Vedantic Shores Press, Archive of Feature Articles by Paul Hourihan

Until we discover and experience our true Self, we are occupied with surrogates for that Self. Where is this Self? According to Christ, “the kingdom of heaven is within you.” But instead we look to the outer world.

In our search, we get some sense of it through substitutive activities such as the beauty of Nature, addictions, crowds, passionate causes, family gatherings…. These occasions make us feel stronger and happier—temporarily at least because they free us from our self-sense or self-absorption. But these activities don’t advance us; they return us to where we were and to what we were. And sooner or later they all fail us, and are meant to fail us. Although we cannot help but resort to them by the Divine Will’s own design and by our inner necessity, we also cannot help but be betrayed by them and left abandoned and desolate at the end. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. 1

Even Nature fails us as we see in the lives of William Wordsworth, and Henry David Thoreau who spent much time in Nature and wrote so beautifully about its glories, but weren’t fulfilled thereby.

If we put our trust in anything for too long for its own sake, we cannot but end unhappily. Nothing is to be loved for its own sake, nothing whatever. In the Upanishads, the sage Yagnavalkya, before renouncing the world, gives the following instruction to his wife, Maitreyi:

“A wife loves her husband not for his own sake, dear, but because the Self lives in him.
“A husband loves his wife not for her own sake, dear, but because the Self lives in her …
“Everything is loved not for its own sake but because the Self lives in it.... ”2

“Let all ignore him,” concludes Yagnavalkya, “who thinks that anything whatever is different from the Self.”3 Humanity’s heroes are those who have this sense of unity with others. We are aware of their oneness and attunement with them. We recognize that that is the thing in them we would most desire, not their power or fortune but that quality.

How do we dissolve the separateness we feel in life and get past the surrogates for the Self in order to reach the real Self? Through living a spiritual life, which results in a systematic erosion of ego consciousness and its replacement by spiritual consciousness, then the One, the Self, the Blissful Presence Within is glimpsed as real.

The scriptures of the world are roadmaps that lead us to the hidden kingdom within. Read them closely, they are pathways to Self-realization.

And meditation is the vehicle that will carry you to that kingdom of Light that is within you, that is part of you … and is you.

[1] Holy Bible, Exodus 20: 3

[2] The Upanishads, translated by Eknath Easwaran, (Nilgiri Press, 1987), Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 36

[3] The Upanishads, Breath of the Eternal, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester, (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1975), Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 143.

See also Words of Wisdom: Meditation and Spiritual Life and articles MEDITATION - THE ULTIMATE ESCAPE and DISSATISFACTION: THE PREREQUISITE FOR SPIRITUAL LIFE.

MAINTAINING THE LOVE RELATIONSHIP WITH Meditation

By Paul Hourihan

Many of us know from experience that the beauty and intensity of a love relationship when it’s in full flower will gradually fade away. We lose control of it subject to mysterious forces that seemed so absent at the beginning—forces that slowly undermine the splendor of what was there originally. How, then, can we maintain our love, which we want to preserve and protect more than anything else in the world?

Meditation will rejuvenate it and restore the grace that was there when the light of love rested on your life initially. The transforming power of meditation on your personality will enable you to recapture the quality that attracted the love in the first place—and more—for what you achieve, what comes by knowledge and development, is deeper and truer than what was given you for the brief season at the beginning.

Meditation will transform you—what must happen if your love is to be retained, renewed, and preserved. You may say, “… but I don't want to be transformed—after all, it was me, as I am, that he or she loved in the first place; it was with this self, this personality that I loved as well. Why do you talk of changing that which served so successfully at the outset?” Because it wasn't your ordinary self that experienced love—but that part of you in touch with your true Essence. The self that you are now is the egoistic, selfish, unripe personality that you were before the grace of love ascended on you and made you, for a while, into the ideal person you were with your beloved—the same process taking place with him or her as well.

Love transformed you during that all-too-brief period. Then, like all grace, it was withdrawn and it was left up to you to re-achieve the quality of grace on your own so that the revelation would become permanently established in you.

Through meditation and the way of life it engenders, we can connect to the source of love itself, which as the mystic discovers, is within our hearts. Meditation gives us the opportunity to perfect the wonderful thing we discovered long before to become once again mystics of love.

See also Words of Wisdom: Meditation and Spiritual Life and article MEDITATION - THE ULTIMATE ESCAPE.

