Building Spiritual Force

We haven't abandoned anything in the practice. Everything we did before is still here but we’ve added a new dimension to it. The dimension of meditativeness. The basis of meditation is the opening of ourselves to merge with something greater than ourselves. That is a massive shift to make. It is an acknowledgement that regardless of how much we improve this little psycho-physiological setup, whether that be through the practice or other means, it will still be limited. The Yogis pointed out that even though the system is limited, it must be swimming in a limitless power called Life.

If we can connect our limited selves with the unlimited Life force, then we become unlimited. It's a shift in attitude to acknowledge that we are working with a greater power and blending into it more and more, so our limited ego structure starts to give way into a universal intelligence. Then the wonder of Life starts emerging simply out of that contact.

The mind may have certain ideas about how this will look, and some of these ideas may be true simply by fluke. A lot of the time, however, it doesn’t have a clue. For example, we may think that by connecting up to a bigger energy, we are going to be a super energised human being as a result. It is a reasonable assumption but it is not always true. 

What we are dealing with is a spiritual force that is way deeper than what is happening in the body and mind structure. The body and mind structure were built out of it but the spiritual force of Life itself is much deeper than that. 

You may feel absolutely exhausted in your physical and mental sheath and yet be full of spiritual force. You can be worn out on every dimension of yourself but you will always be adding to a spiritual force that is moving deeper and will carry you through whatever experiences your body and mind are going through. 

One of the most incredible yogis I ever encountered was one of the meekest, frailest, oldest men I ever met. He needed assistance to even move around and yet the spiritual force in this man was enough to pin you against the wall. You are not defined by your outer appearance; you are defined by the force underneath. 

It was true with Yogananda also. God only knows how much karma he took on through his teaching, but for the last two years of his life he was in a wheelchair. The only people who knew about this were the monks around him. Whenever he gave a talk, they would wheel him in behind the scenes and then he’d use the force inside of himself to get out of the wheelchair, walk onto the stage and belt out an impassioned speech for an hour and a half; then he’d walk off the stage and collapse back into his wheelchair and be wheeled away. Should it need to, the force gives the physical and mental sheaths more capacity temporarily to miraculous degrees. After all, it is that force that underlies the physical and the mental anyway. 

This force is very real and you are working with building it in your practice. Sometimes the physical and mental sheaths will feel tired because of the amount of new spiritual force they are accommodating because of your practice. These days your physical and mental structure are being asked to upgrade and shift at a faster rate than they’ve ever had to before. This is what sadhana does. It is a continuous upgrading of the physical and mental sheaths whilst this spiritual force comes into play. Sometimes this will cause some fatigue in the system. This is why, once you take on sadhana, you throw out all the ideas about how you think it should look in your system. All you have to do is tend to the deeper force that is building inside and don’t worry about a thing. This force will take care of all. 

The diminishing of the body and the mind is absolutely inevitable. The life cycle of a human being goes through a loop and ultimately returns to where it came from. If we are strongly identified with the body and the mind then, when they start to diminish, we will feel like we are diminishing. It means that we lose value as we get older. That is a shame. If we can cultivate something deeper inside and connect and identify with that, then we will see that it actually continues to grow and deepen throughout our existence and even into our next life. The idea is that by the time you leave your body you leave as a massive spiritual force with a whole load of momentum behind you. Imagine being too powerful to be contained in the body that you are currently in so you burst out. That is some way to depart. You continue to go up even as the body falls away. 

It’s simply a matter of where we are putting our attention on a day-to-day level. If we put it on our body, mind and worries then they will grow and we will get trapped in them. Then, as they start to decline, our life will also decline.

The message here is you don’t have to go where those are going. If you’ve identified with something deeper and richer, then you will go where that is going and the more energy you’ve given to it the bigger it will be. People will be astounded by the release of prana into the room when you leave your body, they will be blessed by it. So even when you’re  90 or 100 years old, you can still be building!