All the minds, for while, for about 25 or 30 minutes, each and every mind thinking exactly the same thought.
As though for those moments the minds have all been pooled together. If the world's minds could be pooled together thus, once a day, what a world this would be! Forget about the world. How about a single nation? A state. Or just one town or village? We can make a start with just family or friends. And I assure you, that when the conflicting minds thus become harmonized in sharing the stillness even for 5 minutes, the individual peace that you seek and elusive ideal of world peace that we all try to pursue, both of those can be achieved.
When I was living here in Minneapolis, I used to advise people to form little neighborhood meditation groups, and I suggested that the groups meditate together. Everybody did not have to come to the Meditation Center. They could meditate in somebody's basement in their own neighborhood. And there were many, many groups throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul at that time. Then I suggested an even easier way. There are two kinds of group meditations: One in which people meet at the same place and at the same time. The other is that people meet, not necessarily at the same place, but at the same time. So five of you, ten of you, friends, family members, agree with each other: "We cannot meet every day personally in one place. Let's organize it this way: Every day at 6:00 a.m. we'll sit. Once a week we can give each other a call." But you will not even need to give that call because after a while you will sense the unity of the minds. You will sense the field being created. And if one person is missing, you will see that something is missing from the field. Learn to bury your hatchets that way. You can bring people close to each other that way. It's been tried. And whenever this has been tried in the history of the world, those areas where such attempts were made did enjoy social, national and international peace.
Unfortunately the way modern history is taught or any history is taught, it is taught as the history of wars, and it is not taught as a history of peace. I wish someone would write a world history which would be the history of the peace of mankind. While the surface wars have continued, peace has also continued. If two people fight with each other in anger, shout and yell, and the neighbors call the police, it's headline news. But how many million households in Minnesota right now are having a quiet dinner? It's not going to appear in the newspaper tomorrow. We notice the stains on the human mind. We notice the pains of the human heart. We do not take note of the joys and the gladness that we impart to each other. The natural inclination to impart joy and gladness is very much present, but it's taken so much for granted that it's no big deal so nobody even notices it. But even now on the face of this earth there is less war than there is peace, and there are less quarrels than there is harmony, and there are more happy families than there are unhappy ones. And even within the unhappy family, if you really analyze, you will find that over the past fifteen years of what you call &emdash; "Oh, I have been so unhappy with you for fifteen years. I've suffered so much" &emdash; if you really sat down, you will find that the pleasant content, the content of pleasantness was much, much bigger and in a larger proportion than the content of pain and unpleasantness. But you do not count the pleasantness. It does not require a major change in a human being, only a slight shift in perception, only a little shift in perception. The pleasure that we give to each other in life is far more in proportion to the pains that we cause to each other. Even among the nations that are at war with each other, you would be surprised at how much of a sense of unity remains. Nobody studies that. Nobody looks at it.
We have made our lives unnecessarily complex. There is no need for a lecture on simplicity. Everyone wants to have a simpler life. You don't need a homily about it. But, yes, unfortunately everybody's caught in some kind of a torrent. "It's the Wall Street economists who are to blame. Not me. I am a very simple man, but life is so complex." In a way it is true. You here in this nation and in every nation in the world are dedicated to possessing more, owning more, having more. If you were to take an account of all the things that there are available on the face of the earth, all of them put together are not sufficient to satisfy your desire.
There is a tiny little kingdom in the northern corner of an island of Borneo. Borneo is divided. Two-thirds belongs to Indonesia, the province of Kalimantan, and then two provinces belong to Malaysia: Sarawak and Sabah. And then there is a tiny, tiny little principality, perhaps even smaller than Liechtenstein; it's called Brunei &emdash; petroleum-rich. The sultan is supposed to be the richest, or one of the richest persons on the earth. There is a palace of eight hundred rooms. I'd be very happy to have eighty of those for an ashram. I could make a good start with eight. Eight hundred rooms and not satisfied! It's not enough. If he slept one-third of the night in each room, well then maybe he could cover each room in a year.
