Julian Lee, May 2018, Missoula, Montana
Copyright 2017 Julian Lee -- All Rights Reserved
"Whatever there is in the universe is evolved from Prana and vibrates in Prana. That is a mighty terror, like an upraised thunderbolt. They who know That become immortal. From fear of Him the fire burns, from fear of Him the sun shines. From fear of Him Indra and Vayu and Death, the fifth, speed forth.
-- Katha Upanishad
The goal of meditation as propounded in the Yoga-Sutra is a mysterious state called "samadhi." Samadhi is the final purpose of meditation (yoga). And if the Christian saints and Hindu yogis are to be understood, the goal of religion and of human life.
The Yoga-Sutra is basically a manual about meditation for the attainment of samadhi. Meditation is the most difficult human work, and that samadhi is even more a challenge to obtain. And it turns out for me at this time, even more of a challenge to accept. Few know what's involved.
I've always been captain of my ship like the rest of us. The captain does not like to see his ship wrecked. The pilot hates to abandon his lovely jet -- his organized bodily life -- knowing such abandonment will wreck it. These are some of the human feelings when getting up to the crest of samadhi. Buddha came to this crest, saw what was involved, and like 99.9 percent of of us would do -- chickened out. He then began to say, 'A middle path is good. Let's calm down, calm down. A dear, normal human life is best.'
Lol!
I understand it. Yogic samadhi is a divine shipwreck. It's one I recently escaped, with effort. Yea, a shipwreck all must go through finally in the revolutions of time. For now I'm staving it off, trying to soften and slow it -- if such can be done. For some it will be worth hearing this account.
Two weeks after the 3rd Bout. 30 years of my guru lineage's pranayama, which draws life force up to the head and face, made my nose turn red. As Sri Yukteswar said, "A yogi's life is a singular life!" Oh me oh my.
I call this divine ordeal a bout because these have turned out to be struggles, like a tug-of-war and a battle with God, finally leading to a negotiation.
Now directly after my third bout with samadhi and the great Aum writing is hard. I see it takes a tough, aggressive mind to write, one I always had. My mind seems a bit shaky now. It's May 2018. I am in Missoula, Montana. Things like the sun, the rain, twittering birds -- are sublime comfort somehow, enough for me.
I've ended up being humbled in life by two things: 1) The personal astrological chart, which I believe I acquired randomly through a lack of knowledge of my parents. Like a crystal or bit of film it projects a particular dualistic world and particular conditions and events. Then 2) God Itself -- Aum -- because of what It demands in the end from anybody who gets close: Subsuming of the little self. Or maybe it's a restructuring of one's self that presents itself as a death.
Yea, I feel very humbled by God right now. For the Lord as pure prana is terrible indeed like "an upraised thunderbolt." The writers of the Upanishads knew things! My whole mind is nothing beside It, like a pinch of sugar sprinkled on the tiny water's edge of a Lake Superior. I recall Ramakrishna laughingly repeating:
"A
salt doll went in to measure
the sea..."
Many years ago during meditation I found a frightening person staring me in the face. It was a strange woman. She was serious and dark.
There is a difference between mental fancies and real visions. In a vision you see a person or thing clearly. It's three-dimensional, more real than a photo. It just arises before you. You often distinctly feel who and what you are looking at.
Hindu lore states that you can't hear Aum louder than the worldly sounds for more than three days running without having to abandon the body. It may have been "one day" but my recollection is hazy. From my experience a day seems right. In theory it's not that you must die when you abandon the body, any more than we die when we go to sleep. In my understanding samadhi is entering into the sleep state and the other side while still awake. And this is the view in my lineage -- that you can come back. Yet in a close encounter with The Thunderbolt I did not feel at all assured about this.
At that time years ago the woman was peering at me as if from out of a dark portal, had an aquiline face and she was dark blue. I immediately thought, with an inner gasp:
"Kali?!"
Disconcerted, I got up and fled my chair. What did I have to do with the Hindu Goddess of Death?!
This is yoga territory. It is the assiduous meditating yogis who get knowledge of these Hindu deities. It is they who uncovered the yogic asanas, mudras, and bandhas in the form of spontaneous yogic movements, or kriyas. Even such visions, according to Swami Muktananda, are a kind of kriya. All those movements and odd happenings associated with the religious life, the kundalini, shaktipat, and meditation -- he called kriyas. Muktananda speaks of them at length in "Play Of Consciousness." Among the interesting yogic kriyas is the snakebite. One is happily going along and suddenly you feel a snake bite you on the hand or finger.
