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Let God be your personal experience, not your belief

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Swami Veda Bharati is a world-renowned spiritual teacher, with yoga and meditation centers in 25 countries. From childhood he has studied the scriptures of various religious traditions including Buddhist, Jaina, Muslim and Christian, and has participated in numerous interfaith dialogues throughout his 55-year career of public speaking and teaching.

The Monthly Aspectarian: Swami, I usually start by letting people tell their story, their evolution. How did you get to be who you are?

Swami Veda Bharati: My background is so completely different from anything you hear. It’s not only unusual in the western world, but it’s also unusual in India, the country of my birth. I was born into a traditional, Brahmin household, the philosophers of India who have kept the traditions of Sanskrit, philosophy and spiritual practices for the last 5,000 years. I sat with my father in meditation for one and a half hours every morning from the age of four and a half years. Apart from that, I have never been to a school in my life, never had a teacher in any subject. At the age of thirteen, I was officiating at a very high religious ceremony. The scholars who were present examined me because they said, how is it that this thirteen year old is sitting over people who have fifty years of experience behind them? Then they went and wrote articles about what they perceived to be the depth of my knowledge of the ancient scriptures, Sanskrit, Vedic language, philosophy and practices. So I began to get invitations. The first time I stepped into a school was to give a lecture. The first time I stepped into a university at the age of thirteen was to give a lecture. That was the beginning.

I started lecturing around at the age of nine, expanded a little more at the age of eleven, and at thirteen I began to travel all over India. At the age of nineteen, I started traveling outside of India, and from February, 1947, all I have done is travel and lecture and teach and do these writings. The spiritual evolution has been an unfoldment of age-old ancient ideas, which to me seemed simple common sense. I didn’t need to mull over them, it just felt natural. What I found natural, I followed. In 1969, I met my spiritual master after a long period of longing. His name was Swami Rama of the Himalayas, the founder of the Himalayan International Institute of Yoga Science. The Institute is not linked with me, but I was there, part and parcel of his work.

TMA: How do you recommend a westerner with little experience approach the teachings that you represent?

SVB: Swami Rama used to say—and I also always say—no matter what I’m lecturing on, no matter what authorities I’m quoting, no matter what scriptures I’m reciting, don’t believe a word of what I say. Verify it. Test it in your personal life. Going a little deeper, the tradition that I represent says let God be your personal experience, not your belief. Believe nothing. Keep your mind open until such time that you have a spiritual experience. Offer a presence that is larger than you in your consciousness. For that, we teach methods of meditation. I often speak of meditation as the lab work of spirituality. You verify. You test. All meditative traditions speak of God within us. God is that ocean of transcendental and cosmic consciousness in which you and I are waves. When the wave does not know that it is part of an ocean, only then is it divided from other waves. But when the wave knows it’s part of the ocean, then there is no division. When we speak of spiritual experience, we mean this wave of consciousness and life force that I am knowing, that I’m linked to an ocean. But it is not to be poetry, it is not to be metaphysics, it is not to be speculation/hypothesis. It has to be a personal experience.

TMA: I was going to say that it’s one thing to understand intellectually, and quite another to experience.

SVB: As you proceed, mediation is not one single technique or method. Meditation is vast, as vast as all the dimensions of all the constituents of your personality—physical, pranic, your energy fields, your breathing, your mind, the mind in all its levels, your very internal life force and consciousness. All the channels of those are pathways to different levels and different practices of meditation. Nowadays, people have taken one single system, one single meditation, and each school practices it as if this is complete and you need nothing more. But those who are born or who are brought up, who are trained and initiated in what we call the traditional Himalayan Masters, incorporate all of these methods as part of a huge tree, as it were.

TMA: Would you say, though, that if not the essence, at least the starting point is silence?

