Q: You always speak of ananda, bliss; you also talk about grace. Are they the same?🔗

Bliss is an inner phenomenon. Grace is its outer expression. Bliss is the flower. Grace is the perfume. Bliss is the experience. Grace is the expression.

Grace can only be blissful. It cannot be sad or serious. It can only be cheerful and laughing. Bliss cannot be anything other than graceful. It can't be ugly. It has tremendous beauty. It is the spirit of beauty. They are two sides of the same coin.

People ordinarily think of bliss as a peak, never as a valley, but bliss has both sides. No peak can exist without a valley. No valley can exist without a peak. They are one phenomenon, inseparable. One must learn to be blissful in both situations. When you are on the sunlit peak, it is easy to be blissful. The altitude, silence, sun, open sky and the freedom of that openness helps to make you blissful. You are far away from the world and its problems and anxieties. But you cannot live on the peak; you must come back to the valley.

The peak can only be a holiday. One cannot exist there longer than that; hence one must learn how to be blissful in the valley, in the turmoil of the world, in the darkness, in the dismal world of the valley, in the struggle, competition and in all that the valley contains. One must learn to be silent and blissful even when the situation is just not conducive to it, when in fact, the situation is against it.

Unless you can be blissful in a situation that ordinarily creates misery, you are not a blissful person yet. Unless you can be in heaven even in hell, you have not arrived home. Much more still needs to be done.

There is an ancient parable. An enlightened Master is asked at the gate of heaven when he is asked, 'Where would you like to go?' He immediately says, 'To hell.'

The gatekeeper is puzzled and confused. He says, 'You are the first person in millions of years who has asked to go to hell. Are you crazy? Why do you want to go to hell?'

The Master said, 'I know that I can be in heaven anywhere. Heaven is in my heart. I have lived in the world. I was always in heaven. I have not lived in hell. Send me anywhere and I will still be in heaven. Wherever I am, heaven is there.'

That is a true, authentic achievement. Otherwise, you only live cheerfully and blissfully when the situation permits, allows, helps and nourishes you.

Live in the world, in the valley, with a song in your heart. Live in the valleys of the world but remain unaffected, untouched and uncontaminated by all that exists there. It is possible. It is the greatest miracle and joy when it happens because then you have transcended all outer situations. And transcendence is the ultimate goal of seekers.

Bliss is also love and love is another name for life, another name for Existence, another name for God. The more the understanding grows, the higher love soars. Love moves higher on the wings of understanding, on the wings of awareness and meditation.

Love plus meditation equals the true seeker's path. Make your love more and more meditative, wherever it is, and meditation will take it upwards.

A small story:

Two beggars lived in a forest. One man had no legs and the other man had no eyes. One day a great fire broke out. The man without the legs could see; however, he could not move. He could see how to escape, but he could not escape. The other man could move, but he was unable to escape without seeing where to go.

Both men would have died if they had tried to escape on their own. They joined together. The blind man took the other beggar on his shoulders. Collectively, they had two eyes and two legs.

That's exactly the situation of man: without love you don't have energy to move. Without meditation you don't have a vision or any insight. With love plus meditation, you have both: you have energy to soar and you know where, how and when.

Our bodies die. However, we are neither born nor can we die. We are eternal. To know this is to be free from fear. It cannot be just a belief. Millions of people believe that they are immortal. They believe out of fear. They

fear death. They want to be immortal. Hence they believe in it. But they don't know and the fear and doubt persists deep down inside. At the moment of death, belief won't help them. Doubt will explode. They will die in doubt, and to die in doubt is to miss the whole point. It is not a question of belief. It must be an understanding.

Meditation is the way to know it. It opens the doors of eternity, timelessness. In the beginning of our meditation practice, time disappears for a few moments. Then we experience more and more of 'time disappearing', then more and more. One day suddenly we are surprised: hours have passed; yet it is as if the inner clock has stopped. There is no time movement inside. When we can transcend time, we have transcended death. Time brings death. It is time that brings birth.

There is a Sanskrit word for both time and death: kala. Going beyond time is to go beyond death. This is a great understanding. Meditation leads us beyond time.

Let it become our experience. We don't need to believe. There are enough believers in the world: Christians, Hindus and Muslims. We need people who know. Those will be the harbingers of a new humanity. These are the people with understanding. They don't believe in God. They understand and know God.