You jump: "What!" It feels like a piercing electrical shock and just like a snakebite. A barefoot boy in my time learned what a snakebite feels like -- when catching snakes, of course. But I think anybody's brain would interpret the event this exact way from some deep inner root. So in this yogic kriya something hits you on the finger like that. And it's like the serpent kundalini has, well, got you!
When the shaktipat came to me, by yoga, I began to experience the ancient yogic kriyas and it was strange and new. A particular one I get is the left arm goes up, bends at the elbow, and the hand assumes a mudra one sees in ancient Indian religious art. I had no idea what they were, but I somehow trusted that they were just fine, possibly even auspicious.
A Christian Sunday School sort would call yogic movements and visions satanic. So would prigs and dogmatic types among Hindus, like the Hare Krsnas who are often limited in their conceptions. The Self Realization Fellowship (SRF) temple nuns and monks in Hollywood will boot you from the temple if you have these divine yogic movements, though Yogananda's own technique produces them and he hinted at them in his "energization exercises." Ignorance always presses around. The ancient yoga and the eastern dharma is a vaster than most minds, even the minds of adherents!
After the start of the beautiful and strange yogic kriyas I had a series of initiation dreams. In one I found myself flying in a lovely situation.
Flying s-l-o-w-l-y seems a showoff thing I do in dreams: "Look at me, look how much flying control I have." I find myself showing off thus to mother figures in my dreams. "Look at me mom! I can do this!" Maybe it's a sign of my coming boyhood in the astral bardo.
I was floating horizontally wearing a royal cape that trailed behind me decorously like the cape of Superman. It seemed a late Iowa summer day. More likely it was the astral twilight. I floated near the home of my grade school muse, a girl I projected perfection onto for years. Her white adobe house off to my right was atop a sloping green yard, surrounded by great Iowa oaks. I was in the air roughly level to the 2nd floor where I'd imagined her bedroom was in boyhood. Nearness to her home represented total fulfillment. Like a bird up in the oaken airs, I felt totally free and empowered. Twenty feet below I was slowly passing over a verdant vegetable garden. This was in cornified Iowa and there was a section of corn. The golden tassels glinted with the astral light. The long crinkled green leaves rose up to greet me. All was stillness. It was a perfect moment and a perfect world.
I'm sure the dream was related to the dawning of the yogic kriyas the night before, a divine development I subconsciously realized set me apart. As I contentedly glided, so pleased to be a kundalini prince, I now saw a dark forest ahead of me. From it was emerging a spectral beast.
It seemed a kind of big cat. It had its own light that somehow let me see him inside the forest, coming out. It seemed to be inserted into this astral world from some higher dimension. Its eyes were made of brilliant white light unlike the light of this world. And they were fixed on me. You know how a cat stares fixedly at his prey and creeps up? The spectral creature was stalking me.
I began to fear. As I feared I started falling to earth. Now I know how a small creature feels when it finds a big cat stalking, eyes fixed on you, nowhere to run. The heart sinks! The soul says "This is the end." You collapse inside at the sight of that cat which is greater than you and its eyes locked upon you. Accept your fate!
Now there was an ugly storm fence ahead of me. I tried to drop to the ground faster to keep the fence between me and the big cat. As I fell, my momentum was, quite inconveniently, bringing me closer to the creature and I wasn't dropping fast enough...
As with many dramatic dreams I was startled awake, not knowing the conclusion. What was the cat? Some Eternal Hunter from the Causal Plane? An ever-existent mythical beast associated with Brahman, the electricity of kundalini, ego-death of yogis? Was it The Griffin, guardian of the gates of heaven? And did I descend to earth in time to have the protecting fence between us?
I knew upon waking that the cat represented the Lord, represented kundalini, and the unfailing kundalini-evolution that would now pull me resolutely toward samadhi; that this process begun in me would have it's conclusion, and there was no turning back. But the crass world of dirty karma -- that little ugly fence -- might be a bulwark against this moment of ego-death and Total Change. The stalking cat was shaktipat, and was God, and He was saying: "I have you in my sights. You've been Touched. You are mine now. I will never let you go, or fail to take you. I've got you."
