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Auther

Ramakrishna Ananda

Dawn Comes

The signs of awakening

Awakening begins. You proceed patiently and persistently, with devotion and  faith, striving to be a friend of all.

From the deep yearning of your heart you put forth every effort. Fulfillment in higher consciousness requires focus and energy of your whole being — short of strain. (You recognize strain creates resistance to success. Your developing self-acceptance enables you to distinguish between application and strain.)

Spiritual Living, Awakening

Perhaps you have a Master, perhaps not. If not, you strive to your utmost to understand and take the guidance of your higher consciousness through your  meditations and prayer, and through your studies. Ideally, you have a special teacher or even better, a Sat Guru. However, you if do not, remember the Lord is with you and is always adequate in providing whatever is needed. On your unfolding into the light, you will receive all the help you truly need.

Inevitably, as the result of your sincerity and devotion, the dawn of your awakening comes.

Mystical awakening is individual. Your particular sequence will be the very best one for you. It is arranged through the instrumentality of higher consciousness itself. You must give yourself a chance and not interfere with your awakening. Using guidelines from this website and Mysteries.Net may be helpful, but to use these principles in order to set your will on how your awakening is supposed to occur will greatly inhibit you.

However, while awakening comes to each person differently, some stages of realization are nearly universal. These stages and signs recur again and again in the lives of awakening aspirants. When you experience any of these stages you are greatly fortunate. Your understanding of these signs will prove extremely beneficial, providing you encouragement and validation of your personal awakening.

Many seekers have experiences they don’t understand and they live far away from qualified teachers. Often, these sincere seekers are having genuine enlightening experiences but since they cannot comprehend or evaluate what is happening to them, they do not recognize or build upon their tremendous blessings. To uninformed seekers, one experience may seemsas important or unimportant as another.

Many times, spiritual awakening is confused with psychic states or a flood of vivid impressions projected from the subconscious mind. It’s a “precious and rare thing,” unless you have an enlightened teacher, to know where you are coming from and where you are going as awakening begins. Awakening events can occur to you for years but you probably will not give them the attention they deserve unless you have a basic familiarity with the road ahead.

You may lament you are not becoming enlightened while indications of your awakening are all around you. It’s essential, if you wish to make gratifying, lasting progress, that you understand the dawnings of higher consciousness and what they signify to your life-enrichment.

As you proceed, be alert.

Reverence for Life

The first sign of awakening is usually a growing reverence for life. You find you are immensely appreciative of being alive. Life itself is revealed as a wonder or a miracle. In your reverence for life you delightedly value the lives of others and of yourself. You perceive life as extremely precious, such an extraordinary phenomenon. You find it easy to conceive in your musings that incredibly great consciousness and energy is at work wherever there is life. With awe and enthusiasm you often turn your mind to consider how great must be that higher consciousness which gives life and sustains it! In life itself there is enough to wonder at forever. In your unique heart you see enough to explore and develop for much more than a lifetime. What is life? Who can say? But you, the awakening aspirant, wholeheartedly treasure being alive and love to watch that life force animating each person; indeed, you admire all living creatures.

You become aware that you may have many negative qualities but, nevertheless, you have an extremely positive and undeniable plus — you have life. You are an expression of that higher consciousness which maintains and sustains life. Life is a marvel. You see it. You know it. You abide in wonder.

You find, with these realizations, that you begin to value other people a great deal. Whether they value themselves and have noticed the miracle of life or not, you perceive uniqueness and significance in each one. You have become enabled, as your eyes of higher consciousness open, to see life well. You can easily understand why Albert Schweitzer said that it’s fine to cut the grass in order to grow a garden, but on the way home from the garden do not drag your scythe and needlessly kill one blade of grass. This now makes great sense to you.

You also clearly understand “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” You know all people are, in reality, sharing life together. You deeply yearn that everyone will see the preciousness of life and not hurt, deny, or strive to destroy the life in another.