In yoga philosophy when we speak of the five yamas, the five guiding principles, the first one is ahimsa: non-violence. Explaining non-violence, the commentators say that all the other principles are based on this principle, are supported by this principle, and are valid only if they support this principle: non-injuriousness. And then it says in the commentary in Sanskrit language, "Na nupahatya bhutani upabhogah sambhavati ." This might shock you. Here now, you will resist. "It is not possible to have pleasure, it is not possible for a human being to enjoy anything of the world without causing injury." The commentator is not talking of the subtlest pleasures of observing a rose &emdash; but, even there, there are subtle hurts. Someone laboured in the sun to plant that rose for you. Enjoy the rose. Be grateful to that person who has irrigated the roots of that rose with his sweat. I'm wearing comfortable clothing. Someone dug the ground, plowed the field, killed numerous insects in the process, planted the cotton seeds, irrigated them in the sun and in the rain, paid taxes on the land, harvested, cleaned, spun, wove, loaded it on a cart or in a truck, brought it to the market. How many people have taken the pains to provide me with this shirt on my body. The practice of ahimsa, (non-violence) the first principle of yama (the retraints upon conduct), cannot be undertaken without reducing the amount of dependence we have on causing injury, hurt, pain and suffering to others. For that reason alone it is essential that we simplify our lives, so that at the end of the day of my current incarnation when I count the virtuous and the non-virtuous karma that I have gathered in this life, the virtuous ones, the non-injurious ones, the non-violent ones, the loving ones outweigh the injurious ones, the ones that I have incurred by causing pain and suffering.
This requires careful self-observation. It requires careful self- examination at each step of our lives to refine ourselves. To become refined human beings does not mean being able to dress correctly for the company we keep. It means to prepare the mind in such a way that at every step the karma that I am incurring is a pure one, a gentle one, a soft one, a sweet one. And in every breath I should observe that.
So that is why, starting off from the first principle of non-violence the fifth yama is called aparigraha (non-grabbing). This country is unique. You know in what it is unique? It has an illusion of prosperity in which no one owns anything. In the United States no body owns anything. Who owns your house? And your car? And your VCR? And your TV? Do you own it? Your bank owns it. You don't own a thing. I don't know how many people here I could count who could say, "Yes, my house is really my own." It is yours? You're living in a house owned by a bank. You're driving a car owned by a bank. You are probably wearing clothes that are owned by a bank that issued your credit card. Better off are those, whose little mud hut doesn't belong to a bank. That's why they can laugh.
I have a assistant at the ashram at Rishikesh who teaches all the hatha yoga, the physical yoga programs &emdash; excellent teacher &emdash; and everyone who comes to the ashram loves his teaching. So the people from Germany started inviting him to our Institute there near Hamburg. And the first time he went, and then they took him out to show him around, and they went to a supermarket for the first outing out of the Institute. And he came back, and he said, "Nobody was laughing." He was asked what he noticed about the supermarket, and he said, "Nobody was laughing." He wasn't concerned about the goods on the shelf. He was looking at the people. Which is unthinkable for the poor Asian villagers, that you would be out there and you would not be laughing.
I see such burdens on the minds of the people in the Western civilization that I don't know. You are sorry for those poor starving Asians, and I'm sorry for the poor Americans who own absolutely nothing, not even a piece of land to build a mud hut on. And the thing is that you can step out of that, or at least you can reduce that dependence.
But before you can talk of simplicity in these physical matters, first there has to be the simplicity of the mind. There has to be something in the mind that satisfies you from within yourself without you having to depend upon these things, on this illusion of possession. You satisfy yourself with an illusion of possessing, when you possess nothing. I think that twenty years ago it was said that the whole world was indebted to the United States. I traveled around the world, and everybody said, "Our country is indebted to the United States." But the United States is indebted to itself. Everybody is indebted. But I think that twenty years ago so I read that if all the debt that is owed by this nation, all the dollar bills were piled up, the pile would reach the moon. Now I think that in twenty years you must have progressed further. What on earth for? Because you think that by having this, now you will be satisfied. Or by having a larger car you will be satisfied. By having a bigger TV you will be satisfied. And you will keep inventing, and you will keep creating, and you will keep having the illusion of possession without possessing a thing. All your life you're paying the banks. (I'm sorry if there's a banker here. I apologize.) But the banks don't own anything because they are owned by bigger banks. I don't know who owns the biggest one. I won't reach that far.
It will begin with mental simplicity. Having something inside you that satisfies you. And this illusion of possession is not going to satisfy you. So reduce your dependence upon externals and find the independence of the spirit so that you too can laugh. We speak in our tradition, we constantly speak of renunciation. And people say, "What? I have to renounce my home, my family, walk out on them? I have duties towards them. I love them. They love me. What kind of a teaching is this?" But that is not what we mean by renunciation. There is a text called the Isha Upanishad &emdash; thousands of years old &emdash; on which Swami Rama has written a commentary, The Book of Wisdom. Part of the first verse says, "All this is the dwelling place of the Lord. Whatever moves on the face of the earth is a dwelling place of the Lord. Enjoy it with renunciation."
