Live with Consciousness Rather Than with Conscience
All the things that we have lived for have no place in the zone that we experience as we leave our body. Our sins and good deeds bear no value. There are no bargains for us to have. Our charitable donations have no say there. There can be no money exchange. We cannot give donations to a charitable institution and take the receipt along with us. There is no visa or speed-pass in heaven. There is no exchange counter between earth and heaven.
A small story:
One man managed to strike a conversation with God. He spoke to him about heaven and hell. God said to him, 'Come, I will show you hell.'
They entered a room where a group of people sat around a huge pot of stew. Everyone was looking famished.
Each held a spoon that reached the pot, but the spoon had a handle so much longer than their arms that it could not be used to get the stew into their own mouths. The suffering was terrible.
God said after a while, 'Come, now I will show you heaven.'
They entered another room, identical to the first - the pot of stew, the group of people, the same long-handled spoons. But there everyone was happy and well-nourished.
'I don't understand,' said the man. 'Why are they happy here when they were miserable in the other room and everything was the same?'
God smiled and said, 'It is simple. Here they have learnt to feed each other!'
Geographically, there is no hell or heaven. These are only psychological states. How much we learn to go with the flow and live, that much life can be heaven. If we are intelligent, we will be happy and blissful; we are in heaven; else we will remain depressed; we are in hell.
Another story:
A big industrialist died and reached the office of St. Peter.
St. Peter gave him a choice to be in heaven or in hell.
The industrialist requested to be taken to both the places before he could decide.
The request was granted. First, he went to heaven. There he saw only saints singing hymns. There was no great activity.
Next he went to hell where he saw people dancing and drinking and having fun. There was a celebration going on. The industrialist was very impressed and decided to choose hell.
St. Peter agreed but warned him that once the decision was made there was no going back.
The industrialist was confident of his decision and went ahead with his choice of hell.
The industrialist was taken to hell. The moment he stepped into hell, he was grabbed by two devils who started torturing him. He was very upset. He protested and blamed the authorities for this treatment. He said, 'This is not what I saw when I came to inspect! It was so lively and inviting. Now what I see is completely different. I feel cheated now!'
The demons looked at him and replied, 'What you saw was only our marketing department!'
Understand that if we believe in heaven and hell, we will end up only in the marketing department! All our ideas of merits and sins are created for better social life. They are not spiritual laws. Only consciousness can help us; not our conscience. Our consciousness is natural; it is a continuous witnessing awareness. Only that is going to guide us after death.
Going to temples and places of worship is not going to help us after death. If we think that leading a religious life here is going to help us there, be very clear that you are not going to be rewarded there. Our actions are not going to accompany us. The moment we leave this physical layer, our activities are not going to count. Whether we are sinners or saints does not count either. There is no difference between a sadhu (one who has renounced family life) and a householder; this is only a social difference. At the time of leaving the body, what matters is how the person has lived; how aware he has been.
How consciously we have lived life is all that counts. The more we become aware of our body and mind, the more it comes under our control. Someone once asked me, 'By controlling my desire for sex, can I attain enlightenment?' I told him, if you are enlightened, you will not have the desire for sex. But don't think that by controlling your desire for sex, you will become enlightened. We must understand that an enlightened man is out of the sex circle. Buddha was out of sex, Krishna was out of sex and Jesus was out of sex.
A small story from Krishna's life:
Once, Krishna along with the gopis (cowherd devotees of Krishna), was trying to cross the sacred river Yamuna (river in northern Bharat) which was heavily flooded at that time.
He prayed to Yamuna to subside and give Him way if she believed He was a brahmachari (celibate).
Yamuna subsided at once to give them way.
People wondered how this was possible since to them, Krishna was a flirt! He used to spend time with all His female devotees and He had thousands of wives as well. How could He be a brahmachari?
Vyasa (author of the epic - *Mahabharata*) explains that an enlightened master is beyond sex. He has no gender. He is beyond his body. He is beyond sex.
But an ordinary person will not attain enlightenment just by going beyond sex. It cannot be used as a technique for enlightenment. Enlightenment does not happen by suppressing ourselves. It needs transformation - of base energies to higher level energies; lust should transform to love, anger to compassion and so on. We need to work on transforming ourselves. None of our virtues or acts are going to help us after we leave the body.
A small story:
In a village, one man was charged of committing a sin. He was rounded up in the village meeting for punishment.
A wise old man visiting the village was watching the scene.
People accused the man of sin. There were shouts from all around.
The wise old man spoke loudly, 'Let the man who is without a sin pass the final judgement.' All of a sudden, there was pin drop silence!