Your awakening to life’s richness also prompts a profound consideration of your own conduct. Your interactions with others more deeply reflect your respect for their concerns and feelings. You actively strive not to harm people or cause them any suffering. You practice, “Do unto others ….” You seek to be constructive and helpful to your fellow human beings.

Cause and Effect Insight

Being appreciative of life you understand it more clearly. Your reverence for life gives you deeper levels of wisdom and more opportunities for fulfillment.

Another excellent sign of your awakening is your heightened awareness of cause and effect. You see that the events of your life are the results of causes. You recognize that what happens to you each day is not based on random, irrational fates. Rather, your thoughts, attitudes, words, and actions most significantly cause and influence your personal experiences of life. While some events in your life remain perplexing and inexplicable, more often than not you can understand why other people and life in general treat you the way they do. You gain the insight which enables you to examine your good experiences and create (cause) more of them.

Further, you stop ignoring your bad experiences if you are truly awakening. Whenever something painful or otherwise negative happens to you, you seek an insight about what caused such an unpleasant effect. Then, in your thoughts, feelings, words, and actions, you strive to cause a preferred effect, a more satisfying and ideal result.

You notice the good you do for people, or for the world in general, comes back to you in kind — not necessarily directly from the people you helped but by some perceptible means your “good returns good” to you.

You see harm, or evil — either in thought, feeling, word, or action — often comes back to its originator.

Each day you appreciatively watch cause and effect relationships going back and forth, on and on, in simple or complex combinations. No longer does life seem to have no rhyme and reason, or seem absurd as many existentialists regularly exclaim.

More Meaning In Life

In your reverence for life you find that life itself is like a two-edged sword. If you use your life in a negative way you can hurt someone; but, inevitably you too will find yourself cut — perhaps not by the person you hurt but by some other precise means. The cuts come back, each and every one, in detail. Evil returns suffering; good returns good.

You also discover that your increased awareness and reverence for life make profound changes in the way causes and effects act in your life. You become progressively free from negative experiences and revel in new causes.

Often formalized thought makes cause and effect a bizarre philosophy of punishment for being alive and a rationalization for every unfavorable occurrence. However, you will see cause and effect, in your awakening, as a creative process — beautiful, exciting, just, and very helpful. Becoming more responsible for the condition of your life and attitudes, you take part in a regenerative process. You realize that a new life, one ever more to your liking, awaits you.

In essence, as your awakening begins you will very likely perceive more meaning and purpose in your life. You will become more fulfilled and able to accomplish your goals as you see a relationship between cause and effect, between your ideas (and feelings) and events in the outer world. You now know that your good returns good, that being evil is cosmically stupid.

But you have even more to experience. The days and years of awakening and enlightenment rush toward you. The five stages of mental/emotional quickening in higher consciousness beckon you to new discoveries. Dawn has come! Let’s begin!

Reflection

I am free to generate
New causes and change my world.

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#2 THE MYSTIC GAZE
A Classic Technique

This classic technique is one of the mystic’s greatest treasures.

It is designed to stimulate your mystical faculties and begin the process of spiritual awakening.

With the Mystic Gaze enjoy the developing sense of clarity, coordination and attunement with life in all you do.

  1. Sit calmly and relax your eyes
  2. Gaze slightly upwards 20-30 degrees
  3. Look into space 20 feet or more
  4. Gaze, don’t stare or strain your eyes
  5. Simply observe and appreciate your awareness of space
  6. Enjoy the dawning wholeness for several minutes
  7. Gear down and go about your day

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#7 EXPANSION THROUGH ATTITUDE AND GOOD WILL
Change Your Heart

Your practice of good will cultivates the heart’s truest, deepest feeling:  love.

These good will practices are a boon to mystical study.

The goal of good will practice is the change of the heart.

When your heart naturally and spontaneously radiates forth a palpable good will, then you are a changed person.