Bliss is a phenomenon that cannot be hidden. It is fire. It is flame. We cannot hide it. Bliss shines forth. It is impossible to hide it.

Secret traditions advise people to 'hide it'. This is because if our bliss is known in some cultures, countries or traditions, we will be in danger. These cultures killed people because they were joyous. In their utter joy and divine madness, they said things that opposed the dead scriptures. They went against tradition and conformity.

In great joy a Sufi Master declared, 'I am God.' He wanted to share it. His Master warned him to keep his mouth shut and not to utter a word. This man promised, yet moments came when he would shout, 'I am God.' And not only would he shout, his whole being would shout. Each fiber of his body would shout! He was so full of light. He was killed, murdered.

Miserable people cannot tolerate a blissful person. It hurts to see somebody blissful. It creates jealousy. It hurts their ego. So Sufis learned to hide it. So have others. Ultimately it is impossible to hide. Bliss is a luminous phenomenon.

Misery is dark; bliss is bright. Misery is a light unmanifest, a candle unlit; bliss is a candle lit. How can we hide it? It is impossible. Of course we have not yet created a society that loves these Masters without judgment. We have not been able to create a society that appreciates blissful people. However, even if we lose our life letting our whole being declare the ultimate truth and joy of Existence, it is worth it.

Man looks small. He is not. He is like a small seed that can grow into a big tree. And a single seed can fill the whole earth with greenery. A single seed almost contains infinity. Like that, man is a seed of Divine love and that seed can become a vast continent. And unless it does, we are never contented. Unless we become pure love with no desire to gain anything except the joy of sharing, we are unfulfilled. Only by becoming total and absolute love, does life come to its ultimate peak. That peak is called God, paradise, and nirvana.

We must grow towards more and more love. No other prayer is needed, no other scripture is needed and no other discipline is needed. Love is more than any scripture or discipline. It brings its own order; it turns our chaos into a cosmos.

Trust in love because love is the foundation of all transformation. Love is the innermost core of alchemy. Love makes us content. People live in discontentment. To live in discontentment is to live in complaints, grumbling and always asking for more and more. To live a discontented life means to live in desire, and desires are unquenchable. One's life becomes a long tragedy. It is a long series of failures and frustrations, a desert where nothing grows and nothing flowers.

Man can live in desire or in no-desire. Seeking means starting and is a path of no-desire. Seeking means whatever is, is more than enough. One is thankful for whatever is. One does not ask for more. On the contrary, one is grateful because so much has been given. And one is unworthy of it. When we see what has already been given to us, we are surprised. We don't deserve it. We don't deserve life. We don't deserve love. We don't deserve joy.

So much has been given, unasked. Feel grateful for it. That is the way of contentment. Contentment is being thankful towards Existence and in that thankfulness much more keeps coming to us. It is a paradox of life that we desire and nothing happens except frustration; we don't desire and everything happens. We become entitled to miracles.

Remember that this single word 'contentment' contains the whole of spirituality. It comes out of wisdom. Contentment does not come out of knowledge. It comes out of knowing and experience. It is not based upon other authorities. It is rooted in our own vision and direct experience.

Knowledge is cheap: we can collect as much as we want. All we need is a good memory. This is not difficult. Memory can be trained and made more skillful. However memory will not transform us. It has its use in day-to-day affairs and in scientific work. Yet it is useless as far as our subjectivity is concerned.

The inner journey needs to be without any burden of knowledge. One must go inwards like an innocent child. The less we know the better. If we don't know anything, that's the best. That's what Socrates says, 'I know only one thing: I know nothing.'

The moment one turns in, is the turning point. That is the moment one becomes wise. That is the moment one starts experiencing life. Otherwise words, theories, and philosophies go on interpreting life for us and don't allow

Innocence is the bridge and when innocence blooms it is wisdom. The ultimate wisdom is bliss and its expression is grace. Then a man becomes a child again. Then the circle is complete, the circle is perfect. This is the perfection of life. If we die knowledgeable, we miss the point; the circle is incomplete. We will be born again to complete it. When we die in bliss, we die in grace, never to return.

Expression of the Divine

14.26 One who engages in full devotional service, who does not fall down in any circumstance, at once

transcends the modes of material nature and thus comes to the level of Brahman.

