A short book on meditation
The Story of a Wave That Forgot
You did everything right.
And you still lie awake at 2 a.m.
Praise lifts you. Criticism drops you. You get the thing you wanted and within a week you want the next thing.
You are not broken. You are living on the surface of an ocean, in the wind, being tossed by weather you didn’t choose.
There is another way to live, and it is thousands of years old.
One awareness became a world of separate selves. You replay that story every morning before you open your eyes.
Five winds blow through every ordinary day, and you mistake them for yourself rather than for weather you never chose.
A twenty-minute practice you can begin tomorrow morning, described plainly and completely.
Read it in an evening. Then read it twice more.
Some of this you can test against your own experience this week. Some of it is testimony from people who went further. Some of it is faith.
The book always tells you which is which, and never asks you to take the last kind on trust.
The book maps six layers, from the surface you live on to the stillness underneath.
Darkness (eyes closed)
The Surface
Matter, the five elements and the five senses.
In you: Your physical body (the ice).
Light
The Luminous
Mind and space take weightless form in light.
In you: Your subtle body and dreams (the water).
The Blueprint
Universal Mind and Universal Space. Intellect. The patterns of everything.
In you: Your mind and intellect. Your causal body (the vapor).
Sound only, nothing left to see
the mind cannot pass this line
Sound only, nothing left to see
The Balance
The Universal Sense of Self. The three qualities held perfectly still. The veil begins.
In you: The root of your “I.”
The Pure Sound
The sphere of pure consciousness. From its centre the first sound flows.
In you: Your spark.
Beyond all sound
The Nameless
Universal Consciousness. Pure awareness and love.
In you: The awareness reading these words.
the way home
Three people. Each went further in than the one before.
I’m not a saint, a scholar or a teacher. I’m an engineer. I run businesses. I chased the education and the money and I got both, and I was still being tossed around by life.
Then something happened that I didn’t ask for and couldn’t explain, and it led me to a man I’d met exactly once, two years earlier.
That story is at the end of the book.
Born in Bihar, India. A scholar of Vedic wisdom, meditation and self-realization, a lifelong practitioner, and a disciple of Maharshi Mehi. He has translated his teacher’s discourses into English. In the Santmat tradition he follows, the voices of saints from every religion are treated as sacred. He answers everyone who writes to him personally, and has never charged for his time.
A self-realized master and yogi of the Santmat tradition in India. His teaching maps the inner journey in stages, from the darkness behind closed eyes through inner light and inner sound, and he held that the path is open to anyone willing to sit, whatever their religion or circumstances. The six layers described in this book follow his map.
The book is his map, in plain language.
Some people will read this and do nothing. Some will sharpen their intellect. Some will begin the practice. And a small number will want to go further than this book can take them.
If that’s you, write to Balmiki Sharma. He answers personally.