SVB: The starting point is silence, but the problem is when we are in silence, we often think. People do not know what silence really means. They think silence is a silence of speech, but silence is quieting of the mind. There are ways to quiet the mind, because of itself, it refuses to be quiet. I’ve had people start with a half a day of the practice of silence at home, and then as soon as the half-day is done, they get on the phone and make up for the lost time.

TMA: I meant silence of the mind.

SVB: Quiet is the very first experience and there are ways to quiet the mind. When we are teaching in my ashram and schools, as I was taught by my master, we start with certain relaxation exercises and a correct way of breathing. People don’t always realize what a connection there is between the state of breath and the mind. The brain waves ... you know, the observation of breath, feeling the flow of the breath, calming the breath, making the breath flow soft, gentle, slow and even. Then we introduce a word. Now what word? When I’m in interfaith groups, I should take the name of God as you know it, in your language, in your tradition, in your religion. Or a sacred phrase ... for a Christian from the Holy Bible, whether in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, or if you know of some words of old Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke. With a Buddhist, it would be something in their language, in their traditions. Just use one single word, or two, a short phrase. Thinking that phrase ... and still thinking that phrase ... and no break between the observation of one breath and the next. Within two or three minutes, you begin to calm down, because your mind becomes an even flowing stream. This is a lecture I give in every country, and I start with it at every gathering. I keep telling people to perfect this if you perfect nothing else. Then, when people start to get the feel of it, we give them further practices, but they’re all interior, they’re all mental.

TMA: When you achieve silence in the mind, one of the first thing that one notices is that awareness remains.

SVB: Yes indeed. Awareness not only remains, but it’s your tool and you control its volume.

TMA: When you’re able to silence the mind, then it can be used rather than be the out-of-control master.

SVB: Right, you control the depth of silence. OK. I’m speaking to you right now in a normal voice. If we were sitting face to face, you would feel it even more. I’m going to now lower the volume. I’m now lowering the volume of my voice ... perhaps you can feel a change in my voice. You can feel, perhaps, that it’s coming from a quieter place ... and yet quieter. And in this way, one can go down into deeper and deeper levels of one’s own consciousness, and one can change the volume. And one can come back to the surface.

TMA: It’s interesting how it’s like an endless onion. You keep peeling layers and layers and it just keeps going.

SVB: At each layer of the mind, the meditation technique, the method, differs. All the religions believe in grace, and they say that you prepare by this cleansing of the mind and going into the purer part of your own mind and consciousness. You prepare yourself for grace so that you can receive it. Then that grace uplifts you.

TMA: How would you suggest that people work on this from this point?

SVB: Many new meditators are looking for a quick fix. How can I quiet my mind, I’m so stressed out, what can I do? We are teaching that the practice of meditation is not something you do only twenty minutes a day. What I teach and train my students to do is to maintain a certain level of quiet even in the middle of all the hectic activity. How to go about being, so that the outside activity does not affect the mind and the brain and the blood pressure and the breathing, and the whole neuromuscular tension and relaxation systems as deeply, as much, or as intensely as it does with the people that have not had that guidance. While remaining active in the world, you can find a place within you which becomes your deeper baseline from which you are operating.

TMA: I think the way Jesus put that was, “Pray without ceasing.”

SVB: Pray without ceasing. You carry on, at a certain layer of your mind, the worldly activities, but at the same time you’re aware of that presence within. There are many different ways to maintain this and I make the audience work on one or two of these ways, depending on the audience. I never prepare a lecture. In all of these decades, I’ve never prepared a lecture. Before the lecture, I go into meditation for sometimes an hour, sometimes fifteen minutes, and sometimes when I’m driving to a lecture. I open my eyes to the audience and whatever word comes out, I follow that lead. Someone speaks, it’s not I.