Enjoy it with renunciation. You can enjoy nothing unless you know where to stop. If you started eating cake and didn't know where to stop, what would happen to you? Try it, but don't stop. It's enjoyable. It's sweet, it's delicious, it's creamy, it's wonderful. It just melts in the mouth. Keep on eating. But at some point you renounce. Wearing good clothes. Very nice, very enjoyable, for a moment. But put on everything. But after putting on one or two layers, you stop. The principle of renunciation goes with you with every step in life. Communication is good. It facilitates so much. Well, keep talking.
There was a spiritual master, a renunciate, a swami who would not allow his disciples to own any money. There are still swamis who maintain that vow. Those of us who are working socially, we keep an illusion of owning also, but we use everything for the benefit of others. Some who are recluses and are not involved with that type of service even now have the vow of not touching a penny, not actually touching any money. When we give the vows of renunciation, at the end of that ceremony, finally the new renunciate goes with a begging bowl to the audience. And I tell people, "Don't put money in it. You can put some fruit, some food, just enough. That's it." There have been cases of one or two swamis turning up at Kennedy Airport and keeping the vow of not touching any money, not having one penny in the pocket, and the people who were supposed to come to receive them didn't turn up. So there are those, okay. So this particular guru would not allow his disciples to have any money, but one disciple was a bit insecure so he kept some hidden. Well, one day they were walking, traveling, and they came to a riverbank, and they had to cross the river. They didn't have a way to get across. There was a boatman who would ferry them across. Now the guru had no money in his pocket, and the disciple said, "Well if you will please forgive me, I have a little bit. So he paid the ferryman, and the guru and the disciple crossed the river. And the disciple said, "See Master, the money was useful." And the master said, "Yes, but in what way was it useful? If you had kept it in your pocket, would it have been useful? You had to renounce it to get across.
It's only with renunciation that money is useful, not in possessing and keeping it." Now if you could build your mental attitude to the entire economic system, not based on possession but on renunciation of money &emdash; what's it called, circulation, right? The more money circulates, the more prosperity grows. Well, that's the principle of renunciation demonstrated in daily life. If you do it with that attitude, then it is good karma. But it you do it with the attitude of possessiveness, then it is bad karma. If you do it with the attitude of renunciation, then it is the gathering of virtue and merit. And it you do it with the attitude of possession, then it is dependence.
Leading a worldly life you have to find ways in which, even if you are caught in this whirl of things, you can reinterpret them in your mind so that your attitude is a purer own, even if you cannot step out of the system. It is not by stepping out of the system that you will improve society. It is by shifting your mental outlook that you will improve society. But for that you will require internal simplicity, mental simplicity.
There are even to this day nations and tribes, when you pass through their territory, the attitude is different. You go in the villages of the Fijians and the Samoans in the South Pacific, there are no doors. There are no doors, leave alone locks. The Greek ambassador to the Emperor of India in the 4th century B.C. wrote a diary and expressed surprise that the word "lock" was not known. In such societies, if you are in the middle of trying to mend a piece of cloth, you need a needle, you walk down to somebody's house, look in the house, find the needle, use it, put it back. I am talking of 1998. Such societies still exist on the face of the earth. And even where it is not quite of that level, some of the attitudes remain. When my friend, Dr. Usharbudh Arya, moved his family from Minnesota back to India, there was quite a rebellion. You know, leaving home &emdash; this was their home. The children had grown up here. And in the last five years there has been a communications revolution in India. A lot more people have phones. And some swamis have e-mail. But in 1981 it was unthinkable. So in the neighborhood, we had the only phone by the courtesy of the city police chief, who was a disciple. And one of the children, one of the girls went shouting to her mother, "Someone just walked into our house, used the phone and walked out!" It was such a shock. And I took a sigh of relief to know that those traditions still continued. They are still there, because the concept of privacy as a religion has not yet become so ingrained.
