Dyskusja:Odosobnienia Medytacyjne pogłębiają Życie Duchowe

Meditation Retreats Deepen Spiritual Life (U-214)

(1) Many people undertake the initiatory path of spiritual development, often with a very ceremonial initiation from some great master or spiritual teacher. Dikshan is a very important part of a person’s spiritual development, and initiatory transmissions from the hands of living masters or teachers are usually the first real beginning of development on the spiritual path of life. However, what is important is what the initiated person will do with it next, how beautifully he will develop and enrich his practice, and how hard he will be asked to continue the exercises to finally achieve awakening and the blossoming of higher spiritual consciousness, connection and ultimately unity with the Deity or with the Absolute God. Without God, certainly, no one develops spiritually; without God, there is no spiritual inner life. There is a rule in spiritual practices not to mix methods of spiritual practice given in the form of lessons for daily practice by different masters and teachers from different spiritual traditions. Sets of practices are like well-chosen dinner dishes, both in quantity and quality of food for the Soul itself. Eating one dinner is usually sufficient, and mixing two sets often ends in indigestion or unpleasant side effects. It should be remembered that with a large number of assigned practices, there will be no time or space to add anything else. With short daily sadhanas, all practices and methods of practice from sources other than a given path of initiatory transmission can be added as time permits, but as a separate lesson, as in school, where there is an hour of biology or geography after a math lesson.

(2) Many practitioners in the West, due to their demonic ignorance, forget to observe the rule of not mixing practices of different methods of practice or different spiritual traditions. When they make their own set, it usually leads to degradation, mental disorder or confusion of the senses instead of leading to spiritual development. For spiritual development, one should only take sets of practices that have been well-proven over centuries and millennia, such as those thanks to which many people have already achieved spiritual purification, awakening, enlightenment and liberation from the cycle of incarnations. Any new, strange inventions of so-called authorial development courses should first be tested by their author on himself for at least 40 years, and then perhaps it will turn out that they have some value. The same applies to miraculous techniques for regaining health and immediate healing from all diseases. In practice, most of these authors who invent the latest strange methods of practice for quick awakening or immediate enlightenment are people who are mentally confused to some extent, most often paranoid, and their strange ideas lead to the same mental confusion and ego-inflating. One should always look at new inventions of the author, what such an author used and look into the spiritual school with original practices to check what he left out, what he simplified, what he rejected because all of this is certainly necessary, and the author’s idea is a dish without many important ingredients, which in time will cause illness of the body or mind due to the deficiency of what is needed, and sometimes due to the lack of what is most important.

(3) When practising yoga, tantra or ayurveda, one must not, under any circumstances, omit the practice of mantrams, which are one of the most important factors guaranteeing proper purification and proper spiritual development. Some varieties of true yoga practice more mantrams, and others a little less, but mantrams are always the basis for practising yoga and tantra, and the founding masters of all schools and methods of yoga and tantra, Master Śiva Yogeśvara and Master Uma Parvati Gauri, recommend first practising mantrams, and only then, as it were, in the next degree, practising the exercises typical of hatha yoga, including asanas, mudras or bandhas. Mantras are simply the basic technical means for purifying and elevating people practising yoga, and in the practice of yoga, mantras should absolutely not be omitted; on the contrary, practising yoga should begin with learning to vibrate the mantra AUM, OM, ŚAM, SAU-HAM, HAM-SAH or GAYATRI! If we are looking for a club where yoga is taught correctly, then it is definitely worth going to a club where at the beginning and end of each lesson, the AUM or Gayatri Mantram is intoned three, seven or eleven times and where there are no mantras, it is a pity to waste your time, because there is no yoga there, only Western fitness gymnastics deceitfully stylized as yoga, to hook up to yoga and gain a few more customers in a rogue way for something that may remind someone of yoga but is not yoga. Yoga without mantras can harm the human psyche because many yogic asanas and mudras require preliminary cleansing of the person with the help of mantra sounds, and each asana and mudra has mantra vibrations assigned to them that should be connected to them. Mantras are, of course, words and sounds in the ancient language of yogis, which is Sanskrit, and the stupid claims of fraudsters that someone does mantras in Polish only testify to dilettantism and extreme illiteracy, as well as irresponsibility and ignorance (stupidity) that a person who spouts such absurd and morbidly demonic nonsense shows.

