The Art and Science of Happiness with Turiya Moore Turiya Moore

A visualization for planetary peace and harmony

Life is a school.The constant battle between good and evil in our own minds has a purpose and is intended to help us eventually realize our own divinity. Near death experiences. The spiritual nature and purpose of life. The direct experience of God in prayer and meditation. An important learning experience about prayer and attitude gained through trying to survive aggressive cancer treatment. 

If you want your prayers to be answered and if you want this relationship. And you want it to be intimate and direct and personal. It is there for you, but God has to be number one. God isn't playing games. It's gotta be number one. You've got to learn to want that and enjoy that more than anything else in my opinion, otherwise it won't come. And so where you're meditating it's ok to pray and say alright I can't hear you but I'd like to hear you, I'd like to hear you more, I'd like to know what you want me to do with my life you know. So I'm gonna make you a promise. I'm gonna do everything I can till the next time I meditate, to try to feel you guiding my thoughts. And if I don't feel you guiding my thoughts, I'm gonna pretend like you're guiding my thoughts. I'm gonna live like you're guiding my life whether you guide my life or not, so you damn well better step in at some point. I'm not going to tell anybody, but I'm going to do everything in Your name...

Excerpt from the talk:
And what if that relationship between us and everything that there is, what if it’s a choice? What if we really do have free will? And the choice is not about how your life ends up and all that kind of thing, because there’s all this action and reaction that’s happening all over the place that’s outside of our control. Stupid people make stupid decisions, the next thing you know we’re all dead. It’s wonderful, it’s a perfect environment to grow spiritually. And so what if the only choice that matters is: do we create the space in our lives to be quiet to calm down, so live from our intuition a little bit more and trust more what we feel instead of so much what we think and what we’ve heard and what we’ve been told and take time to really love our children and to appreciate the sky and to let our hearts guide us toward the next steps in our lives, whatever they might be, making time for other people, being patient with them, giving them money when they need it even when you can’t afford to, just being more serviceful, more loving, because in your heart you know that you want to, even though your mind says that you can’t. There’s a fork in the road at every moment of our lives to realize and to step into a greater reality that includes us and enjoys us, where were we belong.

To get the benefits of meditation that we hear about, like being more free of anxiety, being more positive, being more calm, more clear, more focused and also maybe a lot of things having to do with physical health, does not require a lot of depth in meditation. What it requires is a steady practice, doing something like watching the breath every day or just about every day, once or twice a day, short bursts of concentrated stillness and developing the commitment to do it, but also the understanding that when you're doing your meditation, it's got to at least feel decent, right? So the best way to feel decent if your mind's wandering, you're having trouble with the breath, you're physically fidgety, you have anxiety, you’re having negative thoughts or something, just keep bringing your mind back to the feeling of the breath without controlling it and learn to leave the meditation and feel absolutely successful that you did your best.
In the beginning, a lot of the benefits that we hear about in the medical field, in western science about meditation, those can be obtained that way and that kind of a meditation can evolve into something like twenty or thirty minutes at a time and you're just doing something, there's a lot of techniques out there like that, where you're just inhaling this, exhaling that, focusing here. You'll get a lot of the benefits. But when you read books about deep spiritual experiences, saints communing with God, St. Francis communing with Jesus, Yogananda with Krishna, or when you talk about that kind of meditation, going deeper spiritually, having a direct relationship with the Divine, the way I would define if we're moving deep, it's never going to be like visions, crazy astral experiences, out of body weirdness. Half the time when people experience those things it's because they fell asleep and they don't even know it, because you can get used to meditating and have a really straight spine and be completely asleep and you just go off into subconscious, you go off into dreamland and you'll have dreams related to whatever you think about meditation, whatever you want about meditation and you might come out thinking you had this mind blowing, great spiritual experience and it was literally a subconscious dream.
But the way to know if your meditation is deep, specifically what I'm talking about when I say depth, it's an experience of freedom. In other words you don't feel like you're meditating, you don't feel like you're doing a technique anymore. You might even be doing it, but you're observing a different experience inside where you feel free and when I say freedom what I mean is (and I can only speak about my own experience) when the part of my consciousness that divides everything up into life into likes and dislikes is gone. The likes and the dislikes go away and you're completely aware and you feel free...

And so we learn with the things that we love, we learn to accept them with all levels of their realities, whether they feel good or bad or they are harmful or not, right? We start to have a deeper relationship with things when we can accept the whole picture, not just what we want and that relationship can be very freeing because only then do we start to have a dynamic connection with it and so with people, when we can accept people as they are, with all their imperfections, like the mountainside that will kill you, like the ocean that will drown you if you let them, right?