Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

of male and female. This center lies at the doorway to the higher planes and at the quantum threshold where matter transforms into energy. The symbol of this center, the six-pointed star made by the equal intersection of two equilateral triangles,shows the meeting and balancing of the higher and lower, the masculine and the feminine. Earth risesto meet heaven, and heaven descendsto meet earth through love at this fulcrum. Love is the turning point of materialism to spirituality.
    The sound center instructs in communication and creative expression, as well as developing the ability to speak with truth, love, clarity, and poetry. The third-eye center inspires awakening inward perception, learning to look within. We have two eyes to look outwardly and a third that provides inner vision—“insight.” The inner creates and reflects the outer. Inner vision leads to clarity of thought, intuition (to “see into it”), psychic energy, insight, and clairvoyance—“seeing clearly.”
    The highest center is above the Ajna, the command center. It is beyond our command or control. We exist by the grace of the Source. The idea of awakening or controlling this infinity is immature. We can, however, feel and perceive our cosmic connection with all that is. Silence is the quality of this level. Meditation, in which the observer dissolves and
is
the observed, is the realization of the thousand-petaled lotus of light.
    The practices and concepts of chakra and Kundalini philosophy have been linked in origin to the long alchemical search for changingbase metals to precious metals. Stills and other apparatus were used in attempts to heat, cook, and distill lead or mercury into gold or magical potions. This external process was eventually internalized to try to “cook” bodily fluids at the base of the spine and distill them upward through the spinal cord to the brain in order to gain magical powers or to attain physical immortality. The symbolic analog of this process may be far more important, however: Turning a leaden life into a golden life may be the real esoteric teaching of this form of yoga and the greatest of all alchemy.



Y our entire life is your meditation. All other specific forms of meditation technique are secondary. By integrating qualities of attention, awareness, caring, and insight into all arenas of living, we reach the deeper core and more essential meaning of meditation. This is an important contextual perspective to elucidate before proceeding farther in an inquiry into specific meditation techniques. Rather than simply asking how to meditate, it is better to explore first the essence of what meditation is.

What Is Meditation?
    Meditation practice is often described as the most essential and special aspect of yoga necessary to provide meaning and direction for ordinary life. We are often promised endless benefits from practicing meditation—from relief of tension and anxiety to much loftier goals including freedom, the ending of suffering, and enlightenment. But promising such lofty goals in describing meditation practices also gives them great weight and can make meditation one more source of pressure or conflict in our lives. We may worry about learning how to meditate and finding the right meditation technique among the myriad approaches. We can be troubled about whether we are meditating properly or for enough time, and whether we can control our minds. Allthese conscious and unconscious pressures can make meditation, which we have sought for peace, harmony, and wisdom, another burden we carry.
    As soon as we ask
how
to meditate, we are thrown into the field of techniques and practices. Instead of limiting our discussion of meditation to descriptions of specific practices, I would like to point out two broad, general approaches to meditation. The first approach defines meditation in terms of specific practices, techniques, and more structured characterizations. This
prescriptive
approach tends to be mechanistic and arbitrary. Literally thousands of formal meditation practices—including repetition of mantra, prayers, or affirmations; gazing at candle flames, mandala drawings, or photographs of teachers or divinities; watching the breath, and many more—promise specific results. The majority of these formal practices can be characterized as
mind control systems
—learning and developing the ability to control your mind and thoughts, through the practice of a technique. Such meditation practices can