In the mountains &emdash; I live in Rishikesh which is at the start of the Garwhal Himalayan Mountains &emdash; where the roads have gone up into the mountains in the last thirty years, now people's attitudes have changed. But a lot of members of my staff at the ashram, for example, when they go home &emdash; a one hour bus ride and then from there a twenty-five-kilometer walk into the mountains, up and down, in the winter, crossing the rivers, on foot; they have to walk twenty-five kilometers. But if you go there, in those parts, the milkman, the herdsman fills the pot with milk, leaves it on the street; people who need milk come and measure out the amount they need, leave the money; he comes back in the evening and collects the money, and goes home, takes up the pot and the money. I saw the same thing among the people of Borneo. They just leave the produce of the land, the fruits and the vegetables, by the roadside, and motorists passing by have learned to just pick up what they need, leave the amount of money and go. And in the evening the man or woman comes and picks up the money and goes home. These things are possible because they still are being practiced on the face of this earth. But then there is a mental simplicity.
I'll give you an example of that simplicity. So from one of these villages in the mountains I had a cook at the ashram. It was the first time he had left the mountains, and he had come down and served very nicely. Now in this country we have shrines everywhere. You take a bus, and there is a little shrine in the bus. You take a taxi, and there is a little shrine in the taxi. You go to a shop even now in New Delhi, and in some corner of the shop or the hotel, you will find a little shrine. The hotel manager comes in the morning, does his worship and then gets to work. So, the shrines invariably have a little candle-like lamp, so there is a mental association of sanctity with a lamp, with the light. So one morning I had a woman guest who I had to send to a nearby city, Dehra Dun, at 3:00 a.m., and I didn't want her to go alone. So I told the ashram staff to find someone to go with her. So this boy at 3:00 a.m., drowsy and sleepy, also got into the car along with some other boys. And on the way from Rishikesh to the city of Dehra Dun, a truck had turned over. Now we don't have all these kinds of nice fancy systems with, you know, flashing lights and stuff. You just take a few stones from the roadside, and you make a little barricade, and you put some kind of a little lantern there, and people know that there is something the matter, and they will be careful. So the boy was drowsy, and there was a truck turned over, and there was some little lantern. So the boys woke him up and pointed out the accident, and when he saw the light, he joined his palms in front of his forehead and bowed. I don't know what would happen to him if he came here.
I'll tell you, it takes me a lot of mental resilience to shift from this culture to that culture and that culture to this culture. And when I come to the United States, you know, it shocks me. The first thing that shocks me is the glare. As soon as I land at an airport, I can't stand it. There is so much glare! Lights, lights, lights! So much unnecessary amount of lights hits my eyes and my head immediately. And that is the only culture shock that I still have. Why? Why are there so many lights? You can manage with just ten-percent less. And if you had ten percent less lights in this country, the entire world's energy shortage could be taken care of. I'm telling you. The economists have calculated it. If the newspapers of the United States used two-percent less paper, if the advertisements were two percent smaller, the entire world's newsprint shortage would be taken care of. It's been calculated. It has been calculated that in this country we throw away daily the amount of food enough to feed a nation of seventy-five million people.
I was talking the other day at the Meditation Center about how many people go to special clinics for weight loss. Don't go for weight loss. Do to a spiritual guide who teaches you fasting in religious terms. And because of the internal value attached to it, the spiritual value, you will not succumb to the habit of over-eating again. Again, it's a matter of simply shifting something in the mind. Otherwise you will keep going to the weight-loss clinics, and you will lose weight, and you will gain, and you will lose, and you will gain, and damage yourself and continue damaging yourself. If, on the other hand, you could take the principle that exists in all the different religions and cultures of the world to observe certain fasting days.
Do you know why the fast food restaurants were invented? In India, for the special fasting days, there are special foods that you can eat in the evening. During the day you fast, and in the evening you eat. But during the fast certain types of food are allowed, certain non-grain carbohydrates are permitted. A lot of people use that, and there are restaurants that serve that kind of food. They are our version of fast food restaurants. And I'll tell you one piece of good news: for the last, recent, nine-day period of fasting, the McDonald's in Delhi went vegetarian.
It is very easy to shift the mind. Mind is the most resilient possession that you have. You just have to give the same thing a different value, and the same thing that was bad karma becomes good karma. The same thing that was a destructive imprint becomes and constructive imprint upon the mind. If you take some of these very basic principles that we teach in yoga and meditation: non-violence, non-injuriousness, and extend it to your entire economic, social and family system &emdash; extend it to the entire system. Here in my family, what I am doing, is it injurious? Is it hurtful? The first principle, the principle of non-violence will solve your family problems, some simple non-injuriousness, you know: "No, I cannot do this. This is hurtful to someone. No." We just have to have a higher goal for life.
