I Am Presence.
When your mind and heart are truly open abundance will flow to you effortlessly and easily.
Question:
Dear Deepak sir,
8 years of meditation and reading your books for 6 years helped me a lot in transmuting shadow energy. The purification process was very valuable/enriching. That was the focus of my meditation and even though in your books you urge , " don't let a day go by without asking 'who am I' " , I did not follow this advice till recently. However , for last few months , i have been integrating this practice also along with watching my breath and body sensations all the time. When I ask 'who am I ' or 'who is watching breath' or 'who is having these body sensations /emotions' or 'who is having these thoughts' etc, immediately identification happens with some presence which feels localized in my torso (from around naval to chest area usually) . I feel as if i am this presence. Is this presence consciousness/'I amness' /Being ? If yes , does everyone have the same experience as I am having as one gets deeper in meditation with time? If what I am experiencing is consciousness (our true nature) , then it can not be localized in body , so may be initially it feels localized in body and later on as one goes deeper in meditation with time and sadhana/practice, this presence feels everywhere (omnipresent) ? And may be later one feels it so strongly that there is no doubt and no need of validation (as i am needing validation from you presently) ? I would greatly appreciate your inputs , sir.
Thank you very much.
Response:
The actual experience of the higher self is pure awareness knowing itself. It is a self-validating experience. It is not usually associated with a bodily sensation. However what you experienced could be a physical sense of where you feel the center of your perceptual being.
Love,
Deepak
Dear Deepak sir, A friend of mine says that he is able to go deeper in mindful meditation than in sitting meditation. He gave example of what he calls mindful meditation this way : "if i am driving , i tell myself that till next corner i want inner silence" and when he does that , thoughts stop. He has been meditating for 6-7 years and is a very earnest seeker. Now , it occurs to me that if watching breath is mental chatter, then driving is even more of a mental chatter. when i am walking and watching my breath , then sometimes mind becomes very quiet , however , mental chatter of activity is there because i am walking and i still am not enlightened yet, so when i am engaged in activity , i am not one with activities. separation/duality is there, mental chatter is there. so when i am in sitting meditation , mental chatter of activity is not there (only mental chatter of breath is there). therefore even if in sitting meditation more thoughts come than in walking meditation , that does not necessarily mean i experienced deeper silence in walking meditation. on the contrary , correct interpretation could be that in sitting meditation as there is less mental chatter than in walking meditation , i tend to go deeper in silence and as i tend to go deeper in silence , conditioning/shadow energy is bound to come to surface to be transmuted and hence relatively more thoughts. hence sitting meditation is always and always better than walking (or driving or any other activity) meditation, i would tend to believe. if you could spare time to answer this question , your input would be very helpful for me , sir. thank you very much.