This was decades ago, and so was my vision of the Goddess Of Death, Kali. This Sunday I am happy and grateful I have normative mind and am functioning mostly normally. But after this recent Bout #3, though the "ordeal" aspect was just a couple days, I feel I've been through a long fever. And I feel thoroughly shaken up in a way I've never felt. Oh how the sound of the sparrows chattering up in the eves of a business soothes. Rain on the roof, thunder, a few bums gabbling about, the ability to converse about inanities with townspeople I know, or strangers. The dear human things!
I have been listening to Aum for about 30 years now. Aum is heard within as a real sound, as real as anything in the world. But it's different than worldly sounds in that it gives bliss, plus pain as it crumbles your worldly ego, and it attracts the mind unlike worldly sounds. I hear it plainly all night long now, with open ears. No yogi tricks needed like shutting the ears or setting my elbows on a brace. And when it's getting huge I hear it over the noise of downtown. At that point I'm over the allowable edge -- in trouble.
Yogananda's first meditation technique, practiced religiously, brings this other technique of concentrating on Aum. There is no more powerful meditation technique; Aum is the best of meditation objects. Meditation becomes not only effortless: it takes hold of you and runs you, because nothing attracts the mind more than Aum. Then it's like the sail has been raised on your little ship and you can just settle back and be carried by the wind. Meditation becomes so handy. But now there's a new sailor's dilemma: You might prefer to slow down, but your ship blows on fast against your will! This is the power of shaktipat-bestowed yogic kriyas: They drag you perforce into yogic states, pranayama, breathlessness. As if Mother Shakti has put her hand on you and is making you a yogi.
One doesn't learn about Aum and get immersed in it until one keens to hear it better once heard in any form. Yoga, or ancient essential religion, leaves its marks on the body. Those who hear Aum get Aum in their voice. It gives a honey to the voice, a certain resonance. Those who have Aum in the voice can hear it in others who might have it. In general, those who meditate much get this sound in their voices. Because Aum is the creative power, this gives creative power to one's voice and one's words. This phenomenon is mentioned in the Yoga-Sutra, which states "His words become truth-bearing." They create reality, or truth. Certain Upanishads make similar statements. In the old days, in India, beauty of voice was highly valued in a priest. The Aum does give beauty to the voice. Aum comes out as beauty, it seems, when expressing through nature and humanity. People sense and respond to Aum-voice instinctively. It's like responding to our own Divine mother-father. Lots of meditation, and especially fixing on a "subtle object" like Aum eventually gives a change to the eyes. The religious person is spending so much time looking towards the divine within instead of the outer world, and one can see it in their eyes. They are no longer entirely focused here. Yogis of India like Muktananda call it the "inward turned gaze."
The heard Aum grows as you listen to it, and you hear it in different forms. It is both heard and felt. Have you ever laid back in one of those vibrating reclining chairs? Aum gets to be like that. Vibrating your spine. Then vibrating all of you. My guru's technique, plus brahmacharya (continence) and a bit of bhakti -- these are the keys to it.
That is to say Aum is heard via yoga. As I have written elsewhere, yogic activity consists of austerity, chanting or meditation, and devotion to the Lord. If you think I am making this up please see verse 2:1 of the Yoga-Sutra. Yes, yoga is essential religion.
Now forms of Aum are like this:
A hum
A cart rolling over a road
A blazing bonfire
Ocean surf -- distant
A great river
A train rumbling by, at some distance
A great generator
A great air conditioning unit atop a summer skyscraper (this is one of my favorite similes -- "Hot Town, Summer in the City")
A semi truck outside your house with engine and all fans running
A train rumbling by, closer
Ocean surf -- crashingly near
A roar
A fighter jet buzzing you very near
A jet engine
Crashing thunder, thunderclaps (These last four are, I believe, the highest forms, and mind-dissolving.)
Some of these similes above are in the Upanishads. Others I am contributing for the religious people, and dharma. Religion is, indeed, what points the way to authentic spirituality. But what we really want is bliss, prosperity, and protection -- not "spirituality." Unless spirituality brings bliss! It is the purpose of religion to bring those three -- and to bring yoga. Funny thing: Religion properly followed will bring bliss I know. Will "spirituality" bring bliss? I'm not at all sure! Verily, men and women of the modern age -- including the bald-headed Boulder variety -- who sell us "spirituality" in exchange for Religion are like carnies selling you plastic garbage for good, hard cash. Authentic religion brings prosperity, bliss and Aum, fulfilling the purpose of human life.