This not only has an interior presence, but some of these techniques and methods have very effective exterior effects as well. I’ll give you an example. Twenty-five years ago I was sitting in my office and they said such and such person is calling. I picked up the phone and said, “I haven’t heard from you for three years.” And he said, “Yes, I haven’t been in touch, I haven’t been to your center for this time, but I have been following the teachings that I received from you and I am calling to thank you.” And I said, “Thank me for what?” He said, “You know I am president of the reporters union of such and such state. We were about to go on strike and close down the whole industry. Negotiations were going on for the last two weeks, with all the tension and stress and confrontations and aggressiveness. The smoking and alcohol that the other people used to calm down their nerves just got them more confused. I followed your advice, and every time we came to a deadlock, right there at the conference table, in the middle of that commotion, I would just go quiet and count my breaths.”

Counting the breaths has many different variations. And finally he said, “I did this two or three or four minutes each time, with my eyes open because I didn’t want to tell people, oh, listen we are in a deadlock and I have to meditate.” So you pretend to be normal, what is normal in the eyes of the people. “I counted my breaths, and each time I came up with a fresh proposal. Yesterday my proposals were accepted and you had your newspaper this morning.”

It’s just one example, but I can give examples in so many different directions of life that you can apply these methods and these systems. In illness and health, in wellness of the mind, in relationships, and so forth.

Something else that I’ve been working with all my life, but even more so since the year 2000, is interfaith connections. I am a member of the World Council of Religious Leaders, that developed out of the United Nations Millennium World Peace Summit. It’s not U.N. sponsored, but it’s part of the unofficial participation of a lot of people. We have discussed the questions of religion and terrorism and so forth. At all of these conferences, in the U.S. and Europe and in other countries, my thesis and my theme has been “What is right with the world?” What is happening is that we’re viewing all the terror and all the threats, all the fears and all the conflicts ... the entire world history of religions and their relationships are being thought of as the history of war and conflict.

TMA: Bad news sells more newspapers.

SVB: Exactly. “Dog did not bite man,” is not news. I’ve looked into history and the geography of nations, and the contemporary practices among the people of various nations and faiths, religions. And I have found tremendously vast areas where the idea of conflict doesn’t exist. I’m saying, look at those areas. I’ll give you an example from way back in ancient history. You read about the captivity of the Jews in Babylon, and in the Bible it says that King Cyrus, the King of Persia, liberated them and they stayed in Persia for some time before they rebuilt their temple. The man, the king who liberated them, was he a Jew? He was not, he was a Zoroastrian. We have a small community of about 200,000 Zorastrians left in the world today, but at that time it was a vast empire. King Cyrus had no connection with the Jews, but he liberated them and he helped finance the building of the temple. He also, within his empire, encouraged the Egyptian priests to revive their religion. He followed his own religion, but he helped other religions.

TMA: Well, at some point you realize they’re all the same.

SVB: I would not say they’re all the same. There is doctrine, but there are places where they are the same, and that is seen in silence.

TMA: They all seek to lead to the same place.

SVB: They seek to lead to the deep inner voice and deep inner silence. You read in the Holy Bible, the Psalms of David, the 19th Psalm, “May my meditations be sweet in thine eyes.” So this is not only just way back, thousands of years back, but even today there are vast areas of people’s experience where a commonality of sharing, festivals, and this and that still exist and still is practiced. Now what are the strengths of those societies and how can those strengths be implemented?

TMA: Would you like to give a statement of essence?

SVB: The statement is simply this, that any individual in any situation of life can find the presence within, it is within reach of everyone. That is the core. When we find that, the thoughts and emotions that lead to conflict first diminish and then slowly vanish. Peace in the world can be established by helping every individual to achieve peace of mind, and there are methods and ways to do that.

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Currently on his summer world tour, Swami Veda Bharati teaches a “Two Minute Meditation” technique as a practical method for controlling life stress and bringing spirituality into daily life. He will give a guided meditation followed by a lecture on “Spiritual Growth in Daily Living” at Hari Om Mandir Temple in Medinah, Illinois, on Saturday, July 31. Please see the advertisement in this issue on page 00, and visit www.SwamiVeda.org for more information.

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