Yogis have marked the Summer Solstice with a special reverence for thousands of years. In our modern way of living we oftentimes become indifferent to the subtle changes in nature, even immune to the change of seasons. The yogis, with highly sensitive nervous systems marked these changes, feeling the powerful but refined shifts of vibration throughout the day, seasons, years and even millennial flux.

Yesterday we gathered in deepened meditation and chanting to avail ourselves of the “thinning” of the veil of separation that occurs during the Solstice. Spiritual skies with a blue vault above and a brilliant Light shining everywhere but with no center revealed itself and made heavenly consciousness an easy reach. Powerful cosmic rays from Divine Consciousness easily flowed from celestial regions. All felt the uplifting forces that purify the whole self.

Today we gather again as these uplifting currents continue to let eagle hearts soar. Join in this dance of the seasons and let joy surge through you as a mighty river, and peace pervade you as an immense sea.

For durable materials you must use a great deal of heat and sometimes pressure to get a very strong product. And when you are working a metal into a form you bring it to a forging temperature, about 60% of its melting point. The forging temperature allows you to shape the material without creating cracks and weaknesses in it.

For instance the forging temperature for tin is about 450 degrees F, while the forging temperature for carbon steel occurs at a whopping 2250 degrees F. If you want to make a very hard substance like diamond, just like Mother Nature does, then you simply bury carbon dioxide 100 miles deep in the earth, heat it to about 2,200 degrees F., put it under 725,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, and then somehow quickly rush it towards the earth’s surface in order to cool.

When man or Mother Nature wants to produce a very hard, durable substance they use these means in order to get the desired results. Mother Nature is not so different when creating something very different, when She is forging  character in a human being, and Her masterpiece, a spiritual transformation in you.

Divine Mother uses the circumstances you are placed in order to create what you are meant to become. In this transformation you can certainly feel that the heat and pressure is all too much, however that is because you do not really know what the end product is to be. If the pressure feels like you are buried 100 miles under the earth, and temperatures are soaring to unimaginable heights, then you can only know that what is being produced will be of tremendous strength, hardness and durability.

Faith in the Master Forger; faith that He knows exactly what He is doing will give you the endurance to remain in the crucible and take all that He metes out to you. Trust and faith are alloys in your being that allows the transformation to go on with the best results. Surely your trust and faith will be tested, but that is part of the strengthening and clarifying process you have to undergo. Do not fear, enter the crucible knowing full well that you are ever under the loving care and watchful eye of the Master Forger.

Picture: The great Master Mahasaya and his Divine Romance.

As an aspirant for truth and realization you either qualify or disqualify yourself, based on the purity of your yearning for God. Grace can give you an experience in upliftment, peace, bliss, joy or some tremendous realization, but this is only the beginning of your journey.

To make continuous progress you must ever apply the methods a qualified preceptor gives to you. Without this application the source of Grace will be dammed up and the flow of spiritual living waters will dry up. Without the flow of these living waters aspiration will evaporate; for without Grace no real progress can be made.

For every slip and fall on the path you can trace it back to a falloff of intensity in your spiritual practice. If you find that your practice is dry, that temptation or doubt has crept in the back door and made itself home in your mind, then let the alarms sound to awaken you to the fact that the liar and thief has made inroads.

Only Light can dispel darkness, only knowledge can dislodge ignorance, and only your sincere desire for God can make you know Him. Make sure you have a love affair with the Infinite, and worship your Heavenly Father-Divine Mother with all of your heart, strength, mind and soul and you will find the sacred Presence a loyal and constant lover that will make you qualified to be an enlightened Being.

Krishna Playing His Flute: calling all back to God

painting by Gargi/Lakshmi of Anandashram

Recognizing the Presence of God is something many have difficulty in doing, and doing so consistently. It is not that God is far away from you, that is not the problem. In fact, for the brain the opposite is true. The Presence of God is so familiar that the brain has ceased to cognize it.

Let me give you an example. Your eyes take in photons bouncing off every object in the room in which you sit, however your brain has learned to filter out much of what you see as not worth noticing, or another way of saying it, it has become efficient in processing what seems relevant. So, instead of seeing everything in the room within your 180 degree viewing range, your brain only sees certain objects. If someone walks into the room you may notice them only, and while your eyes have been seeing the chair as well as all other objects in the room, it only notices the chair when the person sits on it. The real truth is that what you see is really a complete fabrication by your brain.

All of your senses function in much the same way. Your brain, being efficient, only presents to your conscious mind what it thinks is required and what it can make sense of. If something is not deemed useful, the brain does not see it. There are other faculties of the brain that are also turned on or off depending on what are useful. Your ability to recognize certain sounds, appreciation of beauty, intuition, or God-consciousness are abilities of the brain that may never have been turned on because it was deemed not relevant to your situation.

A spiritually oriented child may never lose the faculty to recognize God, while a more earthy child does not see the value in it, so that ability quickly drops away. The Self may be like a breeze you do not notice, or some fixture of a room you have grown familiar with, or any other countless phenomena going on all around you that you simply do not notice.

In the book The Science of Religion Yoganandaji makes the point that all human beings seek out happiness, and that only through God-experience can anyone find lasting happiness; therefore knowing God is a universal necessity that has been largely unrecognized. When the value of God-experience is truly known, the search for triggering the part of the brain that can see and feel God begins.

Because the brain is not used to seeing the value in knowing God it overlooks what it already knows; much like seeing but not seeing the chair in the room. Spiritual practice is learning the necessity to know God. Until the brain fully appreciates the value of Bliss, Light, and intuitional Wisdom that can only come from the Divine Presence it will treat the whole idea like a foreign concept that it chooses not to see or feel.

If your brain does not recognize the supreme value of God-experience, do not think it is because you do not have that ability. Rather, slow the mind down and feel what is already present within you. Learn to perceive the sacred behind all other experiences, for it is the vital life within that makes life possible. God is not absent because He is distant; rather you do not see Him because He is so very close to who and what you really are.