The bhakti rapture and bliss enjoyed by our ancestors every seven days in church -- who even comprehends it now? And bhakti is the essential key to yoga, hearing Aum, and samadhi -- in the beginning and in the end. So yea, religion brings all, both the lower and the higher things. I am pro-religion as all getout. Even sitting in a beautiful empty Christian church will cultivate bhakti -- the highest yoga! -- and raise your kundalini. Happened to me, my hands near my face in the anjoli mudra as Catholic holy cards advised me. Churches are priceless for that fact alone.
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"I'm spiritual, not religious." I hear this statement all the time now. It is silly, fashionable, shallow and absurd. Religions are what point the way to spiritual experience and knowledge. Religions show the rules for getting it. Then around those who have these profound spiritual experiences -- Buddha et al -- religions form. This is obvious. Spirituality and religion are bound together like husband and wife, book and reader. As I write throughout this article, what does anybody think I'm discussing but religion? The religions of Hinduism and Yoga! All of this language, all of this lexicon, and all of these meditation techniques -- these are from religion. What is Kali but a religious figure? When someone says "I'm spiritual, not religious" my mind always says: 1) Oh, you are boring? 2) You are incurious? 3) You have no discipline? 4) You don't really believe anything with faith? Weak! 5) So you are just a dabbler in this and that? and 6) You're not interested in God? Bliss? Samadhi? Or how to find God within? and 7) How are you ever going to acquire real spirituality? I note that one needs to be religious about meditation (disciplined, full of faith, purist about certain things) -- to get much out of meditation.
_______________
Early on May 25th samadhi began to dawn in me a third time, a thing I never expected once in this life. It starts with the onset of yogic pratyahara.
I had been fasting too much. I had been leaning on God too hard, worried about a family member. When I worry about loved ones I start leaning on God too hard. This 3rd time the event was similar but different. Again I fought it off, with difficulty. In the end only directly addressing God and asking Him for a reprieve seemed to work.
There have been three distinct times now, once in Ojai, California in the mansion on Foothill Road, the 2nd in Portland, Oregon in the Saint Francis apartments, and this third in Missoula, Montana under the Big Sky. When this state began to develop during the three times, my instinct was always the same: If I go there even once, I'll keep slipping into it and won't be able to control it. I must fight it off. Some yogi! But here is how samadhi starts upon coming up to its crest:
Pratyahara 1 -- The collapse of your human understanding
The threshold into samadhi is a state called pratyahara in the Yoga-Sutra. Pratyahara is more a phase or movement rather than a stable state. It seems I have been enabled to experience pratyahara in a more elongated, slow-developing way, thus learning more about it or seeing the phase clearly. Pratyahara is a stout, definite reversal of attention away from the external world. It is a reversal of life force. In this, the outer senses cease to function.
We go through a version of it every time we fall asleep.
And quite definitely when we die.
But now here I was -- always the different-drummered oddball -- stumbling around main street in this small mountain town, withdrawing from the world in ancient yogic pratyahara. Once pratyahara starts, samadhi is next. This according to the Yoga-Sutra and religious saints.
Now, a difficult thing is that when yogic pratyahara comes on, you find you can't make any sense out of the world around you. You don't understand anything in the external. That person standing there, the appointments you have, what a "street" and "traffic" are -- even who you are. Both in pratyahara and dying you get no-mind. At least not the mind you had in this life. In this way you are like a dying person. Can you hang on to any shred of thought or yogic device then? All you have then is your yogic conditioning, if you have any. My advice is to cultivate yourself in this life to be ever attracted to inner light.
Stories All Gone
During this state I realize that my mind habitually "projects story" onto the external to make it sensible. "This thing/condition is because of that, this history, that convention, this human value..."
In "The World As Will And Idea" Schopenhauer wrote: "The world is my idea." (Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.) As yogic pratyahara dawns you can no longer grasp or entertain ideas about the world, thus it becomes insensible. Now, ideas strung together make stories. I have often reflected that all of human life boils down, in the end, to nothing but stories. Everything is perishable but incarnation-after- incarnation we collect stories, and that is all.
Stories>world, world>stories.
In pratyahara you can no longer project story onto the world. Thus glomming on to some kind of world-story can pull you out of pratyahara back to normal externalized consciousness.
