Happy for No Good Reason (Learn to Meditate: Become Stronger, Calmer and Happier)

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ONCE IN A while a special voice speaks old truths in a compelling new way. Such voices belonged to J. Krishnamurti and Sri Ramana Maharshi. Another such voice is, I feel, with Swami Shankarananda. While Swamiji is a traditionalist who has made a profound study of the ancient yogic scriptures. including Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism, he is also a modernist. He sees the great importance and value in their application to modern life. He has a talent for taking the eternal truths and making them relevant to every aspect of life. Swamiji is also an innovator who has developed and expressed unique spiritual ideas in his distinctive style. Here is a short list of some of his characteristic ideas:

We live simultaneously in two worlds.

The inner Self, the source of peace, love and wisdom, is our essential nature and can be attained by meditation and, Self-inquiry.

Thought and feeling are intimately related.

Feeling should be taken inside and resolved into the Self rather than dumped.

"Tearing thoughts" and "inflating thoughts" are wrong movements in "self-talk".

Self-talk is purified and uplifted by Accurate and Beneficial Statements.

Asking empowering questions is Self-inquiry.

One should learn to recognize and follow the upward shift of energy in daily life as well as in meditation.

Swamiji's yearning for inner wisdom led him to India where he studied for 12 years under Baba Muktananda, an enlightened meditation master. This is the traditional length of time a seeker spends with his or her spiritual mentor when seeking self-realization. With the blessings of his teacher, he was one of the first Westerners to be given the title "Swami" and to establish an ashram in the West. He immersed himself in the philosophy and practice of yoga and emerged as a guru in his own right.

Swamiji describes the state of enlightenment as one of "becoming present".

He says that no matter how painful or happy the past, or how painful or happy we think the future may be, it is the present moment, the now, that holds the key to everything.

I FIRST MET Swami Shankarananda in 1981 but it was a good 12 months before I tried to pronounce his name. I had just completed a lengthy cabaret tour of "Can't Stop the Gunston", a groundbreaking show about man's need to pay his outstanding tax bill. I had decided to say farewell to Norman, the mainstay of my career for six years. I was excited about the future, relaxed and relatively free of debt.

During the last days of the tour I'd picked up a copy of The Bulletin magazine. The cover story was on stress and it had a picture of a businessman sitting on his desk meditating. Now I'd always been quite keen to learn to meditate since the Beatles took it up because... well, because the Beatles took it up. Then I met up with a Melbourne friend of mine whom I hadn't seen in ages. He said that he was in Sydney to give a talk on meditation and that I should come along.

So I went off to this program called "Meditation and Creativity" It was held in the Sydney Masonic Hall and upon entering I thought I had mistakenly gone to an Actors Equity union meeting. It was full of actors. I felt very comfortable. Just like a night at the Logies except tonight we were all going to win. David made his speech and then introduced a Swami Shankarananda.

"Swami" I thought to myself. David didn't mention anything about a swami! Then out comes this European guy with a shaved head - before it was popular - he's wearing orange robes and he's got a red dot on his forehead. "Oh my God," I thought. "This is terrible, what has David got himself into. What's he trying to get me into?"

But it got worse, much worse. This swami opened his mouth and he was an American! Now remember this is 1981, well and truly before Australia signed the World Trade Organization treaty and we got used to the yanks dumping all their surplus swamis on our fair shores.

We ARE THE MOST educated and affluent people in human history, the most literate, the most technologically proficient. We can replace one person's heart with another's, we can fly people to other planets, and we can send tiny cameras into people's organs to inspect them from within. We are able, or will be able, to do almost anything in the physical world. However, we find this world stressful and demanding. We have trouble motivating our teenagers and keeping them away from negative influences. We find it difficult to control anger, fear or depression. We are confused by the world within ourselves.

Our situation becomes intelligible if we recognize that we actually live in two different worlds simultaneously. One is the outer world of people and objects and the other is the inner world of thoughts and feelings. Each has its own laws and each has its own form of education. We have explored the outer world in detail, however we have neglected the inner world.

In my early life I was an academic, deeply involved in Western education. I call this form of conventional education First Education or the "knowledge" tradition. The focus of First Education is the outer world, on science and technology, facts, events and history. This knowledge education embellishes us but does not transform us. We can acquire more and more information and still have the emotional sulks and tantrums of a child.

Over the past 30 years I have been involved with what I call Second Education, or the "wisdom" tradition. Second Education says that true happiness lies not in the outer world but within each of us. Not only that, it can be realized. The process of awakening to Second Education is called inner work. In all my years involved with institutions of higher learning, both as a student and a teacher. no one had ever spoken about conquering depression, overcoming fear and anger and attaining happiness and self-mastery. I learned so much about history and the stuff of the external world, but almost nothing about myself.