Q&A: Keeping your joy

After we stop meditating, how can we maintain the level of consciousness that we reached during our meditation?

Here in the meditation hall we are all aspiring; that is why our consciousness is elevated. When we go home, our consciousness will go down. Some as calamity may take place or we will just enter into ordinary activities, and we will lose our aspiration. Even if there is no outer disturbance, still we find it difficult to remain in our highest consciousness because we are not used to living there. We aspire for half an hour with utmost sincerity, and then relaxation starts. We feel that we have worked very hard, so now we are entitled to take rest for an hour or two. We do not value what we have achieved. We feel, "even if I lose it, I will get it back tomorrow." So we start reading a newspaper or watching television, and in this way we enter into relaxation.

If we want to maintain the height of our aspiration, he then our aspiration has to flow continuously. Suppose we have meditated for an hour or so and we do not have the capacity to continue meditating. Still, we can do something which will maintain and preserve our meditation. We can read spiritual books, sing spiritual songs or listen to soulful music. We can go to visit a spiritual friend or, if that is not possible, call him on the phone and speak about spiritual matters. Another thing we can do is write about our experiences, not with the thought of publishing them but just to keep them in our consciousness. While we are writing down an experience, we are revealing our own inner light. Then, each time we read about one of our own experiences, we get new inspiration and aspiration. Even while we are eating we can remember what experiences we had during our morning meditation. Like charging a battery, we are charging our memory with spiritual energy. In this way we can remain in the spiritual flow that we had during our meditation, and keep our consciousness high until our next meditation.

If we want to maintain our height and make the utmost progress, we have to be very wise in our day-to-day lives in how we spend each second. A time will come when we will not have to have any restrictions in our life; our life itself will be a continuous flow of aspiration. But now we have to use our conscious mind in order to aspire.

Now is the time to make good use of time. Today is the day to begin a perfect day.