By Jeffrey Armstrong
- Western Master of Eastern Wisdom, Inspirational Speaker, Visionary, Spiritual Teacher
International AyurVedic Astrologer, Author & Founder of VASA

We live in a world of opposites. The polarity of light and dark is all around us. It is almost as if the universe is having an argument with itself while we watch. One side of the argument says life is based on power and is only temporary. Death is final, nothing is beyond it and all displays of beauty and love are transient bubbles in an ocean of darkness. In this view, our selfish desires are all that matters and our body is all we are. We are surrounded by a huge uncaring and unconscious cosmos in which we are tiny and insignificant. The other argument says life is based on love and that we are eternal beings made of knowledge and by nature joyful. It argues that behind power lie wisdom, love and a Supreme Being who has created all of this in the service of beauty, joy and eternal love. Like any trial, advocates from both sides bring forth arguments to support their position. The conclusion is very important since once accepted it will become the basis of our life. The Vedic culture of India is based on a commitment to the side of light in this trial. The flag that flies over the Yogic culture reads:

Asato ma sad gamaya - From the unreal lead me to the real.

Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya - From darkness lead me to light.

         Mrityor ma amritam gamaya - From death lead me to eternal life.

If all we had to decide this argument was the evidence of our experience it would be very difficult to prove with logic. In a world of duality, almost every view has it’s opposite. For every argument there is a counter argument. On a day to day basis, the evidence seems overwhelming that death is our final destination. We see people die and that appears to be the end of them. The evidence of our senses argues that we are surrounded by a cold, impersonal, uncaring universe, whose only concern is the unconscious laws of matter. This is the conclusion behind the "survival of the fittest" philosophy. You could say that modern scientists have adopted the religion of darkness and death. They promote a loveless philosophy resulting from their observations of the endless material universes. Each new piece of "scientific evidence" is interpreted in favor of the uncaring cosmic viewpoint. But there is one piece of evidence that argues more powerfully than the rest. Light and dark are not really equal and opposite. Light always drives dark away yet dark cannot drive away light! So light was taken by the Vedic culture as the symbol of higher truth. Light descends to us and drives away darkness. Light regulates the darkness of matter. Light is the source of life and shines within and perhaps from beyond the darkness. But what is the source of the light, what is beyond the light?

To answer this question we must find a way past our limitation. The answer must descend to us from somewhere beyond our sight. For that to happen there must be a great intelligent being who either appears personally or sends us a message. This is the basis of the Vedic culture. The Vedas are held to be "testimony" or a direct message from the Divine Intelligence beyond our sight. That is why they are held in such high esteem. And at least twice in recent history, the person of God appeared on Earth in India. The record of those appearances are the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the two epics which recount the appearance of Prince Rama and his consort Sita and of Krishna with his eternal counterpart Radha. It is said in the Vedas, that at certain intervals, the Divine appears as an avatar, which literally means a descent of God to Earth. The avatar descends with two purposes. The first is to correct any imbalances which are being caused by the representatives of darkness. The second purpose is to teach love and restore our faith that love is an eternal truth. Each of the avatars is said to be a manifestation of Vishnu the preserver.

You may have seen pictures of Lord Vishnu depicted with four arms holding a lotus flower, conch shell, club and disk. Two of these implements are used for exercising power over darkness and the other two are used to show love and sweetness to those who live in the light. The Supreme appears before those in darkness as the limiting power of the universe and as all-devouring time. The same Supreme appears to the lovers of light as a loving person through the blessings of the conch and lotus. Sometimes God sends representatives or ambassadors of the light and sometimes God comes in person. In both cases the message is the same. In some messages you will hear that we should return to the light and enter it. From other messengers you will hear about the delicious Divine Love that awaits us in the spiritual world beyond the light. Both are true.