Pratyahara 2 -- Seeing Terrible Samsara
It is hard to say which of these elements precedes the other. But if this pratyahara deepens over further moments and you don't arrest it and pull out, one then knows a "vision of samsara." The outer world stripped of understanding is a terrifying, chaotic mess (samsara!) and it appears to be populated by utterly mindless, incessant demons.
Before, the people around you were a group of personalities chatting about their video project or their job, or girlfriend, in a coffee house. Now they seem no better than demons who babble nonsense. I remember in my Second Bout, I was caught in between here and there, very much in a slow-gathering pratyahara, and I went to Coffee Time coffee shop on 21st street near my apartment, hoping to get externalized and normal. During this slow-gathering pratyahara I was amazed at how absurd, pointless, and deluded were all the persons around me. There was a palpable sense "All these people are completely deluded, unconscious of wisdom, externally focused onto perishable nothings, really, dead things. They talk on and gabble about things that have no value and no meaning. All these are good as deluded demons. They believe there is value here but there is none. It is all confusion. Demons chasing confusion, their voices and words prating and worthless noise. This seems to be a hell."
This view of the surrounding world arises very soon with the onset of genuine pratyahara.
Pratyahara 3 -- You are dissolving the world
Is it that we see the world for what it really is and this is demoralizing and terrifying?
Or is it that we have withdrawn our personal life force and organizing intelligence -- consciousness -- from the exterior and this makes it a terrifying samsara? I believe in pratyahara body-mind is actually deconstructing i.e. un-projecting the external world projection that we each constantly erect out of our bodies. Thus as we withdraw the projection it's like the whole house is coming down. So not only do we contain no stories to make sense of it, but your self-projected cosmos itself is coming undone, literally falling apart in an avalanche. This is all the more terrifying.
At some point in this change of state, if you can't get hold of a mental something solid in this flood, the samsara is not only incomprehensible, but is receding from view. At the end of pratyahara your senses recede from the world and it's going dark.
My reaction during these developments has been: I must fight this off! Once a 33 vinyl record gets a little scratch the song keeps skipping at that place. Your elbow goes out of joint once and it keeps slipping out. I don't know this would be so, but my mind gets an instinctive fear that this is so when samadhi approaches. It's like knowing that an inner wall within yourself, a wall between your mind and the Other Side -- will finally be breached. I find I am not ready for this. Not today, anyway. I like my human functionality. I want to keep it. So I fight.
The bears in Yellowstone Park
A device I used to come back during the Second Bout was to get a grip on a story. I grabbed a random old copy of the Los Angeles Times I had laying around (I have a collection of old Times, never read) and took it to a crowded place. It turned out being around a crowd didn't help the way I planned because I was viewing them all as jabbering demons.
But after I sat down I found an article about the bears in Yellowstone Park. Pondering that "story" long and hard enabled me to keep my mind "here."
It helped that I have a connection to Yellowstone Park going back to one beautiful night when I walked all night through its north badlands at the age of 19. For hours I poured over this old L.A. Times article, projecting myself into the story. It allowed me to cling to a few mind concepts. "Bears." "Badlands." "Night." "Moonlight." "Hunters and ranchers." "Walking." It was as if Yellowstone Park and "the bears" -- as discussed in this article -- became my entire understanding of the world during those hours. I had just enough mind left to grasp that. All other aspects of the forgotten world became potential projections from that microsphere. The article about the bears of Yellowstone Park served as a raft or floatable material in this inner flood of universal dissolution until a daybreak, when in calmer waters I found I still clung to my mind.
The role of Aum in pratyahara
If you have become able to hear the divine inner sound of Aum via religious devotion and religious practices (meditation or "yoga") -- it's this Aum that makes pratyahara dawn. This because the Aum is subsuming to the mind. The mind is easily sunk into the "ground" of Aum, which is likely the ground of the human mind. The Aum is more attractive and engaging to the human mind than any external thing, thus with a large, very present heard Aum, pratyahara commences. The human mind cannot survive or abide Aum.
And one's normal human life is about to end -- at least for the duration of the samadhi. And will be coming undone later even should one pull out of it, the mind intuits. For this reason, perhaps, the Goddess of Death Kali shows up along with Aum:"This one wants me to do the liberating kill?"
There was a distinct start to this Third bout, around 3 a.m. on the morning of May 24th. I woke up and had a clear vision of myself, my own face, from earlier in the day when I passed a mirror in a bathroom. Yogis have referred to this as "having your own darshan." There is actually a word for it in yoga. (Yes, yoga is not sitting on mats doing exercises in a social gathering!) Then I thought of another person, one of the baristas in the town. And suddenly I felt disconnected from my environment and the world and the night. As if not understanding any of it.