(4) Individual daily yogic practice is deepened through longer practice sessions with a teacher or spiritual master and through so-called individual retreats associated more with the mystical life of hermits or Indian munis. Teachers or yoga masters with appropriate experience and training, usually called aćaryas, are qualified to lead several or a dozen or so days of training in which the student practices their initiatory yogic or tantric exercises more intensively, usually from early morning to late evening with short breaks for food or toilet. The shortest optimal cycle of such a retreat lasts four evenings and mornings, i.e. includes four nights. For example, we start on Wednesday evening and end the cycle of yogic practices on Sunday evening - we have four nights and four full days of practice. Ideally, each participant should have a small separate room, a camping house, or a tent. During such a retreat session, silence is generally maintained as an important part of the practice, which we discuss with the yogic retreat guide leading the retreat at a set time each day. A guide, an experienced aćarya – a master or teacher of yoga or tantra is absolutely essential for the proper process of retreat, establishes practices with students, gives additional guidelines for work, intensifies the student’s practice, indicates errors to eliminate, helps to go through difficult points in purifying the psyche and through emotional-thoughtful and spiritual crises. Making retreats on your own without a master of spiritual life makes no sense and often ends in schizophrenia, possession or other unpleasant disorders of the mind or senses.

(5) Ideally, a cycle of forty days should be spent in yogic or tantric retreat practice, which is considered the basic norm in the East, but it is not always easy for Westerners who are new to spiritual life, completely unaccustomed to cultivating periods of silence, prayer, days of concentration and meditation, or temporary life in seclusion in the manner of monks or nuns (sannyasis). It is therefore recommended to go through four cycles of full ten days, which together cumulate the effect of forty days. Short cycles lasting four evenings and mornings serve to familiarize oneself with the practices of individual meditation retreats and are recommended for novices as a first contact with a spiritual practice longer than the typical half-hour of yogic-tantric exercises twice a day. It is worth remembering that spiritual masters such as Gautama Buddha achieved ultimate realization, awakening and enlightenment thanks to yogic practices cultivated in deep seclusion. For about six years, Prince Siddhartha Gautama practised yogic methods with two successive yoga masters in group retreat conditions, and then, on the advice of another master and under his guidance, he made a strong effort to practice forty days of continuous meditation in retreat, in nature. And thanks to this, he became a Buddha, an awakened spiritual master, a fully enlightened being and liberated from the cycle of incarnations.

(6) Meditation, prayer, and mystery retreats are basic tools for the spiritual development of man after regular daily spiritual practice. Yogic retreat practices aim to deepen individual practice, to expand it, to experience as much as possible the deeper aspects of practice, to purify the interior, to work through patterns that we notice through insight into our interior, which takes place only in deep silence and in significant detachment from the daily routine of work or ordinary human activity. During the retreat, we take a break from family, social and professional contacts, or at least at the beginning; we significantly minimize all contacts. More intensive retreats take place when the sphere or space of silence of hermits completely absorbs a person. A deeper spiritual transformation occurs in conditions of deep isolation from the world, contemplation of inner silence among nature, and detachment from everyday activities conditioned by the cycle of incarnations. It is very unlikely that someone who has not undergone a longer retreat will enter a higher level of consciousness and spiritual development. Many practitioners, after years of their not very regular or periodic daily practice (sadhana), notice that something is missing, that they have missed something, that they are going in circles, and that they have simply forgotten that an essential complement to the work is inner transformation during an intensive and appropriately long meditation retreat.

MHM/Udana no. 214: (C) The Himalaya Master - Mahâtma Himâlaya Rishi

Om Namaśśivaayah!