14.27 And I am the basis of impersonal Brahman, which is the rightful state of ultimate happiness, and which is immortal, imperishable and eternal.

Krishna concludes the chapter by saying that the transcendental state beyond the three attributes of nature,

the gunas, is Brahman, the ultimate Cosmic Consciousness. He says you reach this through devotion. He says that He is that Brahman, the Source of eternal bliss.

Krishna speaks as Parabrahma Krishna, the energy state and not as Vasudeva Krishna the material state. He is in the expanded Consciousness of Brahman, and beyond the three gunas. He is the Source of the gunas.

What is the difference between the Parabrahma Krishna and Vasudeva Krishna, the difference between the Ultimate Consciousness and the son of Vasudeva? In the case of an ordinary human being, even though he has the potential of divinity, he has not realized it. So he is different. That is the difference between you and an enlightened Master. Both of you are Divine to the same extent. Yet you are unaware of your divinity, whereas the enlightened Master is fully aware.

In the case of Krishna, that is not true. He is the Master. Why then the difference? The difference is not with Him. It is with us. The frequency of the Parabrahma Krishna is not visible to and approachable by mortals. That is why Arjuna had to be given the Divine vision to perceive Parabrahma Rupa, the Cosmic Form of Krishna. Even Arjuna, His closest mortal friend, His mirror as the human, the nara of the Narayana, could not perceive Him in that Cosmic Form until he was permitted.

In order for humans to perceive Him and interact with Him, Parabrahma Krishna must become Vasudeva Krishna. To a certain extent He must subject Himself to the play of the gunas.

When an enlightened being has merged with the universal energy and incarnates in human form, that incarnation must have some guna injected into it. Let us use an analogy here. We cannot make jewelry out of gold when it is completely pure, or 24-carat purity. We must add some impurity such as copper to reduce it to 22 or 18 carat. Similarly when an enlightened being enters planet Earth he must be infused with some sattva guna in order to take human form. Within some time, this sattva guna also disappears leaving the being beyond the three gunas and once again in an enlightened state.

Each enlightened Master is unique in his expression of his experience as the Divine. Some express experiences and some don't. Our scriptures say that if two enlightened Masters say the same thing, one is a fake. Each Master is unique in his or her expression. The experience is the same, yet the expression is different.

Krishna is different from Rama, Buddha and Christ. Each has the same theme of compassion, yet the way compassion is expressed is different. Buddha expressed it as contemplation and Krishna in joyous abandon. So we choose a Master based upon how we vibrate to his expression. If our path is devotion, we gravitate to Krishna; He is lovable. If we are the meditative type, we go to Shiva, the ultimate Master who taught in silence.

It does not matter who our Master is. What matters is our faith, trust and the attitude of surrender. Our Master can be an unenlightened being. If we trust him, we will be enlightened, even though he may not be. What

matters more is our attitude and approach, our guna, and not the Master's state. Even if we worship a stone and surrender to it, imagining it to be our ultimate savior, we will be liberated. It is true.

The faith and the surrender help us transcend the nature of all activities. We surrender the result of our actions to that Master, whomsoever he may be, whomsoever it may be. We do everything contemplating that Master and surrender it all at his feet. That attitude alone liberates us. This is what Krishna means by devotion. Nothing more is needed. Krishna is not talking about the flute-playing, yellow-robed Krishna. Anyone that we surrender to totally is Krishna and we then fall into Krishna Consciousness.

Let us pray to Parabrahma Krishna, universal Consciousness, the Ultimate Energy to give us all this understanding in our life, to make us experience the truth that He teaches and to let Him establish us in and make us radiate eternal bliss, nithyananda.

Q: You referred to biological evidence that links our behavior with our cellular formation. Can you please elaborate this point?

Modern science knows there is constant regeneration of cells within our body-mind system. We die everyday. Our body-mind system is estimated to have over 60 trillion cells. Billions of cells die everyday and new cells are born. This process goes on as long as we live. Once every two years or so, all the cells in our body get replaced by new cells. This means that once every two years we are completely reborn.

Since this is a scientifically established fact, why is that the miseries of our old cells get carried into the new cells? Why do our diseases continue after the cells die? What is the connecting link? Science does not have an answer. Yet interesting experiments show the path.

