south, where Bethlehem is in relation to Jerusalem.

The Significance of “East”

A clue might be found in the Jewish word for east – “kedem” – which also means “front” or “fore”. Could there be a special meaning behind the use of the word “east”, a meaning that includes the concept of the “front” or “fore”?

“But the New Testament was written in Greek”, I can hear some people say. And that is true – for the most part. However, there is testimony from Christian writers that indicates that Matthew wrote a Gospel, or some portion of it, in Hebrew or Aramaic. And coincidentally, out of all four gospels, it is only the Gospel of Matthew that contains the story of the star of Bethlehem.

Another “Star” Seen in the “East”

Experienced meditators in certain yoga traditions are quite familiar with a phenomenon that occurs during meditation, when eyes are closed and raised upward, toward the forehead. There, in your mental field of vision, appears a disc of purple or dark blue surrounded by a band of yellow. With continued focus there also appears a point of light in the center – a star.

This isn’t just a metaphysical theory. I see something similar to it during my own meditations, although it appears as more of an amorphous blob of dark blue surrounded by yellow. The yellow repeatedly collapses into a point in the center of the blue.

According to the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, this is the spiritual eye, a reflection of spiritual energy entering the body. By focusing on the spiritual eye, the meditator’s consciousness rises until it reaches a state of superconsciousness, and the heart is filled with peace.

“On seeing the star they rejoiced.”

This leads us to the following interpretation of the story of the magi and the star of Bethlehem:

The magi, sages from India who were practiced in the art of achieving superconscious states and heightened intuition through meditation and yoga, perceived that the one who would embody spiritual enlightenment was being born somewhere in Judea. Familiar with the Jewish prophecies, they went to the capital city, Jerusalem, and asked King Herod “Where is the one born king of the Jews?” He then consulted the chief priests and scribes for an answer, who told him “in Bethlehem”. After he provided this information to the magi, they then traveled to Bethlehem, relying on their intuition as revealed in meditation to guide them to the exact location of the child.

“When they had heard the king, they went their way; and look! the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them, until it came to a stop above where the young child was.”

They recognized the Christ child within the spiritual eye that they saw in their meditations, and their superconscious insight guided them to where the child was.

Seeing the Star Today

With practice, anyone can see the star during meditation. But seeing the star, or light in the forehead, is only the beginning stages of an ongoing process of experiencing increased intuition and deeper levels of consciousness through meditation.

As we celebrate the birth of Jesus during this holiday season, may we recognize the potential within all of us for achieving Christ-consciousness; and in doing so, the realized promise of peace on earth.

Notes:

“kedem” means “east” as well as “front” or “fore”
“shemal” means north as well as left.
“teyman” means south as well as “to the right”.

Yogis and mystics spend years meditating and performing rituals and exercises in order to gain spiritual insights and achieve enlightenment. People have seen the effects of these practices, causing scientific researchers to try to explain spiritual phenomena through experiments and measurements. One interesting concept is the understanding of binaural beats and its effect on the human brain. Some even think that binaural beats can train the brain to automatically enter a state that’s identical to that achieved by experienced meditators. Is there anything to it?

What are Binaural Beats?

The phenomenon was actually discovered in 1839 and is basically a mechanism for getting the human brain to perceive frequencies below the typical threshold of 20 Hz. If two different tones of sufficiently low frequency (below 1 – 1.5 kHz) are presented to each ear and the difference between the tones are no more than 30 Hz, then the brain perceives the difference as a separate beat. In this way you can get the brain to perceive frequencies well below 20 Hz. So to get the brain to perceive, say, a 5 Hz tone, the two tones must be 5 Hz apart in frequency – for example, one 500 Hz tone presented to one ear and one 505 Hz tone presented to the other ear.

So what’s the point? Well, this has some interesting applications in the matter of brain entrainment.

Brain Entrainment, or Brainwave Synchronization

Brain entrainment is the process of changing the brain’s dominant frequency by exposing it to an external frequency. Over time the brain’s frequency will match that of the external stimulus, especially if there is not too much difference between the two.

This isn’t far fetched. The entrainment phenomenon occurs in all kinds of physical systems. Check out this video that shows the effect that metronomes have on each other:

So why would we want to do that with our brain? Well, consider some interesting brainwave frequencies and their implications:

Now brain activity doesn’t consist of only one frequency – there are always many frequencies being generated at any time. But during certain mental states there will be a predominant frequency, and this is what is meant by the list in the previous table.

So imagine being able to enter certain states, such as deep meditation, just by entraining your brain to produce that corresponding frequency as the predominant one. This is the idea behind listening to binaural beat recordings using stereo headphones.

