Music/Videos and Yogis

Meditationtime Forum Post

Date:  Posted 3 years before Dec 29, 2016

MiBeloved 3 years ago

Earlier today a friend invited me to see the TV show 60Minutes, he said it would be very interesting. Lucky for me it came just at the time when I would do my afternoon breath infusion.

I just did not attend it. I was thinking to explain why I avoid videos and music. It is because these media continually wreck my yoga practice. Say for instance, I make a few months progress in meditation, then I become absorbed in a film, I find that this wrecks my practice where I find myself struggling again with images and impressions in the mind which I absorbed from the film.

Somebody said that it was simple to deal with, which was to be detached, but that does not work for me. If I see many images in a video, these will arise later on. Some of these will simply refuse to leave my mind. They will prevent me from going to deeper levels of insight.

Music is the same, even devotional music which will begin playing back in the mind during meditation.

Is this happening to everyone? I do not know. I do not care. Let other yogis who have no problem with videos and music use those to help their meditation. I can only speak about my experience.

After I worked say for six months day after day and made certain progress in gaining deep insight during meditation, I would be a fool to allow a video or a music rendition to bash that in and hurl me back to struggling with music pieces playing in my mind when I do not want them there, and scenes from videos popping up like a wild brush fire, which I have to run here and run there in my mind to extinguish.

Only a foolish yogi will sabotage his own progress.

unlimitedsun 3 years ago

Michael wrote:

Say for instance, I make a few months progress in meditation, then I become absorbed in a film, I find that this wrecks my practice where I find myself struggling again with images and impressions in the mind which I absorbed from the film.

unlimitedsun’s Reply:

I get similar reactions from newscasts illustrating human gore and other types of disasters. They bend me out of shape emotionally and mentally sometimes for weeks on, I even become apprehensive at the onset of wars that I feel will be disastrous such as the Syrian civil gore before which I inquire how to deal with...

Alfredo 3 years ago

This happens to me and I agree with you 100%.

The question arises: Can the people doing this media enjoying be called yogis? I don't think so, or if they are, they are perhaps fooling themselves.

The mind gets easily addicted to these media exposures, and then try to do "pratyahar" on it, and you will see how difficult it is.

You give the mind one single movie, one single image or exposure of that entertaining sort, and the following day, right about the same time, it is already clamoring for a repeat. Repeat it a few times, and now it becomes an ordeal to give it up.

TV in the US is the greatest garbage of all.

MiBeloved 3 years ago

The student yogi is responsible to guard the mind from anything which upset practice. To guard a building you have to secure the entrances and windows. If you leave the doors open, then there is breach of security.

The windows and doors of the psyche are the senses. If you allow the senses or if you must allow the senses, to be open to various objects then you should brace yourself for the influences and their resultant consequences. You should study how the senses become open to and absorbent of certain realities which contravene yoga. Then when you understand how they operate like this, you should study if there is anything you can do about it.

If the senses are so autonomous in certain areas that you cannot control what they absorb, then at least you will know that in those areas you have to accept the trauma which results from those interactions. This knowledge does not necessarily equip you to stop the exposure but it alerts you to areas of your psyche which are running wild and which are out of hand.

This is like a police department in a large city, where they find that they have little control and access to certain streets because criminal elements tightly control those places. The police commissioner may design a plan to encroach those criminal elements and take control from them.

In New York City when I first arrived there in 1967, the mafia and other groups had control of some streets and shopping zones around Times Square. Then later a mayor made a plan and took those places away from the criminal elements. It happens in the mind in the same way, where sometimes you have control and sometimes the psychic adjuncts have the power, and the core self is like a wimp in a corner being told what to do and being traumatized by whatever the senses take in.

Once you get it between your ears, that the core-self must bear the consequences for what the psychic adjuncts take into the psyche, then your job begins to curtailing the power of the adjuncts. Their injection of this or that should be studied in order to trace out and know the trauma contents of those entries.

In the story of Rama and Sita, in the Ramayana, we hear that a pretty woman, a princess named Sita, saw a speckled golden deer. So that happened because of information about the creature entering through the visual sense of perception. Just because that entry was allowed to develop, Sita developed a compulsive desire to have the creature as a pet animal. Due to that she met with certain disaster.

Somebody said that there should not have been such a deer in the first place. Someone else said that an evil magician conjured the creature. Someone said that Sita’s husband should have been there to protect his wife from the exposure.

All of these proposals are stopgap measures. The real issue is one, the visual sense of Sita and Sita’s control of what that sense was exposed to and what that sense did with what it was exposed to. Then finally the issue is what the core-self of Sita did when the visual sense first presented the information of the golden fawn to her.

What was the relationship of the core-self and that visual sense?

Was the core-self under the influence of that visual sense to such an extent that the core-self signed on to whatever that visual senses craved.

These queries arise in the kriya yoga process. A student needs to get these matters out in the open, so that he can rein in the senses one by one and curtail their power over the core-self.