Sufi Meditation

Music for Sufi Meditation

My father named or nicknamed me as Sufi. As a Hindu I rate it as a great syncretic sentiment. And why not, probably I am the only Hindu in Haryana who is called Sufi.

Coming to Sufism. It’s the best mystical offering by Islam to the overall humanity. The strands of unity, oneness, universal brotherhood and love for all waft around from the esoteric incense of Sufism. So I am happy to be called Sufi.

Sharing a musical piece for Sufi meditation. Play the music on a higher volume so that it swathes you in its gripping, haunting pools of melodious surrender to the ultimate. This meditation is best done in a spacious room or hall because it involves swirling around.

Listen to the initial notes and you will feel some spiritual haunts spreading from the central Asian lands. It is about connecting to mother earth, and from her to the solar system, galaxy and the ultimate. So perform it on naked feet, or be in socks at the most if the climate in your part is too harsh.

Stand still as you listen to the build up of the Sufi melody. Just relax and look within, taking the enchanting trilling of the music seep into you. Now spread your right arm by your side, raise the arm to the level of your shoulder, elbow turned at an angle and the hand raised up, palm facing upwards . Your elbow shoulder and chest being in a line. Spread the left arm to the other side, keep it comfortably straight, without putting strain to straighten it. The palm spread out and pointing to the ground. The hand dangling at an angle from the horizontal.

And start swirling, go round and round on your feet in anticlockwise direction. Just slowly build up the momentum. There is a difference between exercise and meditation. In the latter your spirit is involved. The body is just the starting point. Keeping the hands as mentioned above, as you start swinging, swirling, allow the divine forces to take control of your body. If you really do it, believe me you won’t fall, because there are balancing forces all around you.

When we stand we think we are in control of our body and only we are managing the stand of our body. Little do we realise that our apparent control is just illusion. The all balancing forces of eternity are what which maintain our standing. And look at the eternity’s grace, it allows us to think that we are solely responsible for maintaining our standing.

Your body will be swinging in circles, like a swinging top, but that is just the outer periphery of your being. After a time you, will realise that just the matter or food body is going in circles. The real you, the axis of your being, the consciousness, remains immovable. Just like a swinging top swirls around a central nail, you will go within to the immovable point of your being. The externalities will be swung out by the centrifugal forces of divine realisation. The centripetal forces will suck you into the core of your being. And the apparent objectives around you—and so will the illusions—will just merge into an all-pervading continuum, one layer of energy, which even quantum physics has verified.

The differences will melt. Going in circles around the point of your consciousness, you will realise it is all just one energy, spreading, transforming, altering, from here to there. If you maintain that equipoise of spirit, soul and matter, you can build up the momentum to continue for ever! Well, you need not do that of course. Haa Haa.

So continue as long as you enjoy the deep sips of solace. After that lie down on your stomach. Surrender to mother earth and the grandmother eternity. Just lie like a child. You will have glimpses of that cosmic security and protection when your mother carried you in your womb. Remain like this till the momentum of mystical oblivion embraces you.

Open your eyes later. Take a turn to lie on your back. But move very gently, without giving any jerk to the body. Be so soft as if you want to preserve the softest thing in you. Rub your hands. Place them gently on your face, smile, be thankful to the eternal law for the moments of peace. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-J1hVGzWro&t=13s

Nurturing the seeds of goodness

The things which ought to be simply done, should just be done. Otherwise, their shadows linger in the mind. They grow heavier with the passage of time. This invisible weight is heavier than the stones we see around. Simple, harmless acts of appreciation, of enjoyment, of helping someone cross a stream are better done and closed with a full stop. It’s better for a healthy mind. Otherwise, they linger like conspiring shadows over our conscience.

A missed chance of being good will definitely cast a shadow on our mind. An effort to help the self in being good, on the other hand, will hardly leave any unbecoming imprint on our conscience for pinching reflections later.

Only goodness has a legacy and a future. Hypocrisy and meanness are just bad examples and leave repentance most of the time. To do good is instinctive for a human being, it’s however another matter that we stifle the urge most of the time. To be bad, on the other hand, is not intrinsic to our nature. It is wrongly reflective, a miscalculation, a tragic bypass of the instinct of goodness.