Meeting the Spiritual Challenges of the Kali Yuga

By Paul Hourihan, edited by Anna Hourihan

According to Hindu mythology, the duration of the world is divided into four Yugas,* or ages, each lasting thousands of years. The Kali Yuga or Iron Age—the current age we are deeply entangled in—comes at the end of the cycle and is historically a time of materialism, sensuality and godlessness. The question then arises: How do we meet the challenges that the Kali Yuga imposes on our spiritual lives and value systems?

Knowledge is power. It is only through knowledge that we can acquire the proper tools to counteract and survive the pervasive and compelling power of this age of conflict and strife.

Since we are dealing with the fundamental nature of an era that is opposed to spiritual life we need to seek power at the deepest level of which we are capable. This is accomplished through the discipline of spiritual practice, which chiefly involves the operation of the mind in quest of itself in meditation. Commitment to meditation gradually changes us, brings knowledge, deepens our intuitive powers, strengthens us and brings the wisdom needed to deal with the dark powers of the age.

Likewise, what is called for is a commitment to something abiding—something beyond the temporal and changing nature of this world—and that is Spiritual Truth. By making such a commitment, we gain power over the forces in the Kali Yuga that are trying to bring us down. Then only will it dawn on us that we must live with extreme wakefulness, vigilance, and simplicity, as though we are on a perpetual battlefield. As Christ in the Bible commands his disciples: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”**

The Kali Yuga is the triumph of the external forces over the true inner life. Therefore, the inward spirit must be probed through meditation until it becomes stronger than the outer; then we are able to confront the ominous mindset of the Kali Yuga, and succeed.

* The four yugas are: Satya or Golden Age, Treta or Silver Age, Dwapara or Copper Age, and Kali or Iron
Age.
** Holy Bible, Matthew 10:16

THE TRUE NATURE OF THE WORLD
by Paul Hourihan, edited by Anna Hourihan

What is the nature of the manifested world? It would have to be like its Creator: Divine. One without a Second ... according to Vedanta.

An artist may conceive evil, wickedness, etc., in his creations, because of his own still unregenerate nature. But an all-loving, all-perfect Being can only create, even conceive, a world like itself –“of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.”*

Compare, for example, some great saint or God-Man being entrusted with the creation of the world, what would the result be like? Would it not be a reflection of his own nature—would it not be like him?... And yet, it would be a world of conflicts, struggles, opposition, obstacle courses of various kinds, as John Keats had intuited in his “value of Soul-making” letter.** This world is precisely made for the purpose of our spiritual development. With only benign, beautiful and welcome experiences in it, we would never attain to perfection, which the Saint or God-Man would know more than anyone—would know what was necessary in the way of resistance and conflict to have produced the kind of consciousness that he now has. Therefore the world, though apparently containing negative elements, will actually contain nothing that does not play a role—direct or indirect—in bringing us to our spiritual destiny.

Thus, we may appropriately conclude that everything that is is a reflection of the Divine, including evil, including ego… without which we would not initiate the struggle to begin with—the struggle by virtue of which enlightenment may come.

If this is true of the God-man, how much more true will it be of the Supreme itself? In other words, how much more inevitable it will be that the Supreme create a world that reflects its own nature, which is in effect a mirror of itself: Divine in every part.

* Holy Bible, Habakkuk 1: 13
** From a letter sent to his brother and sister in April 1819:
"The common cognomen [epithet] of this world among the misguided and superstitious is 'a vale of tears' from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven—What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you please “The value of Soul-making” … Do you not see … how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul…" - The Letters of John Keats, 4^th edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp 334-5.

STUDY THE WORD

by Paul Hourihan, edited by Anna Hourihan

Study of the scriptures is an important aspect of spiritual life. An intense, creative, engaged reflection and a searching, earnest examination of the law, the Word, the universal wisdom as it may be found in scriptures,* will help to illuminate us into commitment and conviction.

How will this kind of scriptural analysis, and the special way of life the scriptures enjoin on us, help us to have a life-transforming mystical experience?

