As we go within the self, we discover that all the voices of our past lives are still there. As we peel ourselves, which is a process very much like peeling an onion, we discover that there are many selves within the self.
If you dig deeply, you will find that you are not a singular self but that there are many selves, many voices within you. The more conscious you are of those selves and the more you let them find expression through you, the more complete you will be.
As incarnations go by, the atom gets more complex. That is, your being, the part of you that reincarnates from lifetime to lifetime, the aggregate, grows thicker and denser.
Whatever you have learned in your previous incarnations is retained within your causal body, your multi-lifetime body of energy that lives from one incarnation to another.
While this is good and it stores up knowledge and power, at the same time there's a problem with it because it means that a person becomes more fixed.
When you go into samadhi, either salvikalpa or nirvikalpa, what happens is you erase, you loosen, the aggregates. You simplify them.
The Akashic Records are the impressions from all of our past lives that are available within our causal body.
Some people speak of the Akashic Records as if they were on an IBM mainframe that's out there somewhere near the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
All the records of your past lives are contained within your own mind, just as the records of your ancestors are contained within your DNA.
In meditation, as you go into the causal dimensions, the planes of light, you will be purified, energized and you will become wise.
The trick to being happy is getting beyond the body and the astral realms.
You're composed of an aggregate of different forms and energies, the samskaras. These are lines within your own being. When you go into samadhi, these lines dissolve gradually so you become less formed.
In the Far East, a peasant has no problem that someone can be born from another universe into a human body, walk up to their hut one day and ask for something to eat and transport them into infinite galaxies of awareness.
The self plays among the waves of existence. It surfaces, it comes up for a while, and then it disappears again.
In sanskrit they say: "Tat twam asi" - thou art that. You are God. The bubble of your awareness bursts and you're flooded with immortality.
Everything that you see before you with your physical eyes is an illusion. In other words, you are not seeing correctly. Life is made up of light. But if you are only looking through the senses, it seems solid and physical.
The wheel goes round and round and round forever. Pleasure, pain, birth and death, lifetime after lifetime, it is endless. All sentient beings experience this, the endless dance of life, the lila.
All of the universes are but phantoms, mirages, and while they have their own essence, their own pantomime - they pass forgotten.
The perceiver of the dream, the one whom the dream is unfolding before, is what we call the Self.
Once you have personally experienced enlightenment, you will see beyond the ocean of death to the everlasting shores of immortality.
The universe is always ecstasy and it's always perfect, but we don't perceive it that well. If we keep doing our yoga in every lifetime, we perceive it more correctly.
The planes of light exist. Yoga is a method of unifying the energies of the body, the mind, and the spirit and directing them towards infinity, the planes of light.
Now, stopping thought is only the beginning. As Brahmananda, who was a disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, once remarked: The inner life begins with samadhi. This is an awesome thought, I realize, for the average person who meditates, that it could begin with samadhi.
Krishna once said to Arjuna: Consider the past and future with an equal mind, and pass the peanut M&M's.
Sri Krishna is said to be an avatar, which is a human way of trying to define very big. That is to say that Sri Krishna is not from the local area network, but he has come from a world that is different because his mind is different.