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Bhumis – Ten Steps to Enlightenment
From satsang with Giten, March 3, 2016, in Stockholm
5. Adventurousness, Courageousness, Challenge-Welcoming
The fifth Bhumi is SUDURJAYA, which means adventurousness, courageousness and challenge-welcoming.
Buddha says: SUDURJAYA – look at the far. Let the very far be your challenge.
Accept and welcome challenges.
Don’t avoid challenges, welcome it.
Through accepting challenges, you expand your inner being.
Through challenges, you grow roots deep in your inner being.
Through accepting the adventures of life, you grow your awareness and inner integrity.
Meditation is the greatest challnge. On the fifth Bhumi, the meditator and buddhisattva, the buddha in essence, also develops the fifth Paramita DHYANA, which means meditation, silence, sitting and doing nothing.
Ordinarily people avoid challenges and are satisfied with safety and security: a safe job, a good house, a good wife or husband and a secure bank account.
Through choosing safety and security, people never grow.
People just grow old, but they never grow up.
Don’t be limited to the secure, to safety, like life is a insurance company.
Life is only for those that dare to live.
When you have the courage to be adventurousness, you move into the unknown.
When you are ready to drop safety and security, life will come closer to you.
You will feel the taste of the unknown, of the timeless and the eternal.
Bodhisattva’s on the fifth Bhumi cultivate the perfection of Samadhi. They develop strong powers of meditative stabilization and overcome tendencies toward distraction. They achieve mental one pointedness and the perfect calm abiding. Bdhisattva’s who attain the fifth Bhumi help sentient beings to attain spiritual maturity without becoming emotionally involved if they respond negatively.
– Swami Dhyan Giten
Satsang with Giten on Buddha:
Paramitas – Ten Provisions for the Inner Journey
From satsang with Giten, March 3, 2016, in Stockholm
5. DHYANA: Meditation, silence, sitting, doing nothing
The fifth Paramita is DHYANA; which means meditation, silence, sitting and doing nothing.
Buddha says: If you can sit silently for even a few moments without doing anything, insights and glimpses will start coming to you.
Let this quality of meditation, silence, sitting and doing nothing penetrate your life.
Whenever you have nothing to do, don’t create unnecessary occupations.
Just sit silently and watch life flow by.
Look at the people, look at the sky, at the trees or close your eyes and look at the thoughts or the inner silence.
Just be, and let things pass by.
Just sit silently and you are expanding your inner being.
You create a new space and freedom in your inner being.
This will change your eyes, it will change your face and you will become more centered, more fulfilled.
You will have a new presence and silence around you, which other people will start feeling.
This inner silence, people will experience on the outside as love and compassion.
Buddha says: On this lonely journey to the other shore, you will need to learn how to sit silently.
In the book, “Presence – Working from Within: The Psychology of Being”, I talk about the relationship between love and aloneness:
THE TWO ASPECTS OF MEDITATION:
LOVE AND ALONENESS
What are the two aspects of meditation? How does love and aloneness relate to each other in meditation? Just as the continuous rhythm of ebb and flood of the ocean, meditation also develops between two aspects. These two aspects are love and aloneness. Love and aloneness are the two banks between which the river of meditation flows. Love and aloneness are the two wings of meditation. We need to develop both these wings to learn to fly.
Aloneness is our inner nature. We are born alone and we will die alone. Aloneness is the quality of our inner being. Aloneness is to be deeply rooted in our inner being.
The word “aloneness” consists of two syllables: al-oneness. Aloneness means to be one with our self. When we can rest in our own aloneness as an inner source of love, joy, silence and satisfaction, then our aloneness becomes a door to belongingness to life, to oneness with the Whole.
Meditation can be defined as the art of learning to be with ourselves in our aloneness. Meditation means learning to appreciate our own aloneness. Meditation is learning to rest in our own aloneness. When we can rest in our own aloneness, it becomes an inner source of love, joy, acceptance, relaxation, silence, creativity, freedom and wholeness.
Love and aloneness are really two sides of the same coin. The inner aloneness and the outer love are two aspects of the same phenomenon. Meditation is learning to be happy and satisfied in our aloneness, and love is the fragrance that arises when we can rest in our own aloneness.
A friend of mine said that she often feels alone, but that she accepts this aloneness as a source of meditation.
Love is not an exclusive relationship with another person; love is the quality that arises when we are in contact with our inner being, with our authentic self, with the meditative quality within, with the inner silence and emptiness. This inner emptiness is experienced and is expressed on the outside as love. This is not a love that is addressed to a certain person. It is a presence and a quality that exists as a fragrance around a person, which is experienced by others as love.
A therapist needs to develop the capacity to rest in his own aloneness as an inner source of love, joy, silence and satisfaction. When the therapist can rest in his own aloneness, he does not need to seek confirmation from clients. He can receive nourishment and inspiration from within himself or through friend and colleagues.
Life is a continuous development and balance between opposite poles and tendencies. It is a continuous development and balance between love and aloneness, between holding on and letting go, between our male and female qualities and between love and freedom.
