The Art and Science of Happiness with Turiya Moore

So you watch the little waves, they blow with life changes. Wind is like emotions and changing conditions and sometimes it’s turbulent and sometimes it’s calm and these little waves just blow like little victims from one side of the ocean to the other, then they crash on the beach and die. Yet the ocean never changed. The volume of the ocean never changed, the depth never changed, the whole ocean is the same, untouched, uninvolved, but completely there and present in the experience of the wave. So this is how in yoga they explain that is like the individualized spirit that is identified as a separate reality, the ego. And if it would just relax! You know how they say – the bigger they are, the harder they fall. The more we’re identified with this “I”-ness, if it’s in the wrong way, the more we suffer with ups and downs, like really big wins and then really terrible losses, because it’s all about “me” and because we’re like these waves that are crashing right? One approach to meditation is to see it as we watch the breath or we concentrate on other things that are happening inwardly, as a way to take us away from our identity as something that’s unique, separate and limited and merge our awareness, reconnect with our ultimate potential as something much greater and much more permanent than a human body and the current personality and thought processes that we experience as our own.

This is a talk from our Free Monday Meditation Series. Recorded at Meditation Unlimited in Torrance, CA on April 10, 2017

Willingness is a great virtue. In this talk I'm focusing on developing the willingness to see the divine in everything. Our appreciation of beauty in all things is dynamic to change ourselves and to change our world. Those things we focus on, we also draw into our world and strengthen.

Recorded at Free Monday Night Guided Meditation and Lecture on July 24, 2017.

And so we learn with the things that we love, we learn to accept them with all levels of their realities, whether they feel good or bad or they are harmful or not, right? We start to have a deeper relationship with things when we can accept the whole picture, not just what we want and that relationship can be very freeing because only then do we start to have a dynamic connection with it and so with people, when we can accept people as they are, with all their imperfections, like the mountainside that will kill you, like the ocean that will drown you if you let them, right?

To get the benefits of meditation that we hear about, like being more free of anxiety, being more positive, being more calm, more clear, more focused and also maybe a lot of things having to do with physical health, does not require a lot of depth in meditation. What it requires is a steady practice, doing something like watching the breath every day or just about every day, once or twice a day, short bursts of concentrated stillness and developing the commitment to do it, but also the understanding that when you're doing your meditation, it's got to at least feel decent, right? So the best way to feel decent if your mind's wandering, you're having trouble with the breath, you're physically fidgety, you have anxiety, you’re having negative thoughts or something, just keep bringing your mind back to the feeling of the breath without controlling it and learn to leave the meditation and feel absolutely successful that you did your best.

In the beginning, a lot of the benefits that we hear about in the medical field, in western science about meditation, those can be obtained that way and that kind of a meditation can evolve into something like twenty or thirty minutes at a time and you're just doing something, there's a lot of techniques out there like that, where you're just inhaling this, exhaling that, focusing here. You'll get a lot of the benefits. But when you read books about deep spiritual experiences, saints communing with God, St. Francis communing with Jesus, Yogananda with Krishna, or when you talk about that kind of meditation, going deeper spiritually, having a direct relationship with the Divine, the way I would define if we're moving deep, it's never going to be like visions, crazy astral experiences, out of body weirdness. Half the time when people experience those things it's because they fell asleep and they don't even know it, because you can get used to meditating and have a really straight spine and be completely asleep and you just go off into subconscious, you go off into dreamland and you'll have dreams related to whatever you think about meditation, whatever you want about meditation and you might come out thinking you had this mind blowing, great spiritual experience and it was literally a subconscious dream.

But the way to know if your meditation is deep, specifically what I'm talking about when I say depth, it's an experience of freedom. In other words you don't feel like you're meditating, you don't feel like you're doing a technique anymore. You might even be doing it, but you're observing a different experience inside where you feel free and when I say freedom what I mean is (and I can only speak about my own experience) when the part of my consciousness that divides everything up into life into likes and dislikes is gone. The likes and the dislikes go away and you're completely aware and you feel free...