By Dada Vedaprajinananda

If you close your eyes and try to meditate on God using a mantra or any other technique, you may be able to do it.  But how long can you sit meditating with your eyes closed? Eventually you will have to get up and eat and do other worldly activities in order to survive.  Once you get up and start focusing on mundane objects, you may forget about the spiritual thoughts you had during the sitting meditation. Fortunately there is another yogic practice that you can do in order to continue your spiritual quest even during the active portion of your day.

That practice is called Brahmacarya and it means, “remaining attached to Brahma (God).”

Brahmacarya is the fourth part of Yama, the yogic practices of controlled conduct designed to put you in harmony with the world around you.  The way to practice Brahmacarya is to remember that every object, animate or inanimate, is an expression of the Supreme Consciousness.

The knowledge that even a piece of stone is simply consciousness in a crude form is known by yogis as the “sweet knowledge” or “Madhuvidya” in Sanskrit. You might be washing dishes, but if you can remember that the dishes are an expression of the Supreme Consciousness, the soapy water is an expression of the Supreme Consciousness and your hand is also an expression of consciousness, then you can maintain the same state that you reach in meditation.

What happens in meditation? When you repeat a mantra and are aware and consciousness of its deep meaning you are attempting to bring the psychic wave of your mind in parallel with the wave of the Supreme Consciousness.  Sometimes as you do this, you can really feel it and it is an elevating experience. When you break your meditation and material objects become the focus of your attention, then your mind moves in another direction. Your mind looks on the material objects as crude forms and your mind moves in parallel with the waves of matter.

It is however possible to begin viewing each and every object as an expression of consciousness. It can be practiced during any kind of worldly and when it is done the worldly activity is transformed into a spiritual activity. That is why you can view Brahmacarya as a kind of meditation in action (Conifer).

Now, before you jump up and say, “Wow, that’s sounds a lot easier than sitting down to meditate. I think I will do this instead of sitting meditation,” you should understand that it is not so easy.  If it were that easy, then anyone who ever read a spiritual book would be walking around in bliss. The problem is that once we get engrossed in the world it is very easy to forget about consciousness, bliss and the cosmic realm. If you come out of the meditation center and look around for your car and find that it has been stolen, you might forget about the bliss pretty quickly!

So, what’s the solution? Do your sitting practice of meditation on a regular basis. Sit in the morning before you begin your active day and sit again in the evening before dinner or before sleep. In these two periods of meditation, if you think about the Supreme Consciousness, you will then be equipped to go out in the world and start looking on every worldly object and all beings as expressions of that same blissful consciousness (http://soundviewmedical.com/moda/).  The more you try to practice this during the work day, the better your sitting meditation will become.  The better your sitting meditation becomes, then the easier it will be to remember the sweet knowledge that every particle of this universe is an expression of God. The two practices reinforce and support each other.

Before I close out this essay, I have to address the common understanding or actually misunderstanding of the term Brahmacarya.  Most books on yoga say that Brahmacarya means celibacy. This is an interpretation which supposedly celibate priests promoted in the middle ages so that they could maintain their superiority over the married masses who could not become celibate. While yoga does say that we should restrain our sensory and motor organs, it is does not say that we should repress or kill natural functions.

For those who are able to live a monastic life, then celibacy is a means that will enable them to spend more of their time in spiritual practice and social service.  Those who are called to worldly duty can likewise devote some time to meditation, some time to taking care of their immediate family and some time for the service of the greater human family. In both cases the important thing is that whenever anyone has to come in contact with physical objects or with other beings, that they remember that these objects are simply the disguised form of the Supreme Consciousness who has hidden himself within  every particle of this vast universe.

(This article is based on Shrii Shrii Anandamurti’s A Guide to Human Conduct.)