From problems to peace

This page is the standing picture behind everything else on this site, set out once, in ordinary words. You do not need to believe any of it to read it, and you do not need a vocabulary — every name on this page is introduced by the plain thing first.

If you have never read anything spiritual before, start here rather than with a book. It takes about fifteen minutes, and it is in two halves: what one person can test in a month, and then the span it all sits inside, which nobody can.

The problem, before any of the answers

Here is the situation the whole thing is about, and it is deliberately small.

It is a quarter to ten in the evening. This morning you decided that tonight you would not say the thing you always say. About twenty-five minutes ago you said it. Nobody stopped you. Nobody was holding you down. You were free the entire time, and you did the opposite of what you had decided.

That is the problem. Not suffering in general, not the state of the world — that. You are free on paper and you cannot reliably do the small thing you decided this morning to do.

Three things are in the way, and they are the dark row at the top of the map.

The stand-in. Something acted in your name at twenty past nine and it felt entirely like you at the time. It had your voice and your memory and your side of the argument. The traditional name for this is body-consciousness — living as though you are the body and its history, its appetites, its reputation. It is not a broken part of you to be healed. It is a stand-in, and the useful question is not how to fix it but how long it was on.

The ten. There is a short list of what the stand-in runs on — anger, greed, ego, attachment, and the rest. In the old stories it is pictured as a figure with ten heads. The list is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that one item on it only needs a second to take an evening off you, which is why willpower keeps losing: you are bringing a decision made over twenty minutes to a fight that lasts one.

The accounts. Things you did, and things done to you, leave something behind — the old word is karma, which means nothing more mysterious than action and its consequence. The claim here is not that you can escape it. The claim is that it can be settled, and the back half of this page is about what does the settling.

Who am I?

This is the question the rest of the page hangs on, and the answer is a shift rather than a fact to learn.

You are the one who minded. Go back to that evening. You felt flat afterwards. That flatness is the most interesting thing that happened all night, because somebody in the room had to be disappointed for flatness to be possible — and it was not the one who said the sentence. Somebody else made the decision at the kettle that morning and has never once agreed to the evenings. That party is quiet, it has no leverage, and it has never been talked round. In forty years it has not changed its mind.

That is you. The traditional name is the soul — in this tradition, a point of conscious light, the thing that is aware and decides.

The body is the car and you are the driver. This is the one picture worth taking away, and it has to be taken literally to be any use. The car is real, it matters, it needs looking after, and it is not you. You are what is behind the wheel. The wear on the car is not an insult to the driver, and the driver's condition is not fixed by polishing the car.

That picture is also why none of this is an argument for disliking your body or your life. The driver does not get free of the car by hating it.

And one thing it is not. It does not mean somebody else was responsible for what you said at twenty past nine. Being driven badly is not the same as not being the driver. Nothing on this page excuses anybody from what they did, and the worst possible use of it would be explaining to your family that it was not really you.

Who is the Supreme Soul?

For most people new to this, this is the awkward part, so here it is plainly.

Another one of the same kind, who was never caught in any of it. Not a bigger version of the universe, not a force, not a metaphor. In this tradition the Supreme Soul — Shiv Baba, the Father — is a point of conscious light like you are, with one difference: never in a body of his own, and therefore never once run by the stand-in. Everyone you have ever asked about your evenings is in the same trouble you are. He is the one who is not.

That is why the relationship is a link and not a worship. On the map those two boxes are deliberately the same size and the same colour, side by side. You are not reaching up at something of a different order. You are two of one kind, and one of them has what the other has mislaid — the old description is the Ocean of peace, and you the drop.

If you do not believe any of this, the practice below still has something in it, and you should hold the belief loosely rather than fake it. What you cannot do is get the full claim of the tradition out of a half-held version, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.

What is remembrance?

This is the whole practice, and there is only one.

Three seconds of turning your attention to that one. Not clearing your mind. Not watching a thought go past. Not talking yourself round, and not analysing the evening. Turning — the way you would turn to look at somebody who came into the room.

The traditional name is remembrance, and in its full form it is called Raja Yoga — yoga here meaning a link or a connection, not a posture or a mat.

Three facts about it that matter more than any description:

• It is free and it is short. No equipment, no hour, no quiet room, no cushion. At the kettle, in a car park, on a stairwell.
• It is not insight. Understanding this page better will not do it. The thing that does the work is the turning, not the comprehension.
• It is not something you do to get somewhere. It is the connection itself. There is no stage after it.

The companion page, Meditation, is the two things to say while you do it, and it takes about a minute. That is the practical end of this page.

What that does — and how long it takes

Two separate things, on two completely different timescales, and running them together is the commonest mistake.

Knowing who you are takes a second. The shift from I am this body and its history to I am the one driving it is a recognition, not a project. Every account of it agrees on the duration, and the figure is not forty days or seven years. This is the hardest sentence here to accept, because we expect the size of a change to match the effort that bought it.

Changing what you are like takes years. The accounts settle slowly, under remembrance repeated over a long time. The traditional name for that is the fire of yoga — and the word fire misleads almost everybody, because it sounds like an ordeal. It is not an ordeal. It is the same three seconds, very many times, for years. Nobody gets the dramatic version.

So: the recognition is instant and the clearing is slow. If you were told it would all arrive together, you were told wrong, and the disappointment that follows is what makes most people stop.

What was always there

Here is the claim that makes this different from self-improvement, and it is the sentence in the box at the top of the map: nothing is added.

You are held to have seven original qualities — purity, peace, love, knowledge, power, joy and bliss. Not seven targets. Not a ranking. They are what is there when nothing is being added, which is why they are found by taking things away rather than by acquiring anything.

