Dada Gunamuktananda wants you to shift your focus.
Think about it…
We are all increasingly – justifiably – obsessed with what’s inside our food. What nutrients or strange toxic compounds lurk within?
We want to know what’s inside our homes. Lead? Radon? Termites?
We know that Intel is inside our computers because they remind us constantly.
And yet we know so little about what’s inside that most important computer of all: our own minds.
“You can say that there are two sides to human life,” says the warm, lighthearted, and popular meditation teacher Dada, “and one of them is very neglected. We spend a lot of time focused externally, understanding the world and all its information, interacting with the outer world. And, sure, that gives us a certain amount of satisfaction, a certain amount of fulfillment, pleasure and happiness.”
But all too often, he explains, speaking from a quiet, verdant garden in Valencia, Spain, “we neglect the second side of life – until it’s too late.”
Watch Dada Gunamuktananda at METAL
“I’m going to be a bit controversial here,” he says, “but eventually you will come across a personal crisis for which nothing you’ve constructed or ‘understood’ on the outside is going to help. No matter what you’ve done or accomplished in the outside world, at some point you're going to be left kind of stranded, wondering what your life is all about, who you truly are, what you truly are and what you're going to do next. The only way you can get through that crisis is to look within.”
That process, or skill, or practice, says Dada, is meditation.
He asks, “why wait? Why not get started now? It’s the wise thing to do to practice meditation preemptively. Yes, do it in order to prepare yourself. But of course, not only for that.”
According to the yoga philosophy, he says, “meditation is the only way to ultimately fulfill yourself. We can be partially fulfilled with the people and things in our lives, but we're only going to be able to be completely fulfilled by looking within,” and discovering what he calls “the beautiful truth.”
THE POSITIVE VIBRATION INSIDE
A leading teacher and practitioner of the school of Ananda Marga, “the way of happiness,” Dada says “keep doing whatever you’re currently doing in your outer life, but also do meditation. You only need half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening. One hour out of twenty four is not a lot to ask, especially because you're working on your most inner, most precious self.”
The Ananda Marga school teaches a very specific meditative form.
Students in meditation at Ananda Marga Center.
“It’s very important to know your breath, yes, but we go further than that. We add the repetition of a mantra to go along with your breath. The mantra has a very particular meaning and vibration, in fact, the most positive meaning and vibration that you could possibly imagine. Simply watching your thoughts and breathing is good, but we add the mantra because this makes the process proactive rather than passive.”
“The more you repeat your mantra in accordance with your breath,” he promises, “the more you will ideate on that mantra, the more you feel the vibration of that mantra within yourself, and so the happier and more at ease you will become.”
This principle of “as you think, so you become” aligns with established psychological principles developed by Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and perhaps most thoroughly by Martin Seligman and his school of positive psychology.
THE RIPPLE EFFECT OF POSITIVE MEDITATION
The natural result of this type of positive meditation, he says, includes “becoming a better person. You will not only be more at ease with yourself, you will communicate with others with more ease and empathy and you will want to help them.”
But it all begins within.
Percentage of global meditators by country
“We are a bottom-up philosophy. We start with the fact that we're not going to be completely happy unless we find the truth within ourselves. And that leads to comprehensive social engagement for us. For responding to natural disasters we have the Ananda Marga Universal Relief Team. We run schools – over 700 in India alone. We’ve got children's homes, medical clinics, and other types of community development projects.”
According to Dada, the goal of his meditation community is to “effect the greatest good that we can in the world. Our social perspective includes all of humanity as well as animals and plants. In fact, our founding Guru gave us a comprehensive socioeconomic theory, because clearly communism didn’t work and capitalism is not working as well as it should. We bring some more facets to the table.”
LIVING INSIDE THE HOUSE OF BLISS
Dada was not born into his yogic community, which began in a small Indian village in 1955. Born in New Zealand, as a young man he was a seeker of a familiar kind. A medical student who followed the bread trail from a poster at his university to an evening class and then to a weekend retreat, he quickly realized that the mechanistic world underpinning his studies somehow just didn’t give access to “that all pervading, blissful awareness that is in everybody and everything, the cosmic consciousness that is the entire universe.”
Meditation in the Ananda Marga style, however, did.
“Meditation is the only sustainable way of having a spiritual experience that I know,” he says. “Sure, you can take mind-expanding substances like ayahuasca, LSD, MDMA, and they will give you a glimpse into the spiritual world.”
His early experimentations with plant medicines and psychedelic substances provided him with an important contrast to what he experiences now.
“It's like this: you can walk up to a house, and there's a window. You look through it. You can see what's inside, but you can't get in unless you find a door and actually walk inside. That door is the practice of meditation. Walking through that door is the only sustainable way of experiencing what’s inside. And it's not an immediate experience. It's not fast food. It's a lifelong process. You have to gradually raise up your entire consciousness to live inside a heightened spiritual awareness.”
Over time, he says, you begin to change.
“Mechanistic materialism doesn’t engender optimism. But when you experience the truth that you live in a conscious universe and it lives within you and as you – you feel loved, hopeful, happy, and at peace with others. You are never alone or helpless. You know that the force that guides the stars guides you too.”
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
There is something gentle, unpretentious, direct, simple, and fun about Dada, which is probably why his TED talk has garnered almost 6.5 million views on YouTube alone.
His message likely resonates so well because he embodies exactly the kind of easeful joyousness of the Ananda Marga methods that he teaches.
In his TED talk, for example, just before he quotes three towering physicists, including Einstein, in support of the idea of a conscious universe, he quips, “I won’t spend too much time on this, in fact I’ll try to finish before I begin.”
“I value my own sense of humor,” he says. At Ananda Marga, we have a very positive life view. We see life as a big drama, a big cosmic game. So why not laugh, because if you don't, you cry. Right?”
Written by Adam Gilad
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