# Deep Meditation - Pathway to Personal Freedom  ## Metadata - Author: [[Yogani]] - Full Title: Deep Meditation - Pathway to Personal Freedom - Category: #books ## Highlights - The mind is a machine – a thought machine. It produces thoughts all day and throughout much of the night. We experience these endless thoughts in our awareness. The mind itself is not awareness. It is only a machine. We are the awareness. This points to an interesting possibility. If we can bring the thought machine, the mind, to rest, what will we experience? It will be our awareness, our self, minus the incessant activity of the mind. This is what meditation is for, and the consequences of this are far-reaching. ([Location 95](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=95)) - Here is the procedure of deep meditation: While sitting comfortably with eyes closed, we’ll just relax. We will notice thoughts, streams of thoughts. That is fine. We just let them go by without minding them. After about a minute, we gently introduce the mantra, …I AM... ([Location 112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=112)) - What is enlightenment? In its most basic form, it is abiding inner silence. It is directly and automatically experiencing who and what we are in every moment – while we are awake, while we are in dreaming sleep, and while we are in dreamless deep sleep. Always aware, always awake inside. That is the possibility that deep meditation puts before us. ([Location 232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=232)) ## New highlights added April 9, 2024 at 8:33 AM - Who am I? – I am the silent awareness standing behind all this. What am I doing here? – I am here to grow into full awareness of my true nature, which is peace, creativity and happiness. ([Location 67](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=67)) - This is the ultimate answer to the question, “Who am I?” – I am the essence of everything, and everything that is manifest is the essence of me. ([Location 79](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=79)) - But we will not use I AM for the meaning – only for the sound. We can also spell it AYAM. No meaning there, is there? Only the sound. That is what we want. ([Location 107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=107)) - Whenever we realize we are not thinking the mantra inside anymore, we come back to it easily. ([Location 116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=116)) - But, if we are meditating, as soon as we realize we are off into a stream of thoughts, no matter how mundane or profound, we just easily go back to the mantra. Like that. We don’t make a struggle of it. The idea is not that we have to be on the mantra all the time. That is not the objective. The objective is to easily go back to it when we realize we are off ([Location 120](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=120)) - How long and how often do we meditate? For most people, twenty minutes is the best duration for a meditation session. It is done twice per day, once before the morning meal and day’s activity, and then again before the evening meal and evening’s activity. ([Location 137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=137)) - This cycle of thinking the mantra, losing it, and coming out into a stream of thoughts is a process of purification in the mind and nervous system. It is very powerful, and will ultimately yield a constant experience of inner silence in our meditation and, more importantly, in our daily activity. ([Location 171](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=171)) - For this reason, we sometimes refer to our experiences in meditation as scenery. Even ([Location 175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=175)) ## New highlights added April 10, 2024 at 9:57 AM - Deep meditation in our daily life naturally leads us to a perpetually more relaxed mind, and to the greater levels of creativity that come with that condition. In that way, we can say that meditation will help us to become more intelligent, simply by giving us better access to the latent genius that lies within us all. ([Location 218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=218)) - While others are noticing the improvement in our demeanor, we may not. We are just living it, with a gradually growing inner smile. ([Location 647](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=647)) - When sexual energy is going to that higher purpose in the neurobiology, we call it spiritual energy. ([Location 715](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=715)) - The witness is our own self in the deepest sense. It is that part of us that experiences everything we are aware of – our thoughts, our feelings, our physical sensations, the world around us. Everything. Let all that fade away and what we are left with is the witness, our own special self, which does not move or change throughout all the experiences we have in our entire life. That is what we are cultivating in deep meditation. ([Location 788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=788)) - Wisdom comes from inner silence. This is why we say, meditate and then go out and be active in the world. By this we are engaging our inner silence in our daily thoughts, words and deeds, facilitating the growth and stabilization of inner silence, the witness, in our nervous system and ongoing experience of life. So the path of deep meditation is two-fold. Through the simple procedure of meditation, we dive within to our pure bliss consciousness. Then we come out and engage in our daily activities in the world, which stabilizes the quality of inner silence in us. This two-fold process leads to the rise of our inner silence and the phenomenon of stillness in action. ([Location 830](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001L1RUTQ&location=830))