Nurture the seeds of the instincts of goodness. It’s a simple practice. It gives peace of mind, clear conscience and makes the journey enjoyable. Avoid it and you carry the burden in your mind.

Happiness: as simple as breathing

It’s basically we who repel happiness away from us. We don’t allow it to come to us, embrace us, take hold of us. We set it as a goal too far down the line in future. Some house, some grains, some accumulation of pleasure, some relationships, etc., etc. We set up goals as the preconditions for our happiness. And the goals keep on piling up, over the years, and set up a wall between us and happiness. And happiness keeps on getting more and more distant from us. I will set up a home and then be happy. Happiness delayed. And then I work over the years. There is no end. I set a goal to raise a family and then be happy. Again it sets up a wall between happiness and us. Relentlessly we just push on. Happiness stays thus a distant goal. Never to be achieved. We make it conditional on endless goals, which are never met, because it’s the destiny of a goal to merge into another bigger one. They never die, only we die. Huge immortals they are. In pushing for them, we die. Separated from happiness that could have been the greatest gift of life, had we not pushed it away from us.

The remedy lies in taking away happiness from the far end of our endless goals and keep it safe in our house, like we store some grains for the harsh winters, near us, in the safest part of our house. It has to be cut away from the trail of endless goals and ambitions and kept with the self, in the present. It has to be set free from any conditions of meeting some goal. It’s a state as good as being healthy. Just being and living for a day. Separate being from becoming. You can be happy if you set your happiness free from the chains of your lifelong dreams.

You should be pushing towards yours goals as a happy person, rather than somebody who wants to be happy in future after completing the goals. The goals never come to a halt, only we do, at the moment of our death. So we die unhappily, separated from the natural state of happiness which could have pumped our life with unthinkable contentment and satisfaction, only if we had set it free from the chains of goal-setting and placed it unchained from those unreachable spots in the future.

Let happiness be a precondition for our doings, not a poor outcome of our efforts. Do everything as a happy person; instead of doing the deeds to become a happy person. Happiness is a state of being so, not the specific result of some hot pursuit. There is only one way it can be availed. Either we embrace it in the condition we are in, or it just eludes us. Keep it with you while you fly. It will boost your determination to go far and high.

So the only way to remain happy is just to be happy, instead of slogging it out to become happy later. Fellas, kindly decide to keep happiness as a routine, let it take possession of your present, like a monkey eating fruits and the birds flying. All in the present. Now. Just being. Simply being happy. 

The Regalia of Old Age

So he, the regal old man, embracing his age with fragile but tight grip, lives happily as the tail-end of a great life lived. He has weathered the tempests of youth: the force of beginning, starting and acceleration! And now the path of letting it go; losing the pace slowly, gracefully, receptively. The deceleration.  Slowing down with effortless muse. To stop finally. It gives him as much excitement as the force of starting. And then the final rest. Now, during the slowing down phase, his time has become slow, the world is a small puddle around his feet. He lives like in a dream. A slow-paced one, minutes stretched like hours, days like weeks, weeks like months, months like years. In slowing down gracefully, effortlessly, he lives equal to a dozen lives lived in the beginning mode.

He enjoyed the choices which fate sieved for him. Just grabbed his share. Now he picks up and plays among those things and coarse, discarded chaff which remain unwanted above as the fine particles, much in demand, trickle below. But it’s great fun, he tells with mischievous gusto:

“In youth, we just think that life means rolling in the sieve’s fine brew. But life can be equally enjoyable among the discarded heap, little malformed grains, sand-grains, specks and chaff. Now I roll like a child in the rubble of the past, which was once waylaid by the youth’s blast. It is now the precious wealth of my old age. Mellows down the rage in this haze. There aren’t any takers for it now. So I enjoy it alone, without that competitive drone.”

The old reveller, away from the fire, cosily lying at the margin, where the faintest traces of warmth touch his old bones before moving into the cold darkness.

The majestic slow down, as important and enjoyable as the headlong thrust of the beginning, the youth. The source, the beginning, and the slowdown, and the end. A cycle. Enjoy it!

Ice Cubes on Desert Sands

The cover page of my upcoming book...