How can a person reach Supreme Consciousness?

The first three questions named the goal and the resistance. This one is practical: how does a person actually move? Every kind of work needs an instrument, and here the instrument is the person: a body and a mind, with consciousness behind both. Seen this way, spiritual practice is not a set of beliefs. It is the tuning of an instrument, so that it can do what it was made for.

Ananda Marga philosophy describes the mind in layers, called kośas, a word that means a sheath. Ánanda Sútram compares a living being to the flower of a plantain: Paiṋcakośátmiká jaeviisattá kadaliipuśpavat. The petals wrap one inside another, and the inner ones can be seen only when the outer ones are drawn back. Outermost is the physical body. Inside it lie five layers of mind, from the crude mind that runs the senses to a layer so fine that the sense of “I” is barely present in it. Behind all of them is consciousness itself, the witness of the second question.

Two things follow, and the rest of this page rests on them. First, each layer can be developed, and the practices below work on them from the outside in: conduct and the body first, then the deeper mind. Second, none of the layers is the self. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti notes that people often mistake one of these layers for who they are, and that real spiritual practice means ideation on the consciousness beyond the kośas, not on any of the layers themselves.

Body and mind are not two separate machines. They meet in what Ananda Marga philosophy calls vrttis, propensities: the urges through which the mind expresses itself. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti counts fifty principal ones. A few are basic longings, physical, psychic and spiritual. Most are the familiar weather of a human mind: hope, worry, effort, conscience, fear, shame, envy, cruelty, repentance. Each can be expressed inwardly, in thought, or outwardly, in action, and between them they account for nearly everything a person feels and does.

Each propensity also has a physical base. The fifty are grouped around six cakras, centers along the spine and up to the forehead where glands and sub-glands cluster. The propensities find their expression through these glands, and the hormones the glands secrete decide how strongly. When a gland secretes too much or too little, its propensities go out of balance, and a person may be gripped by fear or anger far beyond what the situation calls for. A seventh center at the crown of the head, linked with the pineal gland, governs all the rest.

This explains something many people know from experience. A person may sincerely want to be calm, honest or generous and still find some urge overriding the wish. That is not only a failure of will; part of the cause lies in the body. It also means that the reverse is possible. If the glands influence the mind, then work on the body can steady the mind, and work on the mind can change the body. The practices on this page use both doors.

Why should practice change anything? The answer is a plain observation about the mind: it takes the shape of whatever it dwells on. Picturing a street, it takes the shape of that street for a moment, as the second question showed. Dwell on something long enough and the shape becomes a habit. Someone who thinks of nothing but money comes to measure everything in money. Someone who replays a quarrel all day grows into an angry person. The proverb says it in five words: as you think, so you become.

This works in both directions, and that is the whole point. If the mind becomes like a small object, it can also become like a great one, and the greatest possible object is the Infinite. Ananda Marga practice gives the mind exactly that object. The Sanskrit word is bháva, ideation: holding the feeling of the Supreme in mind, and seeing the Supreme in whatever is in front of you. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti’s image is a body tied with a rope. If the body grows, the rope snaps. The six enemies and eight fetters of the third question break the same way, not by a separate fight against each of them, but because the mind outgrows them.

This is also why the practices are not built on suppression. A mind held still by force springs back when the force lets go, the way a river breaks a dam. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti’s answer is to give the mind somewhere better to go instead of blocking it. For the same reason Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti discouraged people from brooding on their faults: a person who keeps thinking “I am a sinner” only becomes a more confirmed one. Think of the Great instead, and the small things fall away.

The first practices concern conduct. Yama is the regulation of conduct toward the world, niyama the regulation of conduct toward oneself, and together they make ten principles. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti calls morality the foundation of spiritual practice, and the reason follows from the last section. A mind full of deceit, greed or resentment keeps taking those shapes, and can hardly ideate on anything vast. There is a plainer danger too. Concentration is power, and a selfish mind uses power for selfish ends.

Regulation here does not mean destruction. The six enemies and the eight fetters are not to be wiped out, Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti says, since a person needs some of them to survive; but they should serve the person instead of ruling them. Nor is the aim only to avoid wrong acts. The aim is that the tendency itself fades: not just refraining from theft, but no longer wanting to take. So each principle concerns the mind first and behavior second. None of them is a commandment. Each describes how a mind behaves when it is moving toward the Infinite, and each comes with its reason.

The second section showed why the body matters to the mind: the propensities work through the glands. Ásanas, the postures of yoga, are designed for exactly that link. The old definition is sthirasukham ásanam: a posture held steadily and with ease. Held with the right breathing, each ásana presses, stretches or rests particular glands and so evens out their secretions. Many are modeled on animals whose bodies favor a certain quality. The tortoise can draw in its limbs, and a person sitting in the tortoise posture finds it easier to draw the mind in from the world.

Ásanas are not general gymnastics. There are tens of thousands of them, and a teacher chooses a few according to each person’s needs, since a posture that calms one gland can overstimulate another. Some are taken up slowly. The lotus posture used for meditation, for instance, is approached gradually, so that knees and hips are not injured.

