Eyes Open
A Raja Yoga practice you can run from a book, with your eyes open
Free to read, in full, here. Seventeen chapters, and the book asks you to take one a month rather than read them in a week.
You have tried this before. You sat down, closed your eyes, waited for something, got an itch and a shopping list instead, and concluded you were bad at it. The problem was almost certainly not your aptitude. Nobody told you what you were supposed to be doing.
Every chapter closes the same way: something to study against the organisation’s own published pages, so you can check it; something to practise, starting at one minute three times a day; a meditation to read slowly; and a plain statement of what it should do for you, and by when — including what will not happen.
This is not an official publication of the Brahma Kumaris. They teach this course themselves, free, in over a hundred and ten countries, and if there is a centre near you, go there instead of here — or as well.
- What this is notA note before anything else. They teach this course themselves, free, in over a hundred and ten countries, and if there is a centre near you, go there…
- Who is askingChapter one asked you to sit for a minute and hold one sentence: I am a peaceful being. If you did it, you may have noticed a small problem with it. Who is?
- The machine you are runningSit still for sixty seconds and thoughts arrive. You know that; chapter one was mostly about not treating it as a defeat.
- Soul consciousness, and what it is notChapter two probably convinced you. Not of everything, but of enough — that the thing reading this is not the same kind of object as the thing holding the…
- The Supreme, and why knowing is not enoughChapter four gave you one job: pick the fault you would most like to be rid of, then leave it completely alone and practise its opposite instead.
- Where we came fromThere is a particular feeling that almost everybody has had and very few people have a use for.
- The method, and why the eyes stay openSix chapters in, you have been given almost no technique. That was deliberate. Technique is the most attractive part of this subject and the least important…
- The eight powersThink about how you handled the last four difficult things that happened to you. For most people, a pattern shows up immediately, and it is embarrassing in a…
- The bodiless stage, and service by the mindChapter seven said there are exactly three movements in this practice — inward, upward, and outward — and that this book had not asked you to do any of the…
- The third eyeThe course teaches this one with an experiment rather than a definition, and the experiment is good enough that I am going to run it on you before explaining…
- Karma — what actually gets recordedAlmost everybody reading this already uses the word, and almost everybody uses it wrong. Listen to how it occurs in ordinary speech. That's karma.
- The cycle of time, and the dramaThere is one question that costs more human hours than any other, and you asked it recently. Why.
- God's part in itThere are two ways to get this wrong and almost everybody is doing one of them. The first is waiting.
- The tree of religionsYou have had this conversation and it went badly. Religion comes up — at a table, in a car, with somebody you like — and within about four minutes two…
- Food for the soulSome time in the last year you have been uneasy for no reason you could name. Not about anything.
- The four subjectsBy now you know a great deal about this. You could explain what the soul is, how it is built, where the tradition says it came from, what karma actually…
- Where it came fromSome time in the 1920s, a diamond merchant in Sindh looked at a picture on his own wall and decided he did not like it.
At the back
Questions
- What is Eyes Open?
It is the Brahma Kumaris' Raja Yoga course set out in seventeen chapters, with the practice, the guards around it, and a plain statement of what each chapter should do for you. The book asks you to take one chapter a month rather than read the lot in a week.
- Is this an official Brahma Kumaris publication?
No. It is not an official publication of the Brahma Kumaris. They teach this course themselves, free, in over a hundred and ten countries — and if there is a centre near you, the book's own advice is to go there instead of here, or as well.
- Why do I keep failing at meditation?
You sat down, closed your eyes, waited for something, got an itch and a shopping list instead, and concluded you were bad at it. The problem was almost certainly not your aptitude. Nobody told you what you were supposed to be doing, which is the gap this book is written into.
- What does each chapter of Eyes Open give you?
Four things, every time: something to study against the organisation's own published pages so you can check it; something to practise, starting at one minute three times a day; a meditation to read slowly; and a plain statement of what it should do for you and by when — including what will not happen.
- Is Eyes Open free to read?
Yes, free to read in full on this site, all seventeen chapters.