All genuine gurus or prophets in all cultures, at all times, redirected our attention back toward our source in the light of Divine Being. The meaning of guru is: gu (darkness) ru (remover). Anyone who is able to remove your darkness is guru. Guru means an emissary or ambassador of our original state, a being who remembers where we came from in the Spiritual World. An avatar, on the other hand is God the Divine Person appearing before us in this dark world in order to reaffirm the truth of eternal Divine Love. The concept of avatar is unique to India. It appears that for whatever reason, India was chosen as the place for God to appear in person on two different occasions in the last 20,000 years. The story of Rama in the Ramayana and of Krishna in the Mahabharata are actually the historical record of God coming in person to teach us how to be in love with God. In both stories the family, friends, servants, wives, lovers and even pets, were all demonstrating various forms and flavors of eternal relationship that are possible between our soul and God. That is the reason the stories are of such importance. They are like training manuals in the details of Divine Love.

Think for a moment what it would be like to feel completely in love and to be loved. In this world, death, disease, old age, war, work, and separation always interrupt that feeling of love. Everyone feels injured by the loss of love or the lack of love. Eventually they begin to doubt love and become convinced that death, darkness and sorrow are more real. But what if the first love of our life is a sweet intimate loving relationship with a form of God that is personal and endlessly loveable. What if God is not really obsessed with being big, endless and powerful. What if our limitation is that we don’t really believe that big G God will ever really love us as sweetly and intimately as our earthly lovers and friends. Wouldn’t that place a limit on our belief in Divine Love? According to the Vedas that is exactly our limitation. We lack the evidence that love with God will really fulfill our desire for true intimacy. Have you ever heard of someone falling in love without knowing anything about the other person? Can you imagine loving an endlessly powerful and almighty being unless that person could appear before you in a loving form? If you cannot imagine something, you cannot do it. So it is that Rama and Krishna and other avatars of God appear before us from time to time so we can see their beautiful form and qualities and learn to love them as they were loved at the time of their appearance. The Ramayana and Mahabharata are Vedas or books of instruction on how to enter the Divine Light and fall in love with the beautiful Lord of our heart who is eternally manifest there. They are a Divine "Kama sutra", on all the positions and varieties of love which we can choose to express with God.

Let me illustrate this by explaining the meaning of the name Krishna. If someone asked you the meaning of the word God what would you say? What would be your definition? Is God the most powerful, the almighty, the creator, the destroyer, the sustainer, the judge, the punisher? The answer would be yes to all of those. Then what aspect of God would be the most interesting? What are people of this world working so hard to achieve? You could say security but security for what-For pleasure or enjoyment. What then, do people do for enjoyment? They surround themselves with beauty and try to develop enjoyable relationships. And once they have these things, when do they want to give them up? Never! So here is the definition of Krishna or God. Krishna is the person of God whose being is made up of everything that is attractive or beautiful. God is the gold mine and all things of beauty come from that mine. If you see beauty it is a fragment of that gold.

Now which would you rather own, the gold mine or a piece of gold? Therefore, God or Krishna is that person whose beauty is so amazing, that seeing it everyone would be attracted and fall helplessly in love. That is God. The ultimate lover, friend, child, servant, beauty, opulence, charm, flavor, deliciousness, object of desire, gem, vision, artistry and so on. Inconceivable and endless beauty focused into the personal being of the ultimate partner and waiting for us to share eternal love. But from our perspective, we doubt that it is so. We doubt that we are capable, worthy or able to really experience such grand love. We don’t actually believe that the power and vastness of the universe are supported by an even greater and more intimate love. In that way we have capitulated to the dark side and accepted their arguments. We have lost faith in this ultimate love.

These days it is very popular to think that meditation is somehow dwelling on an empty state. It is as if people have overdosed on matter and are now fasting and trying to become empty. It is true if you overeat; not eating for some time will restore the balance. Yet the real question of meditation is: " Where did all this beauty come from and what is my correct relationship to the artist who created this wonderful world. In that way, meditation is not just an empty or impersonal process. The closer we get to the Divine Light, the more of God’s original beauty will be revealed to us. It will not be less beautiful or variegated than the world we now see; instead it will be infinitely more beautiful. At the center of that beauty will be a new level of love, similar to but far beyond any love we have experienced here in the material realm.

