24. What do you do When you do?🔗

Do you know that when we sleep, we are actually not sleeping? We will not know how to sleep well until we learn to live in the 'now'.

Psychologists say that a person living in the Western countries never sleeps for more than 14 minutes at a stretch; more often it is less. After 14 minutes, he comes back to the dream state or wakeful consciousness or just floats in the dream level. Again he goes back to sleep for a maximum of 14 minutes. Then he comes back to the dream level. Again he goes back to sleep. They call this the rapid eye movement or REM sleep pattern.

We never sleep totally even when we sleep. There are levels of the mind in which we never have dreams. We never need to have any dreams. We can directly enter into deep sleep, if we know how to live in the 'now', the present moment.

If we know how to live in the 'now', we will know the art of eating, the art of sleeping, and the art of doing everything the right way. That is the art of living.

Can we try to remember one incident from our day in complete detail? No! We are more dead than alive. We almost live like a man in half sleep. We do things without fully knowing what we do. Do we recall brushing our teeth ever? Do we remember the sensation of the cold water in our mouth when we brush? Do we remember the taste of the toothpaste in our mouth or the pressure of our toothbrush upon our gums or how we felt after brushing? Or how the water felt when we poured it on our body in the shower? Have we ever wondered how the whole thing happens? Do we ever wonder what happens after we have eaten our food?

Look at our life; look at our faces. We look bored most of the time. Somehow we are pulling along. The juice or the joy or the pep of life is not there in us. It is just a drag. Why? Because all we do, all that we know to do is how to postpone enjoyment of the moment. Our mind never sits with our being. Our mind never lives the moment. Our mind never lives in the same moment that we are in. We are always in the space of tomorrow or in the space of yesterday. It is never in the space of today, 'now', the present.

Live in the present. This is the secret of the art of living.

25. Live from your Being

If I ask you, 'What did you eat for breakfast,' some of you might be able to say a few things you ate. But if I ask you how it tasted, you will have no answer.

The truth is, you are always in a hurry. Your tongue never tastes the food when you eat. Your eyes never see when you look. Your ears never listen when you hear. Your body never feels when you touch.

Consider the simplest of things you do. Consider shaking hands with people or visitors. How many times do you shake your hands in a bubbling way? For you it has become a mechanical action. Your hand is practically a dead man's hand. Your handshake is a dead man's handshake. All you do is, stretch your hands; you never stretch your being. Never has your inner being penetrated through it.

How does one do anything from one's being? The answer is simple. Be in the truth. When you live in the truth, if you are truthful in thought, word and deed, there is no need to prepare a script, or hold a mental rehearsal, or decide how to say something to another person.

Consider the many ways in which you lie everyday. When there is no truth in you, it will reflect in your actions. That is the simple reason why almost all love affairs end in failure. How long can you continue to act? How long can you keep on preparing? How many times? How many days? How many times can you remember what you said the previous time? Not more than once, certainly.

The truth will come out eventually. And when it comes out, you start feeling uneasy and start another round of lies. Whe I say lie, I dont mean the gross lies that you speak. I mean the subtle lies that you talk, act and do every minute unconsciously to hide the truth from expressing in you. Every minute, you resist being relaxed inside the truth; that is the problem.

Because no one is really relaxed in the truth, everyone feels unconsciously cheated in some way or the other. The woman says you have cheated her. And you say she has cheated you. Both feel cheated by the other. In reality, nobody is cheating. It is just that your true nature or reality suddenly emerges and you feel grossly disappointed about something you can't really express.

A love affair is like a dye and powder. When you go in the rain, the color changes as the dye runs. Black runs into white and white into black. How long can you maintain the pretense? Naturally, the truth has to come out. The truth comes out when you relax. After that, you find yourself in big trouble. But there is no need to panic. Truth is the best thing that can happen to you.

Fall in tune with the truth. This way, there will be no need to remember what you said when. Then there will be no problem. Then there will be no fear of having to create any script. You can live as you are.

Live in the truth. That is the easiest way to eternal bliss!

26. Mysteries of the Universe are Miracles

Precognition is a common experience for most of us.

Let us say for example, that we feel that a particular person is about to call us. Sure enough, when the phone rings, that person will be on line!

Suppose we are watching the television show. Suddenly, we know what the character will say next. Sure enough, that character mouths the words as if to oblige us.

Another experience: let us assume that we are ready for dinner. Precisely then, the doorbell chimes. Even before we open the door, we know who is at the door. We expect a friend we haven't seen in years. Sure enough the friend is at our doorstep!

In my discourses, I often ask the audience if they have experienced something similar at some point in time in their lives. Over 50% of the audience confirms having had this experience every time.

When it happens, we ignore it. In fact, most of the time, we brush it aside as a coincidence. When this happens repetitively with a person, we attach the tag 'gifted'. In fact, we attach 'gifted' label to those who see auras and sense the vibrational energy of people and places.

For any experience to be termed as a 'gift', the magnitude and frequency of the experience should be consistent. It should be far greater than mere chance for us to stop calling it a coincidence.

In real life, we come across people making many predictions and forecasts. Some can accurately predict disasters, time and again; others give exact forecasts of deaths; many can heal people, who have been given up by doctors; some can produce substances out of thin air. We have a single word for all of these happenings - miracles.

We differentiate between coincidences and miracles depending on the degree of unexpectedness of the incident. These incidents, where we don't see the causal linkage, we call miracles. Scientific laws cannot explain miracles. When Science cannot explain a phenomenon, it is simply labeled as barbaric or miraculous.

There are no miracles in life. It is simply that we don't yet understand the laws that govern occurrence of such incidents, which seem to defy 'scientific' laws.

First, we need to accept and understand that the universe supports laws that go beyond the 'scientific' laws discovered by humans. This basic acceptance will lead us to the next level, to understand the cause and effect linkages behind many of these inexplicable happenings. Then, we begin to deeply appreciate the mysteries of this grand universe.