During my ten years as a celibate monk and student of the priesthood, while living in the yoga ashram temple in my twenties, I was taught many of the details regarding how to maximize my valuable time in this rare human form of life so that I could achieve the ultimate goal, namely transcendence or liberation at the time of death. One of the secrets revealed to us, based on the Sanskrit Vedic teachings on yoga philosophy, was timing. Timing is a crucial part of the journey, and although not paramount, it does facilitate the process tremendously if you get it right.
Much like gardening or trading, your ability to time your actions will improve your success rate. You can plant at any time of the year or enter a trade whimsically and still benefit, but if you time it right, you can achieve much better results for your endeavor. The art of meditation is similar. We were taught that the day is divided into periods of time known in Sanskrit as “muhurtas”, which are 45 minutes long. The most conducive time to perform daily meditation was at sunrise, noon, and sunset. These are the three junctions (“sandhya”) of the day, or transition points and brahmana priests would stop to perform a little meditation for a few minutes at these times, silently chanting their specific “gayatri” mantras during these times.
Besides this though, there is another period of the day when we would all rise to do our daily meditation. This period is known as the “brahma muhurta”. It is 90 minutes before sunrise, and students were trained to rise at 4am, seven days a week, to capture this moment for our meditation time. We would awaken, shower, dress in clean cloth and proceed to the meditation hall, and perform daily chanting to music of certain Sanskrit prayers, and then we would all sit down to meditate for two hours.
The sun would rise upon our mediation, after which more prayers and chanting would resume, followed by a class on the Vedic texts like Bhagavad Gita or Bhagavat Purana. Our daily morning program would thus last from 4.30am to about 9am. Then we would have breakfast. I practiced this religiously for ten years, and eventually graduated from the monastery school qualified as a brahmana priest. Although I never became a professional priest as such, the training has stayed with me for the rest of my life.
I went on to live a fairly normal life after that, getting involved in intimate relationship with a partner for a few years, a lovely woman, but my heart was always more attracted to the way of the monk and mystic. So I left my relationship on good terms without ever wanting to have a family, and have lived a renounced life with minimal business demands ever since. Now in my fifties, I have been celibate again for some years, having returned to my calling, based on the training of my youth.
So in this way timing is important throughout the day as well as throughout one’s entire life journey. Naturally as a youth we are recommended to train hard and refrain from casual relationships while in training. Then after graduation we are able to enter married life and raise a family. Obviously business or career of some sort is required to provide for the family. But once the kids have grown up and are living lives of their own, the life clock naturally and traditionally requires that we gradually retire from external mundane life once more, and return to the path of meditation in preparation for death and transcendence.
In other words there is a natural rhythmic cycle to the journey of life, and there are cycles within cycles. On a daily basis there are appropriate times for tapping in to the best frequencies in the moment, and then in the overall lifetime there are also natural progressions from the Spring to the Winter of our journeys, so to speak. These chapters and timings are all harmoniously in synch with the natural flow of the life force and by harnessing them properly, we can make the best use of the human form of life to awaken a transcendent state and achieve liberation at death.
Modern leaders today however, are deliberately attempting to destroy the natural flow of life by hiding the teachings on yoga and civilized lifestyle from the masses. The elite are tying to force the youth away from what is a healthy lifestyle and pushing them into an unhealthy way of life which degrades consciousness instead of uplifting it.
The bodily concept of life is being so heavily pushed, that there is no education regarding our real nature as consciousness or the way to behave in order to awaken consciousness as an eternal soul. I would be considered old-fashioned by now presumably, and admittedly my upbringing and training has been conservative, but I also had a liberal life after the monastery training of my youth, albeit toned down by insight and education. Today’s youth have little insight due to lack of proper training. The agenda of the elite seems to be to deliberately destroy the healthy and civilized way of life in this century. In this way the masses are easier to control as workers.
Nevertheless, the details of a healthy life, which is guided by ancient wisdom, is still available for those who wish to learn it, and can be found in the ancient Vedic Sanskrit texts. And part of it involves timing. By working with the natural flow of life on a micro and macro level, we can tap in to the flow and be in harmony overall. It may require unlearning the bad habits and perspective of reality as much as imbibing the good and healthy ones. And that is the very basic foundation of the eightfold yoga path, which begins with “yama” and “niyama” – what to do and what not to do.
We need to go back to the very foundational ABCs of healthy life, namely our morals and habits. If we can correct and align those, then we can begin to practice meditation via the various techniques to awaken heightened consciousness. By destroying the moral fiber of the youth today, the leaders are preventing any further growth in consciousness in civilization as a whole. The natural path of society is thus on a downtrend for the foreseeable future, which is unfortunately the predicted way of Kali Yuga, the current great age in history.
Nevertheless, any individual can still seek out a higher understanding of life and reality from the ancient Sanskrit texts, to make a personal journey toward enlightened consciousness and liberation from material bondage – if they so desire. The information is still available, for now, even if the educational systems are lacking. It’s up to you as an individual to choose your path, choose who you hear from, and what you accept as truth or normality. Your future depends on it.