Perhaps you have heard the word paramahamsa. Parama means supreme and hamsa means swan. In the East it is well known that the swan has a particular talent. If you mix milk and water together, the swan can drink the milk but leave the water behind. There is an acid in their mouth which curdles the milk, allowing the to remove it from the water. In this world the water is birth, death, old age and disease and the milk is love. The sages agree that to love and be loved is our original and eternal nature. In the realm of the material, our true nature has gotten mixed up with the temporary nature of matter. So we erroneously think that we are born and die and we doubt our eternally loving nature. Yoga is the removal of those doubts with the sword of Vedic Wisdom. It is for this reason that the Bhagavad-gita was spoken by Krishna to Arjuna, his friend and disciple, on a battlefield. The battle is within us and is raging all around us as the struggle between the truths of Divine light and the doubts of material darkness. That soul who swims across the troubled waters of material existence drinking the milk of love of God but rejecting the poisonous arguments of death, hate and the cynical beliefs of voidist and materialist thinkers, that is a great swan-like soul or paramahamsa.

Here then, is the positive process of meditation as described by the yogis. Imagine that your mind is like a glass that has gotten filled with ink. You could try to empty your mind of the darkness by the negative process know as neti-neti, or not this, not this. You could examine each thought and experience, trying to return to your original condition. The danger would be that some of the ink might still cling to the glass. Or you could adopt another process that is known as "filling the glass with milk." It is a fact, that ink floats on milk. If you fill the glass with milk, the ink will float to the top and eventually only milk will fill your mind. In this case the milk is the words of Vedic knowledge, which fill our mind with stories of Rama and Krishna and displaces the ink of materialistic knowledge. It is also the milk of the sound vibration of the many holy names of God. Repeating those sacred vibrations gives us direct contact with God through the divine quality and potency of God’s names. That is the blessing of Vishnu’s conch.

It is said in the Vedas that in our heart, which is like a lotus, our atma or true self is sleeping. While sleeping we create dream bodies of matter in order to play in the material world. But due to the dark nature of matter we get lost and wander from life to life in illusion. Then God sends his ambassador the guru to bring us back to our true nature. It is by proper hearing from a soul of pure intention who has seen God within the Divine Light that our amnesia is removed. The guru then directs us to three places. The first is to the sacred stories of the Vedas to purify our minds. The second is toward the Paramatma or portion of God manifest within our own heart. According to the Upanishads, there are two birds sitting within the same tree. One of them is eating the fruit of the tree, which is of two kinds-happiness and distress. When the eating bird finally remembers his true nature, he turns within and sees his friend who was waiting all along. That reunion of the atma who was in forgetfulness with the Lord within the heart, is the beginning of our return to an eternal relationship of love. The third place is to other holy persons, gurus or sadus as they are called. These are the souls who are awake to their true nature and no longer disturbed by the arguments made by the lawyers of matter.

That reunion of the atma with Paramatma is called Yoga. At its basis is the unshakable belief that the universe is ultimately supported by an even greater love, which is eternally seeking to reestablish a connection with us. Our own meditation should be a turning within to reconnect with Paramatma, our lost friend, lover and mate. To do this, first find a guru and then under his or her guidance, read the Vedas and learn their knowledge. By studying the lives and loves of the descents of God, of Rama and Krishna, you will see how to emulate the great loves they shared with their loved ones. That is our aspiration as souls on the path of enlightenment. We want to recover that great love which is now dormant in our hearts. Your guru will also teach you the Divine sound vibration of the names of God. With those mantras your mind will never again be filled with ignorance or doubt. It is our eternal nature and right to cultivate that love to it’s highest potential. Never allow any doubt or obstacle to deter you from the path of Divine Love. When you have this endless gift in your life, you will treat all living beings with that same sweet love and teach them that same eternal truth. Then you will have passed through the trial of Matter. You will once again be a lover of God.

© 2008 Jeffrey Armstrong All Rights Reserved

Jeffrey Armstrong has been a practicing yogi for 35 years and teaches the Philosophy and Lifestyle of Yoga, including bhakti, tantra and mantra meditation practices. He is an award-winning author, accomplished mystical poet, and master AyurVedic astrologer.