Meditation is development and a balance between aloneness, to be with oneself, and love, to relate with others. It is a balance between inner emptiness and the outer world.
It is like the balance between the East and West, between spirituality and materialism, between body and soul – and both these aspects are needed to create wholeness.
The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung has called the two aspects aloneness and love for introvert and extrovert personality type, but he has not considered that these both aspects are really complementary aspects. The psychological and spiritual development process is about integrating both these aspects in our being. Using concepts from the world of Hegel, you could say that Jung described the thesis and the anti-thesis, but he did not describe the synthesis between the thesis and anti-thesis. Jung’s approach was also to create a synthesis between modern Western psychology and classic Eastern philosophy, but on the road he lost the method to create this synthesis. The method and the practical tool to create this synthesis in our own being is meditation.
Meditation is the only way to go beyond the personality and create this synthesis in our own consciousness. Otherwise it would be like creating a science, but without creating a practical research method through which you can use this science. In this context, meditation can be described as a subjective science through which you learn to study and observe your own inner world with the same accuracy and objectivity as natural science
studies the outer world.
Some people can easier be alone with themselves and other people can easier love and relate with people. My experience is that there are basically two kinds of people: those that easier can be happy and satisfied in their own aloneness and those that can love and relate with people. Depending on previous experiences in life, we can easier be with ourselves in our own aloneness and have a tendency to reduce ourselves when we relate with other people. None of these ways are better or worse than the other.
Aloneness means to learn to give this moment to yourself. To rest in our own aloneness is like sitting on the top of a mountain liberated from the noise and madness of the world.
The basic fear of aloneness is that in aloneness we are nobody.
Aloneness has always been my continuous companion in life. A friend of mine once said to me that of all people that he knew, I was probably the one who knew most about aloneness. I also remember that I once asked one of my teachers in life if it was my path to be alone. His answer was that he did not think so, but that through aloneness I could find my own inner source of love. He also said that through finding my own inner source of love, I could discover then that aloneness is no longer aloneness, but that it opens an inner door to oneness with life.
During a period in my life, I had as a continuous meditation to learn to be happy and satisfied in my own aloneness. It was a continuous meditation to learn to be so satisfied in my own aloneness that I did not need anybody or anything outside of myself. Basically I have always been comfortable with my own aloneness, but this meditation taught me to both accept when I felt a pain in my aloneness – and when my aloneness became an overflowing inner source of love. This meditation taught me that I can rest in my own aloneness as an inner source of love, and to be in contact with the Whole, without reaching outside of myself.
Several people have commented during the last year that I seem so relaxed in my own aloneness. I remember an experience that I had a year ago, which taught me a lot about aloneness. I sat alone on the train on my way to Gothenburg, the third largest town in Sweden, to conduct an intensive week with an open introductory evening, individual consultations and a weekend course. When I sat on the train, I suddenly landed in the pure aloneness of my inner being. It was like the whole world suddenly disappeared and I was totally alone. I got the feeling that it must be like this to know that you are going to die, to know that you are going to leave life, to know that you are going to leave all the people that you love and everything that is near and familiar. At the same time as it was a deeply painful experience; it was also a pleasurable experience. This experience taught me more in an hour than I could have learnt during 10 years of study in psychology at the University. This experience helped me to find a deep acceptance for the fact that I am totally alone in the world, independent of how many people are around me. This acceptance also created a sense of liberation, a sense of joy, and a deep relaxation in myself. Later I told a friend of mine about this experience, and her thoughtful comment was: “Well, after such an experience, there is not much to be afraid of any more”.
Meditation is the way to be with ourselves and to learn to accept our own aloneness. In aloneness, I experiment with being consciously alone as a door to be egoless. In conscious aloneness, the ego cannot function. In aloneness, you are not.
I have always been comfortable with my own aloneness as an inner source of love, joy, truth, silence and wholeness.
When we depend on other people, it becomes a bondage – instead of a freedom. I took this Sunday as a meditation to be consciously alone, and to accept all feelings of pain, of not being loved and the fear of being nobody that would come up during the meditation. This meditation goes up and down during the day: at certain moments, I can totally accept my aloneness. It feels fine to accept that I am alone and that I am nobody. At other moments, I feel the pain of not being loved, when the meditation brings up how dependence on other people is a barrier to totally accept my aloneness.
I take a coffee at a restaurant. I am the only person that sits alone in the restaurant, while the other guests are couples and families eating Sunday dinner. It brings up painful feelings of not being loved and wanting to be needed by other people, when I see how much people cling to each other in the couples and the families.
Escaping your aloneness through relationships and needing other people’s attention through being a teacher, a politician or by being rich or famous are ways of escaping the pain of aloneness. But then the relationships are not really love. Only when you are capable of being alone, you can really love.
When we can be alone, we discover the inner source of love, which is our true nature. When we can be alone, it opens the door to be one with the Whole.
– Swami Dhyan Giten
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