DISCUSSION QUESTION 3
What are some practical steps we could take if we accept that the development of equality is important?
Response by Learner NJ
Udasin: aloof and dispassionate mind is useful to progress. But if this high perfection is to be achieved then it must be modified to a new sense of strong submission and a powerful and intense surrender with glad acceptance.
Not lonely power, peace and stillness but an integral experience which liberates itself from this self-created shell and enters in the sea of all embracing ecstasy of beginning less and endless (anadi anant ) beatitude of the Eternal.
On practical level, a beginner may develop this slowly by some measures like counting ten before reacting, deep breathing, developing a habit of writing both the sides of each experience and decision. Carry out SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats -- and Force field diagrams for any critical decisions. React late, visualize vast scene of Nature and having moderation in reacting to good or bad moments, regularly reading spiritual books, especially autobiographies of sages and their visible part of lives which are living monuments of all these principles.
Response by Learner MD
Here we presuppose that the being and nature have been made ready for the plunge through past aspiration and experience. If the time has not come no amount of practical or theoretical knowledge will help.
The first step would be to stop living in the surface being. To not identify with the pulls and pushes of the surface mind, vital and physical. First, one steps back and watches the play of forces, the play of the ego and the play of attraction and repulsion, the play of rag and dwesh. Then, by a firm mental will and conviction supported by a central spiritual aspiration one stops the process of reacting to things. One tries to arrest this tendency to react to stimulus and flow with it and then get inextricably caught up in that karmic cycle. No reaction, no judgments, no good or bad, no like or dislike, no pleasant unpleasant.
Initially it is a forced equality on the stubborn nature. Absolutely and strictly no impulse towards anything or anyone. A total cessation of the outward pranic flow. Very soon if this discipline is backed by a true need in the being the process becomes easy and in fact accompanied by a subtle joy. A subtle satisfaction or tripti starts filling the being and the energies are automatically pulled inwards, towards some central real person, towards that which is actually meant to live this life. One feels this joy much greater and superior to the one that comes with the fulfillment of desire. In this inner joy and outer silence something is revealed. A strong inner Presence or Person is felt and instantly the reality of the surface being vanishes for the first time. It is still there but silenced.
Once this has been experienced there takes place a reversal, a revolution. Things will never be the same again. Even if there is a swinging back and forth or a dissipation of the experience something has changed forever and it will work its way towards the permanent change and the final transformation. Once the inner Person has been touched through the discipline and meditation of equality the task is his to take it ahead. It is the first stage of equality that is most difficult and the most crucial.
