Shakti Accumulation Meditation

For transformative purposes, Shakti is required. You have to be able to accumulate Shakti and hold onto it. Nowadays, it's much more important to learn how to hold onto your Shakti than how to accumulate it because everyone is leaking Shakti into the environment all the time. Remember that Shakti, in the context of the physical body, is prana. Also remember that wherever your attention goes, your prana is going to go also. And we have, in the world of today, thousands and tens of thousands of things that are trying very assiduously, very enthusiastically to drag our attention in their direction by providing us with new and interesting things or things that are very scary or things that are very tasty or things that are very not tasty or things that are very horrid. Whatever it may be, anything that causes your attention to get diverted in a particular direction is going to cause your prana to get diverted into that direction as well.

When your prana gets diverted into that direction, it is no longer moving in the direction of being accumulated for the purpose of self-transformation to make you into a self-dependent individual. Therefore, before you even think of doing some kind of fancy process to accumulate Shakti, you have to patch the bucket so that it's not leaking Shakti out and never being able to be filled. And this is why we must think about what is Patanjali called in his system of eight limbs of yoga. He called it prityahara. Ahara is a word that in Sanskrit is most commonly used to mean food, but ahara means anything that you take in. So prityahara means turning away from taking things in. Prityahara means instead of always taking things in because, you know, we think about here is the I am watching a movie, for example.

I'm taking in the movie. But people don't think about the fact that as is taught in India and if you put a little bit of meditative attention on it, you will understand yourself. In order to take something in, your sense organ must exit from the body, take a photo of what is going on out there, and then come back and be processed by the visual cortex. Your eyes, not the physical eye, but the actual sense organ has to go out of the body and come back in order for you to take something in. Something from outside is not going to march into your eye. It's the eye who has to go out and come back in. So what we're in prityahara, what we're suggesting is instead of allowing things to come in, which means allowing your sense organs to go out and drag these things in, instead of doing that, what we're going to encourage you to do is open your inner senses, return the energy back from where it has been stationed in the sense organs, and try to cause that energy to become nice and stable inside your organism.

So please, close your eyes and sit in a nice comfortable meditative posture and breathe deeply and slowly and regularly. Now, there are ten sense organs according to the classical Indian sciences. There are the five sense organs that we are familiar with, the sense organs of smell and taste and sight and touch and hearing, but there are also five other senses. And there is the sense of, the sense organ that is associated with the tongue, often referred to as vak or speech, but really it means any kind of communication. If you're doing sign language, then you're using your hand to communicate. Your hand is effectively a tongue at that moment.

So there is the tongue, the hand, which means manipulating anything. If you're painting with your left foot, then your foot is acting as a hand. The hand is not the physical hand in this context, it is the generic hand that is the expression of what that sense organ does. Then there are the feet, which are involved in locomotion. So if you're walking around on your hands, at that moment your hands are behaving like your feet. Then there is the genital organ, and that represents creation of all kinds, including procreation, which is what the genital organs are involved in. And finally, there is the anus, which represents elimination anywhere in the body, but because that's the greatest and the most profound kind of elimination for the organism, that's why that's used as its symbol.

So we're going to start with these five sense organs of action, the karmendriyas, and then work our way to the nyanendriyas. And we're going to start from above, work our way below of a rohana, and then work our way back up a rohana, because there has to be a circulation of energy in the organism. So your eyes, I trust, are closed. And now we're going to encourage you to bring your attention to your tongue and your throat. And we're going to, because your eyes are closed, you're going to be able to have a perception of your organism, a perception that you might find it more difficult to have when your eyes are open. And that perception is going to involve, to begin with, in the context of your communication skills, all the different methods that you employ to communicate.

You may be aware that even verbal communication is only about one third the words themselves and about two thirds the pitch, the tone, the cadence, the body language, everything other than the words themselves. That's about two thirds. Only about one third in what is actually communicated is bound down by the words. So while your eyes are closed, we're going to encourage you to think about all of the ways in which your organism communicates, not just via the tongue, but by your eyes. Because especially if you have a dog, you know that the way to communicate with your dog is eye to eye. Then the dog can't lie to you. It could be via your breath. It could be by any method, by body language.

So we're going to bring all of those different methods of communication, we're going to bring them into the throat. And then we're going to bring that attention from the throat down to the heart. And now that we're at the heart, we're going to think about all the different ways that we manipulate things. And I'm not using the word manipulation in a pejorative way. Manipulation means using the hands. All of the different things that we do, all the different ways in which we move things around in the world.

We take this from here and put it over there, and we take this from there and put it over here. All these different ways, using our attention, using our keyboards, using our talking to Siri or whoever it is, whatever. All of these different ways we're going to bring to the heart. Because as you'll notice, the hands are very close to the heart. And the heart is an important center where prawn is circulating. So we're going to bring all of this to there, we're going to focus it there.