By helping us to collect our energy, fuse our strength, concenter our power of will. We are scattered; this will make us whole. We are many; this will make us one. Then with that united force of integrated inner strength we will plunge deep into the center of the mind and storm the gates of heaven that are hidden there. Do you think we can do that with our ordinary, everyday strength?
Through the practice of nonattachment, however difficult it may be at first. A life of cultivation of this virtue of discrimination, enlightened dispassion—what we call nonattachment—will reward us with the gift of deep peace, freedom from cravings and from restlessness during the time of meditation itself. In that condition it will be easy for us to dive deep within… the world of sense attraction and attachment having been stilled for us by our daily cultivation of spiritual virtues over a long period.
By spiritual direction in our lives leading to a life of moral and ethical orientation. By thinking of others and by curbing our self-love and natural egocentrism, we discover that the great obstacle to mystical experience, to the experience of Truth and Enlightenment, namely, egoism, is gradually being reduced. In other words, a nonegoistic life is being set forth.
Finally, the Great Law—the Law of Universal Oneness—will be reflected more and more in our lives and consequently in our meditations; for as we live, so shall we meditate… and likewise as we meditate, so shall we live, and so shall we be. Meditation, the chamber where Truth resonates, if Truth we have found, will be strengthened and reinforced for us by our obedience to and increasing reflection of the Great Law of Unity, of Universal Oneness.

For all these reasons, as well as others that will occur as we proceed, mystical experience and the life being recommended to us in the scriptures interact upon each other intimately and directly.

However, the scriptures are not the end. Though they are our highest production, they offer only the basic introduction to the realities of spiritual life in the mystical ascent. In the meantime, they help us to understand, check, curb, and control the lower nature and establish ourselves on a new path—that achievement, alone, will be monumental.
_______________________

* Mystical writings in particular, such as: "The Sermon on the Mount" in the Holy Bible, the Upanishads, and the Tao Te Ching.

Please note: Our latest title, Children of Immortal Bliss: A New Perspective on our True Identity Based on the Ancient Vedanta Philosophy of India includes a study of the Upanishads.

every DAY IS A NEW YEAR DAY

by Paul Hourihan, edited by Anna Hourihan - (Excerpt from a taped lecture)

The New Year is here. We hope you’re starting some resolutions to become even better than what you are and have been. But we don’t need a New Year’s Day for that, do we? Every day is a New Year Day; every day is Christmas.

In our spiritual lives, every day is Christmas because we celebrate the sense of joy and oneness that Christmas brings to ordinary people during the holiday season. We also celebrate New Year’s Day and every day of our lives by the resolution we make when we wake up in the morning, such as “this day let me be better; let me practice change in myself today” and similar resolutions we state at the start of each day.

New Year’s Day is for those who are not practicing spiritual life but need the benefit of a few days or a week or two to give them extra motivation to change their lives—this is all to the good and we wish them well.

Meanwhile, as the Christmas season passes and a new year is upon us we realize that these celebrations with others that we enjoy are, in a sense, symbols of what we are doing in spiritual life. Christmas is a symbol not only of Christ’s birth but the ever-renewed birth of something in us each day. We may not know what to call it, but we think it is the beginning of what might eventually be a rebirth of spirit; New Year’s Day is a symbol of that rebirth in our will and resolution to turn over a new leaf.

We have 365 New Year days to be authentic spiritual aspirants!

Dissatisfaction - The Prerequisite for Spiritual Life

By Paul Hourihan

Why are some drawn to the spiritual search, and not others? Dissatisfaction—discontent with the world and with oneself. We must disintegrate (break down our conditioned thinking and behavior) before we can integrate. We must know great conflict before peace, great passion before serenity. We must want and need the Truth. Otherwise we do not find it.

Truth belongs to the discontented.

Dissatisfaction with oneself and with Life, as well as a great inner, ongoing discontent is what is needful.

From the viewpoint of reincarnation, it is when we have lived many lives, passed through all the experiences, then the discontent arises because all that we have gone through does not satisfy or fulfill. We are ripe for something else. The fruit of our readiness, our ripeness, hangs heavy on the bough. The slightest stimulus may loosen it—some book, some meeting, some moment, some dream, some tragedy.

In other words, we have to work our way through the basic experiences that Life has to offer, that the world provides, before we are ready for that which the world does not provide, or that Life does not conceive—the world of spiritual enlightenment, of mystical realization.

Another prerequisite—a kind of hopelessness … like a land bird that finds itself on the mast of a ship that has gone out sea.… Us, too. What else can we do?

But from this condition springs grit and determination, which are so essential. But isn’t mildness and quietness always recommended? Yes, but an achieved mildness at depth, where the Truth is. Congenital mildness lies on the surface and is perhaps not the best ideal because the drive, the determination is not there. But the mildness we achieve through effort—that is different.

