[Click above to listen to the talk as you read:]   "I want to talk to you again about a teaching instrument that we've been developing – that I want you all to embrace: Deepen Your Practice, which comes out once a month. This evening is a perfect example. The essence of Hard Light teaching is experiential, in that I strive to give you the opportunity to be exposed to lots of different stages and states of consciousness.

I feel that this is the essence of the teaching. All of the activity here in the Hard Light Center is driven by the profound presence of the Guru Shakti and the amplification, capacity of Samadhi, Savikalpa and Nirvikalpa Samadhi, wherein you are directly exposed to very powerful states of consciousness. It's important also to understand that there are very important ideas that are very useful and helpful to the mind.

One level of teaching is direct experience. The ocean of dharma is vast and we spend a lot of time discussing these profound ideas of dharma, like the Bodhichitta, like the Pratyahara – stopping the mind, the elements of the Pratyahara and Samadhi, the nature of the Guru.

And when I'm giving a teaching on the subject, I always manifest the state, and stages and states of consciousness that I'm discussing at the time. A lot of these talks go on for hours and they're fire hoses of information, and people are going in and out of various states, being involved in the state while the teaching is happening.

The idea of the Deepen Your Practice is to present these ideas that are the structure of these various states of consciousness. On one level the capacity to stop the mind draws the attention into the samadhi, but the mind needs to be fed by the underlying ideas, and needs to begin to learn to articulate the subtle differences of the stages and states. It's very complicated because these ideas are profound.

But over the arc and period of time of a person's sadhana, the ability to engage the ideas and embrace them, study them, contemplate them, come to understand and realize them is very useful. It keeps you in the game. It gives you the ability to draw your mind close as you are going through the process of sadhana and transformation.

From the standpoint of the student-teacher relationship, it is very natural. You went to school, you went to class, you heard the talk or the lecture and then you got a reading assignment that supported the teaching, homework. It's a way for the mind to touch these teachings.

In this way information is developed. To be able to absorb information on the fly, where the experience is being given at the same time the explanation is being given - to be able to absorb the experience and absorb the explanation at the same moment, makes you a brilliant student. The expression of that is to be able to understand the teaching at the moment it's given, perceive the example and understand the explanation at the moment you hear it.

But in reality in the study of a subject of great depth, when you're in the learning process - you touch it and you feel it and come into a relationship with it - but there's always parts of it you get and parts of it you don't get. When you're listening to a lecture on a subject, there's parts of it that come easy and parts of it that you don't understand.

Having been a student all my life, I've noticed the difference of being able to grasp an explanation when it's coming at you, mind-meld words and expression, an example and explanation - and I know when I get it and I know when I missed it.

And I've found that often times complex information is more easily tackled when it's written down and you have the opportunity to read it over and over again and again. At first, the teaching seems kind of opaque, and then it starts to open up to you, then you start to grasp it, gain knowledge of it and understand it and then realize it.

This is what the idea of the Deepen Your Practice is about. Each month you receive one of the teachings that has been given. It comes in one of two formats: hardcopy or digital. You could request it to be sent to you directly online as a file that lives on your computer. You can request that the talk be printed and it will come to you in a spiral bound booklet, which contains the transcription of the talk and the CD of the lecture so you can both hear the lecture and read the lecture. Or you can do all three: have the online files and the printed booklet and CD of the lecture. For people who are exclusively computer-centric, you have the option of having the text on file and store your library on file. If you have it printed for you, you end up with a library of teachings and talks.

The idea is that the talks and the lectures are given to you so that you can study them and it's a new one every month. The process of sitting quietly absorbing information, remembering the meditation, the sound of the talk, reading the words... because all of these talks are given in the Nirvikalpa Samadhi and the fourth attention, they live forever in time and space, they live in eternity, which is to say, they are present in the Akashic record.

And oftentimes you'll find that these will act as a reference point and will bring to life the teaching points as well as the experience of the transmission and meditation.

There are some talks that are based on pointers - what it's like to move from the state of breath, to the state of concentration, to meditation, to meditate on an object like Bodhichitta, or the dynamics and points of guru yoga. The second month is on the four bodies, So Ham, five pranas; the eleventh month is on Guru Radar.

I feel it will be very useful in connecting the glue of the experience of meditation with me and the underlying ideas of dharma that will live in the mind and give the mind substance to the experience.

Many of you have already been involved in the Deepen Your Practice program. Everyone has found it very useful. I want you all to embrace this, because I know it will help.

Over the course of time, Baba would give classes and they were structured like classes with lots of information, and he would always hand out a workbook. To this day I keep those workbooks and scan them.

There's so much information in them, just the technical stuff. I do this same sort of thing in the Intensives, the Retreats, and the Kundas where there are always special teachings involved; a lot of information gets disseminated.

And I want to use this Deepen Your Practice program to capture these teachings in this format, that is an object you can hold in your hands or call upon your computer."

~ Mark Griffin, May 2010