  1. Consciously direct your thoughts and feelings toward an attitude of good will
  2. Bring a person to mind
  3. Or place your awareness on a person closest to you
  4. Direct good will toward this person
  5. Feel free to add specific well-wishes like health, love, courage, etc.
  6. Allow your heart to expand, to change

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#6 EXPANSION LEVEL ONE
Quality of Life

Mystics break out of body bondage through numerous expansions of the heart — of the sense of self.

Your feeling of self-awareness imprisons or frees you.

Happily, you can do something powerfully liberating about the state of your heart and the quality of your life.

  1. Sit comfortably for 15 minutes
  2. Choose a person you know
  3. Imagine you’re walking in his/her shoes
  4. Feel you’re inside this person
  5. Say “If I were (name), I’d feel and think…”
  6. Have fun with it and let your heart expand

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#5 THE HEART AND ITS LIBERATION
Your Sense of Self

Mystics break out of mind and body bondage through expansions, expansions of consciousness.

Your “Heart” is your sense of self, your feeling about who you are.

Who are you as a distinct person from everyone else? This is your core individuality, your mystical heart.

  1. Focus on your mystic heart
  2. It is located in the right-central chest or inside the spine behind the heart
  3. Practice The Radiance or The Mist:
  4. Feel that your mystic heart…
  5. Radiates love, light and energy, or
  6. Generates a white mist flowing outward

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#4 THE MYSTIC BREATH
Your Window

Your breath is the key to the mystery of your life. The Mystic Breath is conscious use of this key.

Our individual natures will require different windows — different energy centers — from which to view the life force.

Allow the mystic breath to reveal your personal window.

  1. Stretch and then sit comfortably
  2. Take 5 to 7 deep breaths
  3. Focus on the center of your upper lip
  4. Witness the breath come and go
  5. Let your mind move to a natural center
  6. Watch your breath and the life force from this “window”

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#3 THE ASCENT
The Essence of Your Life

We begin meditation on the Infinite by focusing our awareness on Spirit, the life essence within us.

How can we do something so seemingly abstract? It’s easy. Spirit empowers your breath night and day.

Let the life force reveal itself to you. Sense the higher power which flows through you.

You’ll feel more alive.

  1. Stretch and relax your body
  2. Sit comfortably
  3. Take 5 to 7 deep breaths
  4. Focus on your nostril rims
  5. Witness the breath come and go
  6. Enjoy for 10 to 12 minutes
  7. Inhale deeply and stretch

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#0 THE MYSTIC SELF
Our True Nature

In the view of mystics, the major problem in life for most of us is ignorance of our true natures.

The Mysteries reveal many ways that you can actually contact your mystic self — and the Infinite Consciousness.

Do you, can you, contact your Mystic Self? Yes, indeed!

  1. Practice this anytime you like
  2. Probably your mind wanders quite often
  3. At times during the day, look at your mind and notice when it’s wandering
  4. Then, turn your attention to that part of your consciousness which observes that your mind is wandering
  5. That special overseeing awareness is part of your marvelous mystic self

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#1 MYSTIC AWAKENING
Benefits

Stimulate your mystical awakening.

When you wake up from a dream you realize you were only dreaming.

Consider too that this normal state of awareness in which you live may be a kind of sleep also.

As you do this technique you’ll find the world becomes more beautiful and enjoyable.

  1. Try this many times a day
  2. Whisper to yourself, “Wake up!”
  3. Mentally say, “Wake up!”
  4. Increase your attention, appreciation and feeling of love
  5. Just cheerfully exhort yourself
  6. Wake up!

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As you may know, we do not charge for our courses. All Yoga World content is free and available to you with our blessings. However, we do have a simple, but important request that’s key to the transformations necessary to succeed on the path.

We ask you to commit two hours a week to selfless service. This service can be anything you choose ranging from helping a family member or neighbor to volunteering at a nonprofit organization.

I Commit to Serve

This commitment is solely between you and your inner self.

Why the Commitment?

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