Our strong resolution to go forward, in turn, is fed by desire, passion, and energy that is not necessarily visible to others: passion of soul, and energy of will.

A more purely spiritual prerequisite: guilelessness … absence of calculation … simplicity.

All the prerequisites are really geared to enable us to weather, and eventually supplant the psychological pattern of our past conditioning that provides resistance to spiritual life.

See also Words of Wisdom: Spiritual Life and Reincarnation.

Meditation - The Ultimate Escape

By Paul Hourihan/ed. Anna Hourihan

Going away on vacation is wonderful! There is only one fault with it—we bring ourselves along. We can get away from our jobs, but we can’t get away from ourselves—that is, the ego self, the compulsive self, the ordinary self.

One reason we drink and take drugs is so that we can temporarily escape from the limited self we normally identify with. Sexual adventure serves the same purpose, since sexual excitement pushes the ordinary consciousness out of the central place in our life for a little while and we seem to become someone new.

Hence, also, our constant need of novelty—new sensations, new things!

But still we can’t escape ourselves! What is the solution to this? We should make ourselves such that we won’t want to escape! The spiritually evolved individual, for example, is absorbed in his or her own Presence and is quite content. A great deep opens up within and he or she discovers at last what the rest of us are foolishly seeking to uncover through novelty, travel, sex, addictions and losing ourselves in work.

To reach this state we have to control, renew and transform the mind. How do we do this? Through the practice of meditation. With meditation we escape from the ego self; we push this aside because we’re seeking something else. We immobilize it for five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour, or whatever we can manage without strain. During this time we give the mind a respite from its usual restless, ego-driven self. We infuse the mind with different vibrations, such as peace, love, devotion, and acceptance, which are coming from a higher level of the mind. Otherwise it experiences its usual self … and thus is continually bored.

Knowingly or unknowingly, we are aiming for the mystical state so that the mind will experience another consciousness than its own habitual consciousness: namely, the Self, the charisma of the Divine Presence within us.
Behold, the kingdom of heaven is within you. (Luke 18: 21)

The true vacation is meditation—we absent ourselves from the familiar limited self to reveal the Unlimited Self within.

See also Words of Wisdom: Meditation and Spiritual Life and Articles: IS MYSTICISM ESCAPISM? and GOING BEYOND THE SURROGATES FOR THE SELF.

WE have It ALL NOW!
by Paul Hourihan

We seek fulfillment in so many things—love, marriage, parenthood, art, wealth, power—and fail to find it in any. What will fulfill us? There is something: namely, the knowledge that nothing will fulfill us, that we need no fulfilling, that we have it all now!

Spiritual meditation reinforces this idea by turning our attention inward. The answer we seek is to be discovered by solitude, prayer, meditation, inner analysis; in other words, by cultivating a life of introspection even as we continue to live in the world. But long practice is necessary, as it is necessary in mastering any difficult art. Here the task is to discover that there was nothing to learn, nothing to do, nothing to be discovered! Yet … we need practice to arrive at this conclusion.

Yes, we have it all now. Just as we are, we are fully equipped for enlightenment. Everything needed is at hand if we would but use it, and continue to use it and faint not. God, heaven, immortality, eternity, all of life, all of the universe are there, ready at hand.

The Infinite is our destiny since—as great mystics have told us—the Infinite is our true nature. But we must know it.

Know thyself, said Socrates, and so says every mystic. Discover who you are and then stand on the strength of that knowledge. Experience the Divine, know it, become one with it—and then awaken it in others. Free yourself—then free others. May the freed make others free.^*

The mystic's call is a call to perfection and to Life—the life of the Soul, of Self-realization. It is a summons to undergo the agonies of creation that must precede deliverance from the fetters of our bondage, from the specter of our egoism. In overthrowing this specter, as one day in this life or in some other we all will overthrow it, we allow our true nature to emerge—the Christ-Consciousness, the Buddha-nature—and come home to ourselves at last.

* This is a line from an ancient Hindu chant:

May the wicked become virtuous.
            May the virtuous obtain tranquility.
            May the tranquil become free from bonds.
            May the freed make others free.

See also What is Vedanta? and Words of Wisdom: Mysticism

Home / Biography / Publications / Feature Article / About Us / Press Room / Contact Us /
What is Vedanta? / Words of Wisdom / Order Information / Bargain Books / Search

We are interested in your views. If you have comments you would like to share on our books or website,
or to be included in our email list click here. See our Privacy Statement.