And the eight powers — to withdraw, to pack up, to tolerate, to accommodate, to discern, to judge, to face, to co-operate — are not a syllabus either. They are what an ordinary evening looks like when the stand-in is not overruling the quiet party. Both lists are set out, with what each one means, on the Meditation page.

So the seven are not a reward for the eight, and the eight are not a method for reaching the seven. Nothing passes between the two. Something stops being in the way.

Peace, and going home

These are the two words most often misunderstood, and both are returns.

Peace is underneath, not ahead. It is not a reward at the end of a practice and not a mood you arrange. It is one of the seven — already a property of the one who minded. The people who teach this say hello and goodbye with Om Shanti, which means I am a peaceful soul: a statement about what you are, in the present tense, not a wish about where you are going. If an evening was not peaceful, the claim is that a measure was failed — and failing a measure requires having the measure.

Going home has two senses, and the small one is the useful one.

The large one: souls are held to have come from a world of silence beyond this one, and to return there. That is a real part of the teaching, and the next section sets it out — along with the reason it is kept in a section of its own.

The small one: there is a version of going home every single day. The day is finite, you put it down, and you do not carry it into tomorrow — which is the second of the eight powers, to pack up. The nightly version is the one you can test, and the large one rests on the same recognition.

Neither is an afterlife, and neither is escape. What the practice offers is sometimes called liberation-in-life — being out of all this while still here: this kitchen, this age, the same job, the same family.

The part you cannot test on a Thursday

Everything above this line can be checked by one person in a month. Nothing below it can, and you should read the two differently.

This is the span the rest of it sits inside. It is the teaching's own account of where all this is going and how long it takes, and it is the part most people meet first and leave over. The practice does not depend on it. You can do the three seconds for years without holding any of this, which is why it has been kept in its own section rather than threaded through the page.

The whole thing is five thousand years, and it repeats. Not a line from a beginning to an end, but a cycle that has run before and will run again the same way. Four ages of 1,250 years each: golden, silver, copper, iron. The first two — the first 2,500 years — are the ones the old stories call heaven, and the people in them are the deities those stories are about.

It is a descent, and that is the shape to take from the diagram. Nothing goes wrong at a particular moment. Purity runs down across the four ages the way a battery does, which is why the boxes above get darker rather than one of them being marked as the fault.

Souls do not all arrive at once. They come down from the soul world at different times across the five thousand years, and the order is purity: the purer come earlier and take more births, the rest arrive later and take fewer. On this account you have been here before — a great many times — and this is not your first run through it.

The confluence age is where you are standing. It is the join between the iron age ending and the golden age beginning, which is why it is called a confluence — two ages running together. It is also called the diamond age, and the reason given is simply that God is present in it: as father, as teacher, and as the one who shows the way back to the soul world. This is the one window in the cycle when that teaching is available, and it is the answer to why any of this is being taught now rather than always.

And this is where going home gets its large sense. At the end of the cycle every soul is purified and returns, rests in silence, and comes back down when its time comes round. The nightly version in the section above is the small, testable echo of this one.

Four honest cautions, because this is the part that costs people.

• None of it is checkable. Not by you, not this month, not by me. Everything in the section above this one was written to be tested; this was not, and presenting the two in the same voice would be dishonest.
• It is not history, and historians do not treat it as history. This is a doctrinal account.
• It is not the Hinduism it borrows from. The four ages have those names in Hindu cosmology, but there they run for hundreds of thousands of years. The five-thousand-year cycle is this tradition's own, and it is a real departure rather than a summary of something older.
• You are allowed to set it aside and keep the practice. The three seconds do not know what you believe about the cycle, and nothing earlier on this page rests on this section being true.

What this page does not claim

• It is not a cure, and it is not medicine. Nothing here is a substitute for a doctor or for treatment, and nothing here should be used to put either off.
• It is not a reason to stay anywhere you are being harmed. If you are frightened of somebody you live with, that is a different and more urgent problem, and the answer to it is to get out. The fourth chapter of Something Has Hold of You says who to go to.
• It is not ancient, as a reading. These particular figures and lists are explained this way by named people in the last hundred years. Where the page sounds like it is quoting antiquity, it is not.
• It is not official. This is one practitioner's reading of what he was taught, and not a publication of the people who teach it.

What you could actually check, and by when

Advice like this fails by being agreeable and impossible to cash. So here is the testable part, with a timetable.

This week. Three seconds, a few times a day, whenever you remember. Nothing else. Do not aim for an hour and do not keep a record.

Within a week, the claim is that you will catch one crossing while it is happening rather than at eleven o'clock afterwards. Catching it is the whole result; you are not asked to stop it.

Within a month, the gap between the thing happening and you noticing should be measurably shorter. You will have a rough number for it, and comparing it to this week's is the evidence.

What will not have happened in a month: you will not have stopped saying the thing. The accounts take years and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.

If none of that happens, the honest conclusion is that this did not work for you, and you have lost a few seconds a day finding out.

Where this comes from

This is Raja Yoga as taught by the Brahma Kumaris, which the author has practised for more than ten years — as a practitioner, not a teacher. They did not write this page and have not seen it. It is a personal reading and not an official publication of theirs, and every error in it is his.

A great deal is still left out: this is a short page about a large teaching, and it gives the cycle in outline and nothing like the whole of it. What it does keep separate is the testable part and the rest, because running them together is how a reader ends up either believing everything or dismissing all of it.

If you want the teaching itself rather than one man's reading of it, go to the people who teach it. The Brahma Kumaris run an introductory Raja Yoga course in a great many countries. They give it freely and ask nothing in return. You will find the real thing differs from this page in emphasis and in scope, and you should prefer theirs.