Aum was very loud, in my ears, mind, and body -- as it always is at night. I got up and went outside to walk around in the night, hoping to regain normal consciousness.
Though I have mostly regained it some 10 days later, I remained in a battle to retain normative consciousness for a full two weeks after. Now I am having to fashion forms of anti-yoga in myself for this purpose.
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Aum is God indeed. It's not the printed word that's God precisely, but rather the great sound within that the religious person comes to hear. The printed word only signifies That. Nobody gets excited or blissed out seeing the word or reading "Aum" on a page. All get excited and blissed out by hearing Aum. Well, except for some who don't. Lahiri Masaya, in his recorded aphorisms, allowed that some don't find pranava attractive, and compared these people to "dogs."
The Buddhists referred to Aum as The Roar of Dharmata though Buddhist writings seem scant on the topic.
The Sikhs set a lot of store by Aum and call it Shabd, Bani, and other names.
Occultists believe that the "Amen" of the Bible, used by Christ, was another spelling for Aum, which is "the Word" referred to at the start of the Book of John. It says "the word was with God, and the word is God."
Let's just say Aum is a universal mystic phenomenon encountered by religious persons who practice the right meditation techniques, especially men who strive for some sexual self-control or basic morality. It's impossible to cope with hearing the divine Creative Sound unless you are, shall we say, charged up with the creative power yourself. So immoral men; big bleeders, won't likely ever hear Aum. (Just sayin.)
From a distance, there is a lot of ananda in Aum, that is, bliss. We humans want bliss, and more of it. When Aum became audible in me during the earlier years strangers would remark on how blissful was my face. "What is your secret to such happiness?"
When it grows larger in you Aum feels both blissful and painful at the same time. Is this because it's breaking up the small you? I have always thought that must be the reason.
Up close the Lord as Aum takes on formidable qualities. It becomes like nearness to a volcano or a churning cauldron. Not just nearness, but the cauldron is in you. It feels like a great ball of pure power. Your body and mind become like a surging electrical sea. It's like you are a boy and after a storm you come upon an electrical line thats down. And it's humming and crackling. Except in this yogic state -- you are the hum. Unlike the boy finding the live wire -- this is not a human experience.
The Upanishads contain a number of schemes of "evolutes" in the process of manifestation. One primal "evolute" in the scriptures in prana. All is made of prana. You have Brahman (God) then perhaps akasa -- infinite space -- then prana, etc. One verse states that akasa and God are synonymous, thus meditating on infinite space is meditating on God. Scriptures and yogis characterize our physical sun as all-prana and say the sun is the physical throne of God in this world. Is Aum the Lord, God Himself, as so many Upanishads and yogic scriptures attest? And is He synonymous with pure prana? Is it like this: Brahman > Akasa > Aum > Prana > The Sun?
All I can say is this: When Aum becomes very large in you there is an intuitive feeling: "This is the Sun."
Full Article
This is the full 11,000 word account of the introduction you just read. Julian gives an instructive and illuminating account of the development of yogic samadhi which he has been pursuing via meditation for 30 years using meditation techniques, i.e. yoga, with the devotional attitude. This gripping and cogently-written work includes techniques Julian uses to normalize consciousness, much information about the transitional yogic stated called pratyahara, ways that the world and surroundings change when in these states, the role of fasting, and comforting insight into the coveted and blissful state called savikalpa samadhi. All most go through these thresholds, phases, and states either during the death process or on the long quest for direct God-knowledge and liberation from duality and karmic limitation. There is no other writer in the west who provides such insights into the meditation and meditation technique, and especially light on the sacred and rare state samadhi, goal of meditation and yoga.
"General Meditation Advice by Julian Lee"
In this 4,400 word article Julian gives much practical meditation advice along with surprising and new insight into the things favoring successful meditation. For over 30 years Julian has been practicing several powerful meditation techniques that come down from the Babaji/Yogananda lineage as well as via Nityananda/Muktananda. He has much real-life experience with them, practical insight, as well as esoteric insight into what favors meditation and why. This is an easy-to-read HTML text file. Includes where to meditate, where you should get your technique, what to do with your hands, how to use new perceptions to make your meditation better, and how to use visualization to create enlivening meditation and stoke your devotion (bhakti).