How can you tell if you are on the right path?

52 sign posts on the journey
You are on the right path when you:

Ask yourself the following questions and seek the answers: 

1. Who am I? Where did I come from?
2. Where will I go when I die?
3. What is my true nature?
4. Why do I think the way I do?
5. Why do I stay in pain and suffering?
6. Why am I afraid, unhappy, or angry?
7. Why do I criticize, judge, and blame others for my pain and unhappiness?
8. What can I do to become more conscious and present, and to find my true being?
                                       
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Ø Understand that if you want to know the truth, you need to search and find it yourself.

Ø Search within to find your answers instead of relying on other people’s opinion for what’s right for you.

Ø Do everything possible to become more conscious of yourself.

Ø Persevere looking “in” to find your true self.

Ø See the world as a reflection of yourself.

Ø Look for the lessons you need to learn in every situation; inspite of the ups and downs of life.

Ø Refrain from blaming, criticizing, and putting others and yourself down.

Ø Refrain from nurturing ill will towards those who may seem to be “better off”, “happier”, or “wiser” than you.

Ø Choose to be positive about yourself, others, and life.

Ø Trust that existence supports you even when it does not give you what you want.

Ø Understand that life unfolds just like the opening petals of a flower, and that the present moment is the only reality you have.

Ø Understand that you don’t need to compromise your inner truth to comply with other people’s expectations.

Ø Choose not to impose your beliefs and desires on others, or allow anyone to impose their beliefs or desires on you.

Ø Surrender your Will to existence and allow it to do what it needs to do through you.

Ø Feel grateful for everything and everyone who has directly or indirectly helped you to learn and grow in consciousness.

Ø Value and appreciate your body as a gift from existence.

Ø Value and appreciate people who are sincere and honest with you.

Ø Live spontaneously and respond to life moment to moment.

Ø Trust life and know that no matter what happens, your being and everyone else’s being is always whole and healthy.

Ø Understand that no one can know you better than you can know yourself.

Ø Know that you only you are responsible for your life.

Ø Focus on finding and living your own unique gifts rather than comparing yourself to others.

Ø Understand that the only way you can know yourself is through experience, introspection, and meditation.

Ø Understand that you don’t need to be loved, recognized, or accepted by others in order to be content and live a life joyfully.

Ø Surrender to what life offers you rather than trying to control others and life.

Ø Strive living from your center instead of your ego mind.

Ø Realize that fear is your only enemy.

Ø Face your fears and act inspite of them.

Ø Take responsibility for all your actions.

Ø Don’t blame others for your pain and suffering.

Ø Don’t manipulate others to get your needs met.

Ø Don’t repress or wallow in your emotions and take responsibility for how you feel.

Ø Forgive yourself and others for your and their mistakes.

Ø Wish well for others and wish well for yourself.

Ø Value your truth and freedom more than security and life.

Ø Treat yourself and others with respect, honesty, and sincerity.

Ø Know that you are not your body, emotions, thoughts or experiences.

Ø Treat every situation as an opportunity to learn something more about yourself.

Ø Act from your heart instead of your mind.

Ø Let go of your attachment to things and people.

Ø Give yourself and others freedom to be who they truly are.

Ø Treat pain as a friend and teacher and look for its message instead of struggling with it.

Ø Live your life remembering that your journey is the goal.

Ø Enjoy walking your journey alone.

Ø Make meditation and self-observation a daily practice.

Ø Courageously face the fear of death and the unknown.

Ø Understand that no matter how hard someone tries to show you the way, you will not find the truth by following or imitating others.

Ø Do whatever it takes to find your true being.

Ø Remember that everything in life is impermanent except your being and consciousness.

Ø Welcome your inner emptiness and understand that this emptiness is a true being.

Ø Remind yourself and know that you are already a Buddha.

- Torkom Saraydarian.

Laws of Life

A law is the way things naturally go or should go or the way the people want them to go. If the life people create is not in harmony with the laws of nature, sooner or later, they see the laws of nature creating painful ways to make people turn to these laws for guidance. The following points are given here as seed thoughts for reflection or contemplation. Thinking on one of them and doing reflective meditation upon it will bring many blessings to your life.

1. You eventually become like those you hate and start to act as they act.

2. You hate someone because you hate things in him that are in the process of developing within you.

3. Those who have to give to others, they will have more. Those who have to have more, they will lose what they have. One must periodically empty himself to be able to be filled anew.

