Taking a moment for stillness can sometimes feel countercultural in a society that runs on productivity. And when we do decide to carve out time for stillness, calm, or quiet reflection, we soon encounter our restless mind. Our thoughts are conditioned to run on external stimuli from the five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. Unless we make a conscious effort to turn our focus, and energies, inward, we are, for the most part, totally mesmerized by the outer drama of this existence. It is so easy to forget that the true nature that lies within each human being is not the mind, but the soul.
Paramahansa Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi, often said that earth is not our true home, we are in the school of life, learning lessons that we are divine beings, made in the image of God. Yogananda said: “Infinity is our Home. We are just sojourning awhile in the caravanserai of the body.” The soul, being a part of the Infinite Spirit, is ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new Bliss, known as Sat-Chit-Ananda in Sanskrit. If our true nature is infinite and joyous, and we are not experiencing that in our daily lives and consciousness, then we might be temporarily bound by delusion, deceived to think we are these small fleshly beings powerless to constant change and duality: good and evil, light and darkness, health and disease, and all the other ups and downs of material life.
Yogananda and other spiritual masters remind us of and awaken us to the understanding that we, too, have that infinite divine bliss and peace within us. The great wisdom of India teaches that finding the stillness of the soul in deep meditation is the key to shifting our consciousness from ordinary material consciousness to spiritual consciousness. As with a nugget of gold covered by mud, we must remove the mud of ignorance to perceive the gold of the soul.
In deep meditation, our life force (prana in Sanskrit) and consciousness are reversed, instead of flowing outward into the world via the senses, we can direct that energy inward to the world of soul consciousness.
Sometimes there is very little we can do to control the outer world, but we do have the power over the inner world of the mind. If we want to positively influence our mind and evolve spiritually, knowing our true nature as bliss, peace, love, and joy, we must find stillness and cut off the senses from their identification with the world and its many distractions.
In the stillness of the soul, we experience what the Bible references as the “peace that passeth all understanding.” Yogananda says, “You cannot buy peace; you must know how to manufacture it within, in the stillness of your daily practices in meditation.” That peace, cultivated from within, then extends to all other aspects of our lives and the world at large. No matter our external circumstances or the demands of our roles in the material world, we can embody that peace everywhere we go, and our souls will shine forth in all their glory and light. That is the growth that comes from inner stillness.
Brother Nakulananda has been a monk of Self-Realization Fellowship for nearly 50 years. Paramahansa Yogananda founded Self-Realization Fellowship in 1920 to disseminate his Kriya Yoga teachings and help people worldwide to realize their highest potential and deepest joy.
by Brother Nakulananda
Self-Realization Fellowship
For more information about Yogananda’s teachings, visit yogananda.org.
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