And then we're going to bring our attention and all of this energy and all of those two sense organs that we've already used down to just below the navel. And we are going to take the energy from the legs and all of the different motions that we make. Nowadays, of course, it used to be that people rode around on horses. Now we ride in automobiles. So all of this, all of our awareness of, all of the methods we employ for actually moving around in the world, we're going to bring all of that awareness down to just below the navel and hold it there. And then we're going to move down to the genital organ. All of the creativity we're bringing down to that place.

All of our creative expression in whatever way that might be, we're bringing down to that place. And then we bring the attention. And when we think of elimination, of course, naturally there's sweat, there's urine, there's feces, but also snot and smegma and the things that accumulate in your eye, earwax, everything navel lint, everything that toe jam, everything that is being expressed out of your body, being eliminated by your organism. We want it to be eliminated, but we don't want any more elimination. And this also sometimes we eliminate anger and we eliminate other kind of waste products externally. So whatever needs to be eliminated, we want it to be eliminated, but no more than that.

So we're bringing everything after the elimination, bring all the energy down. Now we're at the muladhara, now we're at the perineum, now we're going to start to go up again. And we're going to start at the perineum with the five senses, beginning with the sense of smell, because the sense of smell is what is associated with the earth element. And the earth element is what's at the perineum. So all of the smells that you're attracted by, all the smells that you're repelled by, all of these smells and your attraction or your repulsion by these smells, you want to bring all of that down to the perineum, and you want to just let your nose, both your external nose that is actually smelling things and your internal nose, which is either remembering what you've smelled or projecting forward to what you may smell.

All of these things we're just bringing down to the perineum and we're letting the sense of smell take a breather. Then we're going to move from there up to the location where the swadhishthana chakra will be once it is awakened. And at that point we're going to take everything that has to do with taste. And remember that taste, rasa in Sanskrit, means not just physical taste on the tongue, it also means aesthetic taste, it also means emotion. So we're going to bring all of our emotions down to that area behind the genitals in the center of the spinal cord.

And we're going to move that energy and that awareness up to the area behind the navel, which we can call the manipur, and that's the center of the fire in the body and all form, which is what the eyes perceive, all form is a manifestation of fire and all perception of form is being perceived by this sense organ that perceives form. So we're going to take all the forms, the ones we hate, the ones we love, all forms and our ability to perceive those forms and we're going to bring them and focus them as best we can in that area and we're going to allow, as we did with the sense of smell and the sense of taste, we're going to allow the sense of sight to take a rest. Except for that portion of the sense of sight that is visualizing what you're doing right now. And then you're going to move from there up to the anahata behind the heart and that's where the sense of touch is going to go. So we're going to take all of that sensation of touch, everything, including even subtle things like the movement of the air in the room and the very light touch of a butterfly wing as it happens to fly past you.

All of those experiences of touch we're going to bring in to that area behind the heart and we're going to let it get concentrated there. We're going to let the sense of touch take a bit of a break and then we're going to come back up to the area behind the throat at the base of the skull. And that's the place where we're going to take all of the sense of hearing, all of the sounds that we are able to identify and not identify. Everything that we take in that we perceive as sound, whether it's external sound or internal sound, we're going to allow that to all calm down, let the sense of sound become nice and relaxed and then allow all of that to be concentrated there. So now all of the sense organs have been encouraged to take a little nap.

And while they're napping, we're going to take all of that attention that normally would be going into those ten sense organs and we're going to direct that attention first to the so-called third eye, the adnya and then to the top of the head and then to the supreme reality which we're going to envision as being above the top of the head, saluting of course the center of the earth as we always do whenever we do anything. But taking all of that energy and all of that attention that normally would have been employed by the sense organs so we're taking all of that and we are now focusing it on that supreme reality, continuing to breathe very slowly and very easily and very evenly, very regularly, continuing to breathe. Occasionally you may find that suddenly a sense organ starts to work again and you allow it to do that and then you bring it back onto the inside and you encourage it to lie down again just like you would a child who had woken up and had been spooked by something and wanted a drink of water, you calm it back down again, put it back to bed again, let it go back to sleep again and just keep breathing slowly and calmly and keep focusing your attention on the supreme reality and when you have reached a point where you feel that you have had enough and you're ready to return to your normal interaction with the external world, then you go back in the opposite direction. You allow the sense of hearing to return and then the sense of touch, then the sense of sight, then the sense of taste, then the sense of smell, then the awareness of elimination, of creation, of locomotion, of manipulation back to communication. And before you communicate with anyone or anything else, you first communicate verbally, externally or verbally, internally or non-verbally, however you want to, but you first communicate with the supreme reality, you bow down, you thank the supreme reality for permitting you to communicate with it in this way and then you return to your normal way of doing things.