Does it work?

Many such recordings are available online. Because a pure sine wave is not pleasant or relaxing for most people, the beats are generated within a background of white noise. You can download an example here:

Binaural Beat Sample

This recording was created using a freeware program, and gradually moves from theta waves to delta waves. When I listen to it, I immediately start to feel a tingly energy across my back and shoulders.

There are several companies that produce CDs of various binaural beat recordings. The advantage to these is that they are produced with more sophisticated sound equipment and many of the nuances are fine-tuned. For example, I’ve had the opportunity to try one of them, Immrama’s Insight CD. They’ve created a relaxing soundscape of falling rain within which they embedded the binaural beats. Instead of including only one beat, the Immrama Institute’s recordings incorporate a set of harmonically layered beats to more closely mimic the activity of the human brain.

The CD consists of three tracks, each designed to guide your brain into different levels. I haven’t listened to all three tracks for extended periods of time, but only focused on listening to the first track.

My experience with Immrama’s Insight CD

The falling rain is very soothing and I thought that it would be best to listen to it before I went to bed. Within a few minutes of putting on the headphones the sounds lulled me into a very relaxed state and it was easy to lay there for the 25 minutes or so it took for the track to complete, at which point it gradually – almost imperceptively – trails off into silence. By the time it finished I was definitely in an altered mental state, and as I took off the headphones and went to bed I was able to drift easily to sleep.

At the very least, listening to the Insight CD is a very effective way to achieve quick physical relaxation. I would even compare it to the level of relaxation achievable after having practiced meditation for some time. But is that all there is? One strange effect that it has on me leads me to conclude that there is more to it.

After several days of this routine I began to notice a reaction that I have not heard associated with listening to binaural beats. I started to experience symptoms of restless leg syndrome (RLS). This is something that I’ve felt in recent years which occasionally manifests itself in the evening, especially if I’m inactive such as when watching a movie or TV. For some reason, the extremely relaxed physical state that listening to the binaural beats induced also brought to the surface the sensations associated with RLS. The feeling is difficult to describe, but it feels like a build-up of energy in my legs that eventually needs to be released. I can either shake or twitch my leg to release it, or remain motionless and allow the feeling to naturally move my leg on its own – although that is also accompanied by a strange “sour” sensation which is difficult to describe any other way.

But the sensation became more pronounced after several days of listening to the CD – to the point of affecting my whole body. For that reason I had to stop listening to it in the evenings, but I intend to experiment with listening to the CD in the mornings, when I’m active physically. Hopefully, I can then focus on the mental effects of the binaural beats instead of the physical.

The Kundalini Mystery

Why would listening to the CD affect me in this way? Well, it might not be a coincidence that some believe that restless leg syndrome is often a misdiagnosis for kundalini syndrome. Without going into too long of an explanation, many Eastern spiritual traditions teach of a spiritual energy (kundalini) that is coiled at the base of everyone’s spine. Many exercises and practices are designed to awaken this energy so that it flows up the spine and eventually reach the top of the head, at which point there is often a mind-exploding experience that some say is the ultimate in spiritual awakening. (I’ll save my views of that for another post.)

There are many reports of people experiencing “spontaneous kundalini awakening”, or a spontaneous movement of this energy. For some reason, this is sometimes accompanied by such sensations as

• Energy rushes or immense electricity circulating the body
• Itching, vibrating, prickling, tingling, stinging or crawling sensations
• Intense heat or cold
• Involuntary bodily movements which occur more often during meditation, rest or sleep, and which may be misdiagnosed as epilepsy, restless legs syndrome (RLS), or periodic limb movement disorder (PLMD).

These and other symptoms can occur as the result of meditation, yoga, or other intense spiritual practices, and are manifestations of an accelerated release or burning up of karma. Could my RLS be related to Kundalini syndrome? And could listening to certain binaural beats be affecting me in the same way as other practices?

More than a relaxation method?

I’ve definitely experienced how brain entrainment using binaural beats can quickly induce relaxation. But are binaural beats, through brain entrainment, doing more than just inducing relaxed states? I have reason to believe that they do produce many of the same effects as meditation or yoga beyond just the physical relaxation. While I have yet to experience them, the Immrama Institute claims that other benefits include increased learning ability and creativity, reduced stress, and better personal insight. For myself, it may be simply a matter of listening to the CD earlier in the day in order to give these results a chance. If I notice anything, I’ll be sure to post another article.

• My Mindshift II has twelve different compositions for various effects.