Just as we were leaving to come here from the Meditation Center, Ananta dug out some very old tapes that I didn't even know existed from 1974. We had taken a group of 150 people to a Kumba Mela, which is the world's largest religious gathering that occurs. Recently this year we have completed the Kumba Mela, and it was a once-in-sixty-years event. It usually happens every twelve years, and after every five repetitions there is a very special one. And just in that little town of Hardwar, about twenty-five kilometers from where we are in Rishikesh, that region, during that period something like forty million people came to take the holy immersion. We had gone to the similar event in 1974. Ananta (Dan Richey) was with us, and he dug out some tapes from that time that I did not know about. I had forgotten. And here I was interpreting the presentation by one sadhu, holy man. So I started with a story:
So, once upon a time there was a guru, a teacher, a preceptor. And he was walking down somewhere, and a seeker-disciple, as is the custom in those countries, bent down and touched his feet. So the guru went down even further on the ground and touched the disciple's feet. The disciple was shocked: "My God! What a sin you are having me commit, touching the feet of me! I am your disciple."
Said the guru, "Why did you touch my feet then?"
"Well, you are a holy man."
"What makes me holy?"
"Well, you are a renunciate."
"What did I renounce?"
"Well, you renounced money, comforts, fame, house, family, everything."
"But you are a much greater renunciate," said the guru. "I must touch your feet."
"Me? I have renounced nothing. I am still involved with the world. My love is limited to the family. I earn money. I live a very, very ordinary life, and it is my duty to honor a renunciate like you."
The guru said, "But it is my duty to honor a renunciate like you even more."
"I don't understand. What have I renounced."
The guru said, " I have only renounced money and a house and these little things. You have renounced the biggest thing."
"What?"
"You have renounced God."
So this highest renunciation you have to give up.
So a little renunciation in all your choices, in all your acts, in all your emotions, in the intensity of your anger, a ten percent reduction &emdash; Okay, we'll settle for a one-percent reduction for one year. Next year make it two-percent, or the amount that you have the illusion of owning, that your bank owns, ten-percent reduction, five-percent reduction. No. But it is not in the external. Again, it is not in that. That's not where the simplicity is. That's not where the renunciation is. It's in the mind. You may eat a little less because you want to lose weight. That is one. But the renunciate's thought is "This little bit that I am eating extra is somebody else's share. If I left out just this piece of extra bread or cake or whatever, cheese that I don't really need, collectively speaking, it will go somewhere where it is really needed. As you are sitting here, well fed, well taken care of, how many children in how many parts of the world, at this moment &emdash; bags of bones &emdash; have curled up on a street corner without having eaten even one grain of rice? And when was the last grain of rice that went into their little mouths. When we started that KHEL project for the children of the lepers and others, these children had never tasted milk. When one glass of milk was given, they could not digest it, so Mrs. Arya had to dilute it with half milk and half water for their systems to get used to drinking milk before they could graduate to having a full glass of milk again. How many millions of gallons of milk is thrown into the ocean so that the price of milk will stay up. You say, "Well, what can I do? It is not I that is throwing the milk away." But you are! You are a participant. See your part in it, just your part. There are two hundred people here, well maybe more, maybe three hundred people here. If three hundred people went out today and went with this decision, do you know what a revolution you could create?
There was a disciple of Gandhi, whose name is not so well known, Vinoba. It is even less known now than it was thirty years ago. He was Gandhi's spiritual successor: Vinoba. Some of you may have heard his name. So in one particular part of India there was a Communist revolution starting, so he decided to go there personally, a saintly man. In that country, if you are a saint, it doesn't matter; even the Communists will bow down to you. That is the way. That is the tradition. So he went around to these people in the village and he asked, "Why are you taking up arms?"
They said, "Well, here are our landlords, and we have been like bonded slaves for all these centuries. We have no land, nothing. There is no future for our children. What do your expect us to do?"
So he took upon himself the task of speaking as a saint, as a sage. And when someone like that speaks, the rich and the poor all come to listen. And he spoke the to richest landlord of the village, and said, "Will you adopt me as your son?"
"The successor of Gandhi? A saintly man. Ah, do I deserve a son like you? What do you mean? What an honor to our family for you to become our son!"
"All right? You will adopt me?"
"Yes."
"Okay, then give me my share of the land."