4. When one is empty of himself, the universe will dwell in him.

5. If you ask, the answer will be given. If you knock, people will respond. If you search, things will come your way.

6. Those who spread dirt eventually find it as their nourishment.

7. Those who waste your offerings will also make themselves indebted to the creator.

8. Your emotional body is the result of your words, imagination, and emotional reactions.

9. Your mental body is the result of your thoughts, visualization, or vanity and ego.

10. Beauty evokes seeds of beauty latent in you.

11. NOTHING IS LOST IN THE UNIVERSE.

12. No one can change things for the better or cause transformation unless he exists or obeys one who exists.

13. There is the law of opposites. Light evokes darkness, darkness evokes light.

14. There is the law of substitution by which you are allowed to pay the debts of others.

15. Your payment for others becomes your savings.

16. Those whose debt is paid help you for your future achievements.

17. Only after you empty yourself can you be filled.

18. Success is the result of the exhaustion of Karma.

19. Conscious suffering removes a great amount of Karma.

20. Accumulated unconscious impressions create pressure within us. One of nature’s ways to make you conscious of them is to see them in others.

21. We are afraid of people whom we hate.

22. We hate because we feel insecure.

23. Racism and nationalism are the result of fear and insecurity.

24. Bigots and fanatics are those who had extreme fear in the past.

25. Harmlessness leads to freedom from any limitation.

26. No value can exist until it is realized and manifested.

27. No value can be realized unless vehicles to realize that value are built or created.

28. The transmitting agent conditions the nature of the transformation.

29. One reaches the ocean of values not by imitating or living the values of others but by creating his own values on progressively higher levels.

30. Expansion of consciousness occurs after crisis and high level tensions if one is in the Light.

31. The things that we possess by force are the things that we will lose in pain and suffering.

32. Knowledge is like acid. It burns its surroundings unless it is in the cup of Love.

33. The power to possess and dominate is a sign of bankruptcy of essence and preparation for Karmic retribution.

34. The law of life demands that you do your best in whatever you are doing. The will to do your best must be ever progressive.

35. The ultimate goal of thinking is to understand the law behind the Universe.

36. Good relations with God cannot be achieved without having a good relation with his children.

37. Never trust people who hate their father and mother.

38. Never give responsibilities to those who avoid their responsibilities toward their parents, husband, wife or children.

39. Never promote people to more responsible jobs who are not interested in your vision but are interested in your money and body.

40. When you prove a treason, do not ever give another chance to a traitor.

41. People who do not look you in the eye when they talk are suffering from hidden guilt.

42. The best way to lose your friends is to lie to them.

43. When you see your friend present at your parties but absent when you are loaded with labor, have no faith in him.

44. Try to select your co-workers from those who have had harmonious homes and striving parents.

45. Especially watch those who have no control over their mouth.

46. Do not give advanced teaching to those who are persons of interest or who are racists.

- Torkom Saraydarian.

Three methods for working with Chaos

The main point of these methods is to dissolve the dualistic struggle. Our habitual tendency to struggle against what’s happening to us or in us. These methods instruct us to move toward difficulties rather than back away. We don’t get this kind of encouragement very often.

There are three traditional methods for relating directly with difficult circumstances as a path of awakening and joy 

              1. the first method we’ll call NO MORE STRUGGLE. 

              2. the second, USING POISON AS MEDICINE. 

              3. the third, SEEING WHATEVER ARISES AS ENLIGHTENED WISDOM. 

These are three techniques for working with chaos, difficulties , and unwanted events in our daily lives.

The first method, NO MORE STRUGGLE. 

When we sit down to meditate, whatever arises in our minds we look directly, call it “thinking”, and go back to the simplicity and immediacy of the breath. MEDITATION PRACTICE IS HOW WE STOP FIGHTING WITH OURSELVES, HOW WE STOP STRUGGLING WITH CIRCUMSTANCES, EMOTIONS, OR MOODS. Whatever arises, we can look at it with a nonjudgemental attitude.

Application: 
Whatever or whoever arises, train again and again in looking at it and seeing it for what 0it is without calling it names, without hurling rocks, without averting your eyes. Let all these stories go. THE INNERMOST ESSENCE OF MIND IS WITHOUT BIAS. Things arise and things dissolve forever and ever. That’s just the way it is. We can stop struggling with what occurs and see its true face without calling it the enemy. Stop struggle and relax .

The second method. POISON AS MEDICINE. 

The three poisons are passion(craving or addiction), aggression and ignorance(denial, shut down and close out). When suffering arises , let the story line go and BREATHE IT IN ---- not jus the anger , resentment , or loneliness that we might be feeling, but the identical pain of others who in this very moment are also feeling rage , bitterness , or isolation.

