A moderate lifestyle helps with meditation and selfless service

If you want your attempts to reflect God’s attributes in your own life to be successful you should also regulate your lifestyle. Do not eat too much or too little. Do not sleep too much or too little. Do not be too lazy or over-exert yourself. Avoid extremes in everything you do. Combine that with the practice of meditation and selfless service and you will find that it will eliminate all your pain and suffering in this world.

The basics of meditation

These are the basic instructions for practicing meditation: find a clean place to lay out a mat or something to protect yourself from the ground. Put a blanket or towel over the mat and sit on a cushion that isn’t so high that you are unstable or so low that you are uncomfortable. Sit with your body, neck and head all in a straight line.  Don’t look around or let your mind wander. Instead, focus on a point between the eyebrows and concentrate on one thing only.  Be serene and fearless. Your mind and body will gradually calm down. Sit thusly, firm in the vow to ignore the body and its sensations. Meditate with the intent to identify your consciousness with the image of God within. If you have the self-discipline to practice this steadily for a long enough period of time you will naturally attain a state of serenity and peace which will allow you to perfectly reflect the image of God within you.

A spiritual seeker should persevere with meditation in solitude until he or she masters the mind and body and should constantly strive to identify with the soul. That person will eventually be free from the endless effort to satisfy the senses and obtain possessions.

Enduring the pairs of opposites with an even mind

That person who has completely identified him or herself with the image of God within becomes tranquil and content with understanding the wisdom that comes from seeing things the way they really are. The spiritual seeker who is absorbed in that truth, who has firmly established his or her identification with the soul and who has conquered the senses will be unaffected by heat or cold, pleasure or pain, praise or blame. He or she is not disturbed by anything and looks with equal regard on a clod of soil, a stone or a nugget of gold.  That person has equal regard for everyone whether they be a family or strangers, friends or enemies, neutral acquaintances or hateful people, saints or sinners.

An uncontrolled mind is your enemy

You can decide to be your own friend or your own enemy. A person can rise up through the efforts of the mind or similarly be cast downward. As you gain control over your thoughts and feelings through the help of meditation and forsaking your ego, your mind becomes your friend. An uncontrolled mind becomes your enemy.

You cannot really be seeking to reflect the image of God within you if you have not renounced selfish motives and personal desires.  Selfless service to everyone around you is the way to attain union with God.  When you overcome both attachment to fulfilling your sensual desires and to the desire to have your actions yield the results that you want, you will be completely identified with the image of God.  True serenity is the state of mind that results.

Real freedom and supreme peace

When you become perfect in the practice of both non-attachment and meditation things like longing for sensual pleasures, anger and fear naturally drop away and you will realize you are really one with God by virtue of having His image within you. With your mind and body calm and controlled, you will experience real freedom.  You will then understand that these attributes of self-sacrifice and self-discipline are really attributes of God and you will have undoubtedly reached a state of supreme peace