And that way he went from village to village on foot and covered millions upon millions of miles on foot, and everywhere he got himself adopted as the rich landlord's son and asked for his share and redistributed the land. One man! No big, major social upheaval required. No. But that required a spiritual strength and a faith in oneself and faith in the path of non-violence. He changed the face of numerous, hundreds of villages in that country. That would be merely a footnote in the history books, if at all.
Each one of you have the same soul, the same divinity, the same God dwelling in you whose dwelling place your mind is, your body is, your heart is. Let that God speak to you from within you. And each night before you fall asleep, check within yourself: "How many selfless acts have I done today, directly and indirectly? How many injurious things have I done today? And what have I done to make up for those injurious things? What have I done to balance it?" And if it's not the time tonight for you to do something, then do it tomorrow.
And if you have purchased a piece of clothing you did not really need, tomorrow purchase another one for giving away. And the amount that you have overeaten today, tomorrow put aside its value, its price in a little kitty. And out of your three hundred people you can create at least enough food to feed a whole village. It is within the power of the individual.
There is a story, a parable, of a king who had a reservoir dug. Now those were the days of plenty when milk flowed as freely in some lands as it flows here today. So the king said, "Now the reservoir will be inaugurated, but before we pour water into it, we are going to fill it with milk. First it will be filled with milk, and then after that, water. Everyone in the kingdom will bring a pail milk to help fill the reservoir. When I come into the morning to inaugurate the reservoir, then I'll open the sluice gates for the water to flow."
Now one villager said in his mind a night, "Everybody's bringing milk. If I quietly throw in a pail of water, who is going to notice?" So he went and he poured a pail of water into the reservoir.
But the miracle was that the next morning the whole reservoir was filled with water and not with milk, because everybody thought the same thing.
This is what we are doing in our societies everywhere. So simplify your mind. And have certain basic principles on the basis of which you solve your problems, your emotional problems, your relational problems. You will then not have to pay so much money to your counselors, to your psychologists, because you will have certain guidelines. "Should I do this or should I do that?" Well, which one is the more injurious, and which one is the less injurious? Simple! Very Simple! That's all. And you will feel rich inside you, and there will be a satisfaction in you at the end of your life, and you will say, "Yes, this life was not lived in vain." Each year your satisfaction with yourself with grow, and you will not have to keep going and grabbing for this and grabbing for that and surrounding yourself with all these little objects that you end up not even owning because your credit card company owns it. You will not need that satisfaction.
All right. I think I have said enough, and I apologize for any injuriousness. No, I know that sometimes I become very articulate, and it seems that I am just criticizing everybody. I assure you, that is not my intent. But really, really believe that it is possible.
In the past several incarnations I have never done anything for myself. I have a curse on me, and I have two blessings. The curse is also a blessing in disguise. The curse on me is that anything I will do for myself will fail. And the blessings I have: Whatever I will do for others will succeed, and whatever others will do for me will succeed. And it's so wonderful and fulfilling. And from the happiness I derive from that I can speak to you. And I can assure you this is great; this is just beautiful to have that one curse on you and these two blessings on you. I invoke that curse, and I invoke those two blessings on all of you. God bless you.
I have been saying that it is not even necessary that one should sit for one half an hour of meditation. All these changes can take place in you by the difficult way of working it out in the mind analytically, or the easier way of letting the meditation wash your mind. And one minute of meditation can be helpful to you . . . one minute!
Just as your are, just bring your attention to yourself. Simply be aware for this moment. Be aware only of yourself. Let go of your musculature. And having relaxed your musculature, gently bring your awareness to your breathing, breathing gently, smoothly without a jerk, without a break. Feel the flow and the touch of the breath in your nostrils. As you come to the end of an exhalation, immediately begin the awareness of the inhalation. As you come to the end of an inhalation, immediately begin the awareness of the exhalation. Simply feel the flow and the touch of the breath in the nostrils in an unbroken stream. And now, having established that pattern, resolve in your mind that for the next one minute, one minute only, there will be no interrupting thought, only the awareness of the flow of the breath and the touch of the breath in the nostrils. For one minute. Make the resolve and begin the one minute . . . now.
Without breaking the flow of this awareness, gently open your eyes. Resolve in your mind again and again to bring your mind to that clear, clean state so that all your actions may become vehicles of peace and benevolence to others.
God Bless you.
Copyright 2001 West-Art
PROMETHEUS, Internet Bulletin for Art, Politics and Science.