WE BREATHE IN IT FOR EVERYBODY. This poison is not just our personal misfortune, our fault, our blemish, our shame--- its part of our the human condition.

Instead of pushing it away or running from it, we breathe in and connect with it fully. We do this with the wish that all of us could be free of suffering. Then we breathe out, sending out a sense of big space, a sense of ventilation and freshness.

EVERYTHING THAT OCCURS IS NOT ONLY USABLE AND WORKABLE BUT IS ACTUALLY THE PATH ITSELF. WE CAN USE EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS TO US AS THE MEANS OF WAKING UP. 

Application: as one lojong slogan says” when the world is filled with evil , all mishaps, all difficulties, should be transformed into the path of enlightenment.” Thts the notion engendered here.

The third method SEEING WHATEVER ARISES AS ENLIGHTENED WISDOM.

We can regard ourselves as already awake; we can regard our world as already sacred. The third method for working with chaos is to regard whatever arises as the manifestation of awakened energy.

Regarding what arises as awakened energy reverses our fundamental habitual pattern of trying to avoid conflict, trying to make ourselves better than we are , trying to smooth things out and pretty them up, trying to prove that pain is a mistake and would not exist in our lives if only we did all the right things. this view turns that particular pattern completely around, encouraging us to become interested in looking at the charnel ground of our lives as the working basis for attaining enlightenment.

Chaos is part of our home ground. Instead of looking for something higher or purer, work with it just as it is. The chaos in here and the chaos out there--- this is basic energy, the play of wisdom. Whether we regard our situation as heaven or as hell depends on our perception.

- Torkom Saraydarian.

The Importance of Speech

A great one once said that if a person can control his speech, he can reach perfection.

Sound is a creative energy. It creates, destroys, and make things progress, unfold, or disintegrate. When we speak, our sound affects our seven etheric centers. The effects depend upon the motive behind our words, on the level of consciousness we have at the time of speech, and on the accuracy, purity, and sincerity of our speech.

Each time we speak, we send out sound through one of our etheric, astral or mental centers. Every word is related to some center and carries the substance of that center into the aura and into space.

The more you are your self, the more value and credit your words have. The more you are identified with your not-self the less value your words have. The factor that makes your words credible and effective is your true self, which should be your source of speech.

There are seven categories of speech.

1. Inspired speech
2. Controlled speech
3. Fabricated speech
4. Mechanical speech
5. Hypnotized speech
6. Slanderous speech
7. Malicious speech 

INSPIRED SPEECH:

Brings to you reality, direction, clarity, beauty, visions, and revelation. Higher forces guide you through such speech. They illuminate you, bringing to you the ideas and visions of the higher world

Whenever you hear inspired speech, your inner mechanism begins to adjust itself, correct itself, and balance itself. Inspired speech brings construction in your environment, in you r body, and in your psychological system. Inspired speech uplifts you, which means it raises your focus of consciousness from your lower centers to higher ones.

CONTROLLED SPEECH: 
Is speech which you use after seriously thinking about what to speak. This kind of speech is almost impossible for average people. They open their mouths and words jump out right and left.

Planned, controlled speech is balanced speech. The consequences of your words are seen. The results are felt. Controlled speech considers the time element. It chooses the right time, the right person, the right moment of the day. A person who uses thoughtful speech does not throw words like popcorn but measure them and control their flow.

Controlled speech is not the result of excitement, anger, fear, hatred, revenge… Thoughtful speech is up-to date speech.Thoughtful speech is planned speech. Aperson with thoughtful speech knows how to start, how to continue, and how to end, raising In the minds of others a well planned construction.

FABRICATED SPEECH is full of lies, self – interest, hatred and imagination. It is separative and destructive.

Fabricated speech originates from separative interests. It misleads people and creates confusion, misunderstandings, and cleavages. It creates darkness.

MECHANICAL SPEECH: In this stage , the person acts like a machine. It is his urges or drives that control his speech it is his negative emotions and glamors that control his words. It is his illusions, vanities, and habits that control his mouth. It is in this stage that one exposes oneself to obsession.

HYPNOTIZED SPEECH or speech under the influence of hypnotism. Many people in the world talk under hypnosis, and they really do not know what they are speaking about. People are hypnotized through pain, throough excessive pleasure , through fear. In all these conditions, the tape recording machine in the brain records all conversations going on around them, and this continues life after life.

SLANDEROUS SPEECH is harmful and destructive, and it leads to obsession. Every slanderer gradually opens his gates to entitie, which obsess him and use him for destructive ends.