Let us say that you take a blood sample and you separate out some cells. From those cells, you extracted the DNA and keep it outside your body. Experiments have shown that when you react with emotions and release hormones, the DNA in the dish that is separate from your body releases the same hormones. If you become angry and release adrenalin inside you, the DNA outside releases the same adrenalin. If you become fearful, your DNA that is outside releases the same fear hormones. These dishes with the DNA were placed a few miles away and the same results happened.

In another set of experiments, scientists exposed the DNA samples to various emotions. I have spoken elsewhere about Masaru Emoto's book, Hidden Messages from Water. This Japanese scientist showed that water samples showed significant change in their molecular structure when exposed to human emotions. These experiments are also shown in the movie, 'What the Bleep Do You Know?'

Here, DNA samples were exposed to emotions. Scientists found that positive emotions made the DNA grow and negative emotions made it shrink. When

treated with love, even the DNA of people affected with HIV and cancer showed improvement and resistance to further deterioration.

Another set of experiments involved fundamental light particles called photons. A photon placed in a vacuum chamber tended to move around randomly. When a DNA sample was introduced into that chamber, the photon started revolving around the DNA. It was as if this elemental particle detected another element of higher consciousness and obeyed it by rotating around it, in the same manner as planets rotate around the sun.

Even stranger was that when the DNA sample was removed from the vacuum chamber, the photon continued to rotate in the same orbit that it followed when the DNA was inside the chamber. It was as if the energy of the DNA stayed on even though the DNA was physically removed.

Scientists are making baby steps in understanding what the Vedic scriptures established five thousand years ago. The Vedas speak about the energy field that is imperishable even when matter is destroyed. They describe the mindset that as an energy form continues across death into a new body. They explain how this energy influences our behavior beyond time and space.

Samskaras are energy. They can be positive or negative energy. As long as the samskaras continue, they influence the material nature of the body-mind system. Even if the cells die and new cells are reborn, as long as the energy of the old cells is not transformed, new cells will be influenced and affected. Cancers and ailments continue.

This is why we place so much emphasis in training you to understand samskaras and in teaching techniques that help dissolve samskaras in our Life Bliss Programs. You may think it is a tall claim, but these techniques transform your DNA. They transform the energy behind your genes so that new cells are no longer affected by the negativities of the old cells.

Thus ends the fourteenth chapter named Gunatraya Vibhaga Yoga, 'Three Gunas of Nature' of the Upanishad of the Bhagavad Gita, the scripture of Yoga, dealing with the science of the Absolute in the form of the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna.

Scientific Research on Bhagavad Gita

Several institutions have conducted experiments using scientific and statistically supported techniques to verify the truth behind the Bhagavad Gita. Notable amongst them is the work carried out by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose findings are published through Maharishi Ved Vigyan Vishwa Vidyapeetam.

Studies conducted using meditation techniques related to truths expressed in the verses of the Bhagavad Gita have shown that the quality of life is significantly improved through meditation. These studies have found that meditators experience a greater sense of peace resulting in a reduced tendency towards conflict.

Meditators gain greater respect for and appreciation of others. Their own inner fulfilment increases resulting in improved self-respect and self-reliance, leading to Self Actualization.

One's ability to focus along with brain function integration is enhanced. These have resulted in greater comprehension, creativity, faster response time in decision-making and superior psychomotor coordination.

Stress levels have been shown to decrease with enhanced sensory perception and overall health. The tendency towards depression has been clearly shown to decrease.

There is enough evidence to show that as a result of meditation, individuals gain a better ethical lifestyle that in turn improves their interaction with others in the community, resulting in less conflict and crime. Group meditation was significantly correlated to a reduction in conflict worldwide.

Meditation leads to higher levels of consciousness. Through the research tools of Applied Kinesiology, Dr. David Hawkins (author of the book Power vs. Force) and others have shown that human consciousness has risen in the last few decades, crossing a critical milestone for the first time in human history. Dr. Hawkins' research also documents that the Bhagavad Gita is at the very highest level of Truth conveyed to humanity.

We acknowledge with gratitude the work done by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi institutions and Dr. David Hawkins in establishing the truth of this great scripture.

Glossary of Key Characters in the Bhagavad Gita

Pandava's Side:

Kaurava's Side: