Sensory Trap
16.13 They think: This has been gained by me today; I shall fulfill this desire; I have this much wealth and will have more wealth in the future;
16.14 That enemy has been slain by me, and I shall slay others also. I am the Lord. I am the enjoyer. I am successful, powerful, and happy.
16.15 I am rich and born in a noble family. Who is equal to me? I shall perform sacrifice, I shall give charity, and I shall rejoice. Thus deluded by ignorance,
16.16 thus confused by various anxieties and caught in a net of illusions, one becomes too deeply attached to sensory pleasures and falls into hell.
Krishna does not let go. He wants Arjuna and mankind to understand how deeply the human psyche is damaged by the ego.
Shankara defines āhāra or food, in one of his commentaries, to mean all sensory inputs, whereas traditionally āhāra is translated as food. Food, as we normally understand it, is what the mouth consumes. This is the sustenance upon which the physical body feeds and grows. Many live only to eat, but a few aware ones eat only enough to sustain them, so that they can live.
Every sensory organ has its own āhāra, inputs, upon which it feeds. Based on these inputs, the eye, ear, tongue, nose and skin develop their desires and convey these desires to the body-mind system. Control of these senses and the desires that they weave is what Sage Patanjali prescribed as pratyāhāra, one of the eight methods of his Ashtanga Yoga.
Pratyāhāra is not suppression of the senses. Pratyāhāra is not starving the senses. Just as we need to eat in order to live, the senses need inputs to function.
You And Me
However, these inputs can be regulated so that the fantasies they weave are kept in control.
The average human is led by his senses; he does not lead his senses. His karmendriya, the organs of action that are responsible for movements are driven by these senses without the need for input from the conscious mind. Instinctively, they avoid pain and welcome pleasure.
A small story:
Two friends met in the street. One of them looked sad and almost on the verge of tears. The other one asked, 'What happened? Why do you look so sad?'
He replied, 'My uncle passed away three weeks ago. He left me fifty thousand dollars.'
His friend said, 'That's not bad.'
He continued, 'Two weeks ago my cousin died and he left me ninety thousand dollars.'
His friend cried, 'This is great!'
He went on, 'Last week my grandfather died. He left me a million.'
His friend asked, 'Then why are you so sad?'
He replied, 'Because this week, nobody died.'
Understand: Once we allow our mind to get driven away by the senses, there is no stopping. We won't know how to make it stop either. So we continue with our fantasies. We fantasize about accumulating wealth. Unfortunately for us, the purpose of gaining wealth is rarely to enjoy it. If that was the reason, all we need to do is to gain some wealth and then spend it on enjoyment. In most cases, the joy of acquisition becomes the drive for the person rather than the joy of using the wealth. It has nothing to do with what one can do with the wealth. It has to do with how much more we have than all the other people that we know.
The day our neighbor buys a new air-conditioner, the temperature in our house goes up! The day our neighbor buys a new car, our car, which till that day ran well, will stall. As soon as we see another woman wearing the latest style shoes, our shoes that had fit absolutely fine, start pinching.
We are driven by comparison and envy. We are not merely fulfilling our needs, we are actually fulfilling other people's wants and desires. From childhood, we are taught to grab. Nothing we have is enough. Nothing fulfills us. Until death, we are driven by greed.
In our second-level program, called the Nithyananda Spurana Program, NSP or Life Bliss Level 2, participants are led through a meditation on desires. They write everything they have always wanted. They sometimes write pages of desires. They are asked to remember these. They are then led through a meditation and at the end of the meditation, they are asked to recollect all the desires they wrote.
To their surprise, they recollect only a few. Those that they recollect are mostly those that benefit people at large, rather than them alone. The meditation process is designed to dissolve saṁskāras, the accumulated unfulfilled desires. What remain are the original desires with which one is born. These are called prārabdha karma, desires with which we assume our present bodies.
Our body-mind system carries within it the energy required to fulfill the desires that we were born with. Nature, as Mahavira and other great masters have said, brings us into this world having already made sure that all our needs will be fulfilled. However, we develop wants and desires that we borrow from others; these are not our needs.
People are surprised that over time, they lose interest in the drive to have more material possessions after this shift. It no longer makes sense to them. They develop a sense of detachment. At the same time, they find that what they really want happens, without effort on their part. Ask our healers who must go through NSP before I ordain them as healers. They have become less greedy, less judgmental, less negative, and more focused on others. Yet they find that things happen the way they want them to, even though they only spend a fraction of the time they used to on chasing material possessions.
Many Nithya Healers graduate into ācāryas or teachers and into organizers of the Nithyananda Mission activities. They spend more and more time on the mission, and less and less time on their own work. People are amazed to see that with much less time or effort invested, they do better at work and their businesses and their careers!
This is no surprise to those who understand the way Existence works. Existence is waiting to shower us with all that we need. The problem is that we never stop to understand what we need. All the time we are caught in the web of our sensory fantasies, and we run after what others own; we let our senses lead us. After doing these programs and becoming healers, these people spend more time meditating and being aware of who they are. They develop an understanding of their real needs. It is no longer necessary to run after empty wants. What they need comes to them; their needs follow them.
I tell them again and again, 'Do not get stuck in my form. Do not run after me. Do not chase me. Just devote yourself to the mission, which is for universal benefit. Focus only on serving the mission. Then, I will run after you. I shall chase you to be with you.' Many quickly understand this. To them it makes no difference where they are and where I am physically. Wherever they are, I am with them. It is not a mere theory or illusion. Ask them. It is real.
Once we move from the 'me' focused demonic state into the 'you' based divine state, we no longer need to worry about creating wealth, developing a power base, establishing relationships or whatever else we have focused attention upon all our lives. Existence takes care of all this. Existence takes care of us.
If instead, we are focused on our own self, 'me,' be sure, we are moving in a downward spiral that Krishna says takes us into hell.
Q: Based on our education, many of us believed that science had all the answers. Even when science did not have answers to what the scriptures said, rather than denying science and accepting its limitations, we denied what the scriptures said. Thanks to you, many of us understand the truth behind the scriptures.
There is a huge difference between fact and truth. Science, history, and all these logical creations are interested in only facts. Facts are limited by one's understanding, limited by the perceptions of one's mind. Fact is three-dimensional; it is limited in size, space and time.
Truth is forever. It is not limited by size, space and time. When masters say something, it may not be relevant to what exists at that point in time. It is a part of their cosmic experience that transcends time and space.
Time and again disciples tell me, 'Swamiji, we could not understand what you said a year or two ago. It made no sense because it had nothing to do with what we could see as reality. Now we see everything happening exactly the way you said long ago.'
We can understand many things that are beyond the mind from conscious awareness and experience. They cannot be proven by logic and experimentation. When I say that I leave my body every night, it sounds like a madman's tale to a non-believer. However, close disciples know the truth.
Life is more like magic than mathematics. It is a mystery, insoluble, unfathomable, inexhaustible. It is a miracle that we cannot understand. Science tries to demystify it. As science has become more powerful, people have become more irreligious, for the simple reason that they think they already know what it is all about. And they know very little.
Science gives facts, not truth; it talks about objects. Yet the real substance is our subjectivity, our consciousness, and science is ignorant of that.
So as not to accept defeat, science goes on denying this. But it cannot deny it. Even the scientist knows perfectly well that he is, and he is not an object. In fact, without him there would be no science. Without the observer, nothing would be observed; the object exists only because there is a subject.
That inner subjectivity is a magical phenomenon. It is unbelievable. One can experience it and one can be in tremendous awe. That awe is spirituality, that wonder is the Divine.
Spirituality fills our life with more and more mystery. Even things that were never mysteries turn out to be mysteries. A rose flower, a pebble on the shore, a bird in the sky, all these become mysteries. Science demystifies, spirituality gives us back the whole mystery of life.
If we look from the outside, man seems to be another animal. But this is only a sensory perception, since we are used to seeing things from the outside.
If we want to know the human being, we must look from within. Humans have consciousness. The human nature is centered within. Our senses keep dragging us to the periphery of our being. Our true nature pulls us back to our center. As a result, humans become eccentric. We constantly move from the peripheral senses to the central reality and back. We swing like a pendulum.
Meditation is the bridge from the periphery to the center. It is a commitment to discover our inner nature, a commitment to make self-discovery the central focus of our life. If we are decisive, the very decision starts the process of our transformation.