MALICIOUS SPEECH brings into the world the influence of dark force, which eventually possess the person and use him as a polluting agent in the world.

HOW TO CONTROL YOUR SPEECH? 

1. Think before you speak,
2. Speak only if it is necessary
3. Your speech must always be guarded by beauty, goodness, justice, joy and freedom.
4. Try to speak only the essential.
5. Exercise mental silence.

PEOPLE SPEAK FOR VARIOUS REASONS.

1. To impart knowledge
2. To impart information
3. To give orders
4. To reveal needs
5. To release accumulated tensions of glamors, illusions,vanity, and ego.
6. To entertain oneself or others.
7. To deceive oneself and others
8. To reveal and manifest ones true self.
9. To evoke the true self in others.

The more you are your self, the more value and credit your words have. the more you are identified with your not-self the less value your words have. the factor that makes your words credible and effective is your true self, which should be your source of speech.

- Torkom Saraydarian.

Spiritual Saturation ???

The spiritual life is a tension between two polarities. One pole is the spiritual sphere; the other pole is the earthly sphere. One pole evokes an ever-progressive urge; the other pole draws man toward darkness and materialism. Man stands between these two poles. Either the magnet of the spiritual pole pulls him up toward greater and greater values, towards transformation and transfiguration, or the pole of the earthly life pulls him down toward degeneration and death.

The average person is subject to these opposite polarities. Sometimes he is drawn to the light, sometimes to the darkness. Certain people go in only one direction. They either immerse themselves in matter, or the renounce the world as many as they can. Disciples and advanced human beings try to bring these two opposites together and create a harmony between them.

Those who are more advanced transform the earthly life and enable light, love, ad beauty to manifest through matter, through what we call life in general. Thus material life helps to express the beauty of the spirit.

People cyclically follow one path or the other. Upon both paths, they confront hindrances and difficulties and try to overcome them. Gradually they learn that a material problem or difficulty is better solved with a spiritual attainment, and that a spiritual attainment is better manifested through the mastery of matter and personality.

Those who try to advance on the spiritual path and in the meantime live a normal life often confront a situation which is called “spiritual saturation.”

Spiritual saturation has many signs:

1.Spiritual saturation leads to crystallization of reasoning, to dogmas and doctrines, and finally to fanaticism. Fanaticism is a point of crisis in which one turns in the direction just opposite from his former beliefs.

2. A person who is spiritually saturated loses his interest in self-perfection.

3. One of the most dangerous weeds is vanity. Those who fall into spiritual saturation do not have protection against this weed.

4. The person loses his interest in meditation, study, and learning. This is a very slippery path; once you step on it, you can fall to the bottom of the hill.

5. A spiritually saturated person slowly turns his back on his creative labor.
6. Those who are in the process of saturation lose their joy of life.They lose the joy of striving and achievement.

7. Another sign of saturation is that the person withdraws into the cave of his self-interests. Spiritual saturation creates ego, and you try to use all that exists for your ego.

8.The next sign of saturation is that the person becomes indifferent toward spiritual values.

9.The next sign of spiritual saturation is characterized by confusion, inertia, apathy, and heavy depression.It is observed that such people end up in suicide or in individual or massive destructions. This is why people must not be encouraged to enter advanced spiritual disciplines until they prove that no future seeds of failure remain in their hearts; until they prove that their minds are stable, firm and healthy; until they prove that their bodies are purified enough to carry the increasing heat of the spiritual fire.

What are the causes of saturation ?

1. That first cause of saturation is a harmful life. If you cause harm to other people or to animals and trees, it accumulates and causes petrification in your system.

2. The second cause of saturation is lack or failure of actualization. When you cannot live the Teaching in your daily life, you become an obstacle for the Teaching.

3. Saturation begins when one does not engage himself in a creative labor which gives expression to the assimilated Teaching.

4. Another cause of saturation is lack of service. Learning, accumulating knowledge, meditation, study.

5. The next cause of saturation is greed. Greed keeps a person so occupied with matter that he has no time left for spiritual labor. Greed violates spiritual labor.

6. The next cause of saturation is mental confusion. Some people read every kind of book to satisfy their intellectual interest, but soon you see them dumping both their good and bad books into the trash.

7. The next cause of saturation is your karma. Your karma decides the high-water mark of your evolution. People sometimes do not understand why they slowed down on the spiritual path.

8. Saturation occurs when a person is involved in prolonged worrying. Worry is the absence of faith, hope, and future.

9. Saturation occurs when our foundation is weak, or if we have no foundation at all. Association with the wrong people creates saturation. Mental pollution stops your progress and creates saturation. Saturation never affects people who fight for great values.