We are saints as long as people worship us. A 'sinner' is just an idea given to us by our enemies. A 'saint' is an idea given to us by our disciples. A sinner and saint are titles given by moralists. Ofcourse, to live in the planet, we need to follow some morality. But neither a sinner nor a saint exists once we leave the physical body. How consciously we lived our lives is the only thing that matters. Our consciousness will be the torch that will help us cross all the seven layers. Once we cross these seven layers consciously with awareness, in a meditative way, we will have the choice to be enlightened or to take birth. If we have not lived with consciousness or awareness, we will immediately enter a new body after our death. Our lust for the body will be so much that we will not even wait to get a suitable body; we will get into the first available body.
When we are living with the body, if we can be at ease with our body, if we can live with ourselves, sit without thoughts, that is what is the power of consciousness If we have the capacity to sit by ourselves without thoughts, we have the power of consciousness in us.
This is actually a very powerful Zen meditation technique: sitting with yourself. We may think that sitting without doing anything is quite easy. But if we just sit we will see how our mind races through so many thoughts, one after the other, and we will also see that most of these are disconnected and have no real reason to arise as they do! When we are with ourselves, if we are aware of thoughts as they rise, we can drop them instead of trying in vain to control them.
We can sit with everyone, but we cannot sit with ourselves. Even when we are alone, we keep ourselves busy by watching television or reading the newspaper. We watch the same things again and again; we read the same things again and again. If we are not doing these two things, we start planning or thinking.
If we can sit at least for a minute completely relaxed, we will have the same sense of relaxation when we leave the body. We will have the patience and awareness to wait and choose the right type of body. We must understand that it is we who program and design our birth, including the choice of our parents. Our choice of the next body is based on the way we have lived our lives.
For example, if we live to eat rather than eat to live, at the time of death we will still have the desire to continue eating. So we will design our next body to accommodate this desire. We will naturally choose the body of a pig! If we have lived our life only for sleeping and doing no creative work, we will choose the body of a buffalo. Based on the attitude we have lived with, we choose the next body. This is the basic idea on which our janma-marana chakra (cycle of life and death) revolves. We go into janma samskara chakra, a birth life cycle. We go and come back again taking a new body. This phenomenon happens again and again. This is the cycle of birth and death. I have given you my understanding of this cycle of birth and death from my own experience.
This is a vast subject. Only by questioning can we have a clear understanding of this subject.
Apart from the first two layers, which I have explained briefly, the third layer is the subtle layer. It is related to our guilt. When we leave this layer, there will be struggle between us and our guilt; the question of right or wrong will arise. When we leave the physical body or the sthula sarira, we have to deal with pain. In the pranic layer, we deal with desires and in the subtle layer, we deal with our guilt. The fourth body, the causal body is that of total darkness. In the fifth body which is the spiritual body, we will remember all our pain intensely. In the sixth body, the cosmic body, we will feel intense pleasure. These are the 2 spaces that I call heaven and hell. When we reach the cosmic body, we become one with consciousness. If we are not ready for it or we are not enlightened, we come back; we take a rebirth. If we are mature as we go through these layers, we become enlightened.
Even ordinary people who are not enlightened, just by their simplicity and innocence, are able to predict their death. This is very common among villagers. Even among the very family members of these people, such predictions of the person's death have been made and have come true as well. They predict the exact time!
Understand that there is nothing wrong in enjoying life. This morning, a devotee was asking me about pornography. According to me, pornography is the most insensitive thing. It makes us lose sensitivity. In this, only the body structure is respected and not the person or the being. We never feel fulfilled because it makes us insensitive. That is the reason we run behind it again and again. If we enjoyed it with our sensitivity, we would be fulfilled. I call the body, the temple of consciousness. If we enjoy it in the ultimate sense, we will get enlightened and never come back.
When we discuss enjoyment, we should see whether we are talking from a sensitive or insensitive point of view. If we are talking from an insensitive angle, we will never get enlightened. We will come back again and again. We will be stuck in the second layer. If we want to enjoy life on planet Earth, we are attracted by this desire, and we will naturally take rebirth. It is our choice whether we want to get enlightened or whether we want to enjoy the pleasures of this life on a purey materialistic plane. If our sensitivity is heightened, we enjoy bliss and are relaxed without the help of outward pleasures.
There is a beautiful sutra in the Kamasutra which says, 'The moment we have sensitivity, we realize the ecstasy and joy of living. Our very living inside our body is ecstasy.' Tantra calls it, 'the inner orgasm'. If we experience this, we will decide not to take another birth. Why go through all the pain of birth and death? If we have the maturity to live without the body, we will not look for another birth. But if we have any hangover, unfulfilled desire, naturally we will choose to be born again to fulfill it.