Join us today for our Online Workshop and explore training the senses in the company of other passage meditators. We’d love to share this live satsang with you, today November 11 at 2 p.m. San Francisco time. You can register for the event for free, or you can pay on the sliding scale from $0–25. (The standard fee is $10.)
If you’re unable to attend the Online Workshop live, don’t worry – if you register we’ll send you the recording a few days later.
Reading Study
In the reading below, Easwaran describes the “fierce satisfaction of self-mastery.” He assures us that there is something more wonderful, more meaningful, and longer lasting than our common experiences of small pleasures. He also links in the importance of the other eight points in helping us with training the senses.
Please share your reflections to the questions below. We are always eager to hear your comments!
What are some of the ways that you use, or could use, all eight points in order to help train your senses?
Easwaran promises that over time we will come to know a joy that is “immense beyond belief, beyond all bounds”. Are there ways that you keep this supreme promise in the forefront of your daily life when faced with likes and dislikes?
What benefits have you seen or could you see in keeping this promise in mind?
The excerpt below is from Love Never Faileth, by Eknath Easwaran.
Strengthening the will by defying strong selfish desires requires a long, grueling fight. But for those who are daring, there comes a turning point: you discover that there is more satisfaction in defying a desire than in yielding to it. After I tasted this fierce satisfaction of self-mastery, my perspective on life changed dramatically. From then on, I understood that building up the will could work wonders; and I started in defying desires joyously.
The psychology of this is fascinating. You are taking the joy right out of the hands of the desire and holding it up as booty: “Now I have the joy without you!” Desire comes as a bully pointing a pistol at you and demanding your life’s savings, and like Humphrey Bogart you just take the gun out of his hands. When you can do this, your entire frame of reference changes. Most of the pleasures of the world pale into insignificance. It is not that they are no longer pleasant, but your capacity for joy is no longer limited to a few pennies of sensory pleasure; it is immense beyond belief, beyond all bounds. We can throw all our capacity for rebellion into this kind of heroism, defying our conditioned dependence on trivial likes and dislikes. In doing this, we break out of a narrow world into a new realm of freedom.
Repeating the name of the Lord can be of enormous help in this. When the Holy Name is repeated it becomes like a jackhammer, rattling away at the wall of solid rock that is conditioning. The amount of rock you dislodge per hour is not of primary importance; what is important is the number of times you remember to use the Holy Name and the enthusiasm with which you repeat it. Put as much enthusiasm into it as you can muster. When you can recall the Holy Name in times of stress, you will be making much more progress than you realize.
With the Holy Name, of course, goes meditation. Daily meditation enables you to bore deep into the rock of a compulsive like or dislike and set charges of dynamite at strategic points. Once meditation reaches a certain depth, the words of an inspirational passage like the Prayer of Saint Francis – “Where there is hatred, let me sow love” – can be truly explosive. Gradually deep cracks in the structure of self-will appear. Then the name of the Lord can serve as the kind of loader I saw the other day repairing a county road: it comes and clears the rubble from those explosive charges, so that the work of laying your new roadbed can proceed.