Meditations on Light

In your heart a flame is burning, and your body is just a light aura around the flame.

Golden Light meditation

Do this at least twice a day—the best time is early in the morning, justnbefore you get out of bed. The moment you feel you are alert, awake, do it for twenty minutes. Do it first thing in the morning!—don’t get out of bed. Do it there, then and there, immediately!—because when you are coming out of sleep you are very, very delicate, receptive. When you are coming out of sleep you are very fresh, and the impact will go very deep. When you are just coming out of sleep you are less in the mind than ever. Hence some gaps are there through which the method will penetrate into your innermost core. And early in the morning, when you are awakening and the whole earth is awakening, there is a great tide of awakening energy all over the world. Use that tide; don’t miss that opportunity. All ancient religions used to pray early in the morning when the sun rose, because the rising of the sun is the rising of all the energies in existence. In that moment you can simply ride on the rising energy wave; it will be easier. By the evening it will be difficult, energies will be falling back; then you will be fighting against the current. In the morning you will be going with the current. So the best time to begin is in the early morning, immediately, just when you are half-asleep, half-awake. And the process is so simple. It needs no posture, no yogasana, no bath is needed, nothing. You simply lie down, as you are lying down in your bed, on your back.
Keep your eyes closed. When you breathe in, just visualize great light entering from your head into your body, as if a sun has risen just close to your head—golden light pouring into your head. You are just hollow and the golden light is pouring into your head, and going, going, going, deep, deep, and going out through your toes. When you breathe in, do it with this visualization. And when you breathe out, visualize another thing: darkness entering through your toes, a great dark river entering through your toes, coming up, and going out through the head. Do slow, deep breathing so you can visualize. Go very slowly. And just out of sleep you can have very deep and slow breaths because the body is rested, relaxed. Let me repeat: breathing in, let golden light come into you through your head, because it is there that the Golden Flower is waiting. That golden light will help. It will cleanse your whole body and will make it absolutely full of creativity. This is male energy.
Then when you exhale, let darkness, the darkest you can conceive, like a dark night, river-like, come from your toes upward—this is feminine energy: it will soothe you, it will make you receptive, it will calm you, it will give you rest —and let it go out of the head. Then inhale again, and golden light enters in. Do it for twenty minutes early in the morning. And then the second best time is when you are going back to sleep, in the night. Lie down on the bed, relax for a few minutes. When you start feeling that now you are wavering between sleep and waking, just in that middle, start the process again, and continue for twenty minutes. If you fall asleep doing it, that is the best, because the impact will remain in the subconscious and will go on working. After a three-month period you will be surprised: the energy that was constantly gathering at the muladhar, at the lowest, the sex center, is no longer gathering there. It is going upwards.

Heart of light

While waking, moving, eating, working, remember yourself as light, as if in your heart a flame is burning, and your body is nothing but the aura around the flame. Imagine it: in your heart a flame is burning, and your body is nothing but a light aura around the flame; your body is just a light around the flame. Allow it to go deep within your mind and your consciousness. Imbibe it. It will take time, but if you go on thinking about it, feeling it, imagining it, within a certain period you will be able to remember it the whole day. While awake, moving on the street, you are a flame moving. No one else will be aware of it in the beginning, but if you continue it, after three months others will also become aware. Only when others become aware can you then be at ease. Don’t say anything to anyone. Simply imagine a flame, and your body as just the aura around it—not a physical body, but an electric body, a light body. Go on doing it. If you persist, within three months, or somewhere near about then, others will become aware that something has happened to you. They will feel a subtle light around you. When you come near them, they will feel a different warmth. If you touch them, they will feel a fiery touch. They will become aware that something strange is happening to you. Don’t tell anyone. When others become aware, then you can feel at ease, and then you can enter the second step, not before it. The second step is to take it into dreaming. Now you can take it into dreaming. It has become a reality. Now it is not an imagination. Through imagination you have uncovered a reality. It is real. Everything consists of light. You are light—unaware of the fact—because every particle of matter is light. The scientists say it consists of electrons; it is the same thing. Light is the source of all. You are also condensed light: through imagination you are simply uncovering a reality. Imbibe it—and when you have become so filled with it, you can carry it into dreams, not before. Then, while falling asleep, go on thinking of the flame, go on seeing it, feeling you are the light. Remembering it…remembering…remembering you fall into sleep, and the remembrance continues. In the beginning you will start having some dreams in which you will feel you have a flame within, that you are light. By and by, in the dreams also you will move with the same feeling. And once this feeling enters the dreams, dreams will start disappearing. There will be fewer and fewer dreams and more and more deep sleep. When in your dreaming, this reality is revealed—that you are light, a flame, a burning flame—all dreams will disappear. Only when dreams disappear can you carry this feeling into sleep, never before. Now you are at the door. When dreams have disappeared and you remember yourself as a flame, you are at the door of sleep. Now you can enter with the feeling. And once you enter sleep with the feeling that you are a flame, you will be aware in it—the sleep will now happen only to your body, not to you. Yoga and tantra divide the life of the human mind into three divisions—the life of the mind, remember. They divide mind into three divisions: waking, sleeping, dreaming. These are not the divisions of your consciousness, these are the divisions of your mind, and consciousness is the fourth. They have not given any name to it in the East; they call it simply the fourth,
turiya. The first three have names; these are the clouds. They can be named—a
waking cloud, a sleeping cloud, a dreaming cloud. They are all clouds, and the space in which they move—the sky—is unnamed, left simply as the fourth. This technique is to help you go beyond these three states. If you can be aware that you are a flame, a light, that sleep is not happening to you, you are conscious. You are carrying a conscious effort; now you are crystallized around  that flame. The body is asleep, you are not.  This is what Krishna says in the Gita: that yogis never sleep. While others are asleep, they are awake. Not that their bodies never sleep, their bodies sleep—  but only bodies. Bodies need rest, consciousness needs no rest; because bodies are mechanisms, consciousness is not a mechanism. Bodies need fuel, they need rest. That’s why when they are born, they are young, then they become old, and then they die. Consciousness is never born, never becomes old, never dies. It needs no fuel, it needs no rest. It is pure energy, perpetual eternal energy. If you can carry this image of flame and light through the doors of sleep, you will never sleep again, only the body will rest. And while the body is sleeping, you will know it. Once this happens, you have become the fourth. Now the waking and the dreaming and the sleeping are parts of the mind. They are parts, and you have become the fourth—one who goes through all of them and is none of them.