Food reaches the mind by a longer route. The body’s cells are constantly being replaced, and they are built from what we eat and drink; a mind that rests on those cells feels their quality. Ananda Marga practice sorts food by the same three guńas as everything else. Sentient (sáttvika) food, such as grains, pulses, most vegetables, fruit and milk, is good for body and mind. Mutative (rájasika) food is good for the body and does no harm to the mind. Static (támasika) food, including meat, fish, eggs, alcohol, onion, garlic and anything stale, weighs the mind down. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti’s point is practical: a person who says “I will do my meditation and eat anything” is working against their own practice.

Fasting completes the picture. Practitioners fast on set days of the lunar month, most often the eleventh day after the new and the full moon. Around those days, Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti observes, the body’s gaseous and liquid factors rise toward the head and chest, and an empty stomach lets them settle. A fast also rests the digestion, clears waste from the body and frees energy for meditation. Its Sanskrit name, upavása, means “living near” the Supreme, which is its real purpose. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti was blunt about the dogma that grew around fasting: it keeps body and mind clean and fit, but it earns no merit and buys no liberation. Anyone who is ill should fast only on a doctor’s advice.

Kiirtan is singing the name of the Supreme aloud, usually together with others and often with a simple dance. In Ananda Marga the words are the mantra Bábá Nám Kevalam, “only the name of the Supreme Consciousness.”

The reason it helps is the one already given. A mind takes the shape of its object, but in ordinary life the senses keep pulling it outward: the ears catch one thing, the eyes another, the hands are busy with a third. In kiirtan all of them are given the same object at once. The voice sings it, the ears hear it, the body moves with it. Nothing is left over to wander, and the mind lifts with very little effort.

That is why kiirtan comes just before meditation: it brings the mind to a composure from which sitting still is easy. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti adds that collective kiirtan gathers the physical and mental energy of many people into one flow, and that this helps with troubles outside meditation as well. Anyone can join in. Kiirtan needs no instruction and no initiation, and it is often the first practice people try.

At the center of the practices is meditation, sádhaná in the narrow sense. The word means effort, and Elementary Philosophy defines it as the all-round effort to get free of the bondage of Prakrti, the binding force of the second question. In meditation the mind is turned inward, away from the objects that ordinarily hold it, and given the Infinite as its object, so the principle of the third section works at full strength. Step by step, the mind is drawn back through its own layers toward the consciousness that witnesses it.

Meditation in Ananda Marga is not learned from a book or a website, this one included. A qualified teacher, an ácárya, teaches it personally, one to one. It includes a personal mantra and is kept private. There are good reasons for this. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti calls sádhaná an art, and an art is learned from someone who can do it. A technique also has to fit the person, as a doctor’s prescription fits one patient, and some practices do harm when done wrongly. As practice deepens, the spiritual force that yoga calls kuńd́alinii, dormant at the base of the spine, awakens and rises. Those who have learned the first lesson also meet each week for dharmacakra, collective meditation, because many minds moving in one direction help one another.

Behind the teacher stands the Guru. Gu means darkness and ru what dispels it, so the Guru is whatever dispels spiritual darkness. The meditation of Ananda Marga was given by its founder, Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti, and those who practice it look to Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti as their teacher, their Guru. The ácáryas teach it exactly as it was given. Elementary Philosophy gives the reason a guide is needed at all. Someone shackled hand and foot cannot remove the shackles alone, and someone who is still bound cannot free anyone else. Only one who is free can.

The same chapter adds two cautions. A display of miraculous powers is no sign of a Guru; whoever claims the title on that ground is an impostor. And grace is no substitute for effort. The Guru’s grace matters, and those who practice come to feel it, but it comes to those who practice.

The last part of the path faces outward. Sevá, service, means helping without wanting anything back. The first question named it as one of the four legs of human dharma. Here it appears as a practice, and there are three reasons behind it.

The first is debt. Each of us takes food, care, shelter and knowledge from the world every day, and a life that only takes runs up a debt that has to be repaid. The second is the mind. Whoever is served is an expression of the Supreme, so service is ideation put into action. It trains the mind to see the Infinite in a hungry child or a sick neighbor, and that widens the mind as meditation does. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti goes so far as to say that those who do only the inner practice and avoid service cannot make headway even in that, because the two depend on each other. The third is honesty. Service keeps spiritual life from turning into a private comfort, and it shows whether the inner work is real.

Ananda Marga names four kinds of service, according to what is needed: intellectual service, such as teaching; protective service, standing up with courage for the weak; economic service, giving material help; and physical service, giving one’s own labor. None of them is lower than another. Service also needs judgment. Help goes first to those weaker and poorer than oneself, and to whoever really needs it, not to whoever asks loudest or can pay it back.

Here the individual path opens onto the collective one. A person who sees the Supreme in everyone cannot rest easy in a world where some starve while others hoard. The next question takes that up: how a whole society reaches the goal.