How to overcome spiritual saturation?

1. Once a week give your body and mind to total rest in Nature. Once a year have a seven-day isolation in Nature, without tape recorder, television, radio.

2. Think often about a victorious, beautiful future for yourself in coming lives. Do not give up when difficult times arrive.

3. Study the science of cause and effect in your daily life, in national and international life. Develop keen observation and watchfulness and see how things are originated and what are their results.

4.Retiscence and solitude can give your nature a chance to regenerate itself.Holding your mouth from unnecessary speech and idle talk saves energy, which can be used to regenerate your nature.

5. Daily visualize whom you can serve and help, and then try to do it as much as possible. Daily do a short meditation.

6. Visit art galleries, attend great musical or dance performances, listen to inspiring lecturers.

7. Engage yourself in some creative work. Have a plan and work for it.

8. The most effective means to overcome spiritual saturation or to prevent it forever is to make real efforts to raise the quality of your daily life, to raise the quality of your life as a whole by raising the quality of your every action, word, labor, and thought.

9. Every time you take the side of the observer, you can prevent saturation– which is a personality problem and not the problem of the soul,because the soul never falls into saturation.The more you raise your quality,the closer you come to higher,subjective influences.

- Torkom Saraydarian.

Redefine Yourself Today

The best way to prepare yourself to encounter spirit is to learn to be willing to redefine yourself every day.

Write down the most basic labels that apply to you: Name, age, gender, education level and occupation. Taking one at a time, consider how each label defines you.

For example: Your name specifies the identity of a person with a certain family background. It locates you in time and space, isolates you from others and it becomes part of your self-image. You are attached, to varying degrees, to all these threads of identity.

Now, consider whether these connections must apply. Do you feel a need to conform to family traditions and expectations? Is it important to you that your name earns recognition? As you ask some basic questions, you can begin to free yourself from the threads of attachment that keep you from being “born from above.”

Now you can take steps to redefine yourself. If you spot yourself thinking in a certain way because it is appropriate to your age, education level, gender or social status, ask yourself if there are other ways to think. If you open yourself, you will be amazed at how thoroughly you have been defined by rigid beliefs and outdated conditioning. These external influences aren’t the real you, and until you go through the process of detaching yourself from old definitions, you cannot confront the unknown.

Everything new that comes your way winds up passing through a filtering process until it fits your likes and dislikes, social status, income, education level and so on.

Spiritual experience is unfiltered; it comes directly and spontaneously.

From Fear to Fearlessness

In modern life we are taught to respect fear as an essential contributor to our survival, a biological signal that alerts mind and body to approaching danger. But the ancient sages of India taught that fear was born of duality; when human beings realized that they were no longer part of God, they immediately became afraid of what might happen to them.

In the 20th century, after two devastating world wars and the advent of the atomic bomb, this haunting insecurity was promoted into an inescapable fact of life, which came to be known as existential anxiety. You and I are children of an era when simply to be alive seemed to be taking the ultimate risk. As a result, we fall prey to anxiety about who we are and where we belong.

On the spiritual path you can completely recover from such anxiety. By rejecting fear a little at a time, you come to realize that life isn’t constantly at risk. You are safe, you are seen, and you are cared for.

Moving from fear to fearlessness requires a shift in orientation because we live in a climate of fear, where it’s all too easy to succumb to a constant barrage of potential threats. To counter this, you must look to your own inner guidance. Realize that what makes you safe is a higher intelligence that resides within you. Potential dangers are illusions. Only what lies at hand is real.

Eight Worldly Dharmas

The Eight Worldly Dharmas are:

Getting what you want, and avoiding getting what you do not want 

Wanting (instant) happiness, and not wanting unhappiness 

Wanting fame, and not wanting to be unknown 

Wanting praise, and not wanting blame.

One of the classic Buddhist teachings on hope and fear concerns what are known as the eight worldly dharmas. These are four pairs of opposites--- four things that we like and become attached to and four things we don’t like and try to avoid.

First, we like pleasure; we are attached to it. Conversely, we don’t like pain. Second, we like are attached to praise. We try to avoid criticism and blame. Third, we like and are attached to fame. We dislike and try to avoid disgrace. Finally w are attached to gain, to getting what we want. We don’t like losing what we have.

According to this very simple teaching, becoming immersed in these four pairs of opposites ----- pleasure and pain, loss and gain, fame and disgrace, and praise and blame – is what keeps us stuck in the pain of samsara.

- Buddha.