BLISS IS THE PATH AND THE GOAL
The Mind Works in Myriad Ways
List of discourses used
Chaos is Order Order is Chaos
Cognitive Shift
From Lust to Love
Instinct-Intellect-Intuition
Quantum Bliss
Quantum Enlightenment
Quantum Spirituality
Who am I - The Ultimate Question
Bliss is the Path and the Goal
THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM
Someone asked me: Can dead Masters also teach? I replied, "Dead masters are not dead as you think. They may be physically absent, but their spirit is present. Physically they may be absent but spiritually, they are present. When they were alive physically, their presence had the body. When they are gone, their presence has no body, but they are present. Their presence is in no way related to their body. Dead masters are not absent as you think. In the same way, living masters are not present as you think. Be very clear. I am neither present as you see nor absent as you think. The more you grow spiritually, the deeper you will experience my presence. Your idea about dead masters' absence and my presence are both wrong."
- THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM
Chitram vaṭa-taror-mūle vṛddhā śiṣyā gurur yuvā;
Under The Banvan Tree
CONTENTS
Under The Banyan Tree
The Journey of a 1000 Miles
Quantum Spirituality
The Mind Works in Myriad ways
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions...
How does the Mind Work?
What is the Big Hurry?
Opening our Mind to Intuition
Shifting our Doors of Perception
Listening to Nature's Intelligence
Chaos is Order and Order is Chaos
Ways to Invoke Nature's Energy
The Miracle of Body Intelligence
Pain and Its Cure
Guror-tu maunam vyākhyānam śiṣyas-tu chhinna-samśayāt.
What a wonder! This vision under the banyan tree! The teacher is a young boy, the taught are old men! The teacher is silent, yet the doubts of the disciples are dissolved!
Over thousand years ago, Adi Sankara, the great reformer saint of Hinduism, sang the praise of the young Master Dakshinamurthy, an incarnation of Lord Shiva, the rejuvenator in the Hindu mythological trinity, teaching disciples far older than him in silence under a banyan tree. Dakshinamurthy is the archetypal spiritual Master, who though young was enlightened and was sought after by other enlightened Masters far older than him.
Whenever THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM is in his ashram in Bidadi near Bangalore, what Adi Sankara said happens almost every day just the way he sang the praise of Dakshinamurthy years earlier. Under a magnificent Banyan tree that is over 300 years old, a young enlightened Master leads a group of far older men and women in prayer, meditation and discourse. Majestic, graceful, with powerful words and compassionate as a mother, THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM is an enlightened Master who states his mission to be one of individual transformation through dhyana, meditation.
He had a divine vision that he should set up an ashram in a place near Bangalore that would have a large Banyan tree. The name Dhyanapeetam came to him as the name for this spiritual center of his movement, as well as his mission to transform people across the globe through meditation. Three years ago, he had only Tamil speaking people in rural Tamilnadu who came to him, mostly to be healed. Today, in 24 countries across the globe, the Nithyananda Foundation flag flies high. More than 100 Acharvas (teach his techniques in these countries and over 3000 spiritual healers ordained by him, heal people.
The transformation that he has wrought in many is nothing short of miraculous. Helping someone shed his ego is far more difficult than materializing objects through the air.
He says time and again: I am not here to prove that I am God. I am here to prove that you are God.
What may sound pompous and laughable from any one else, comes across as Divine Truth when the Master says it with authority. The Bhagavad Gita is considered a scripture only because of the authority with which Lord Krishna, the Lord and Master speaks it.
The Bhagavad Gita is traditionally not part of the Vedas, the four Hindu scriptural works that were revealed to enlightened sages and which remained unwritten for many thousands of vears. and communicated by just word of mouth. The Bhagavad Gita forms part of the Hindu epic. the Mahabharata, the story of two warring clans, the five Pandaya Princes and the hundred Kauraya Princes, their cousins. In the great war of the Mahabharata, Arjuna the Pandava Prince seeks to surrender rather than fight his respected elders and loved relatives.
Lord Krishna is the charioteer of Arjuna and his advice to Arjuna on the battlefield is the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita as it is more popularly known, is read by millions even today and followed as a guideline to day-to-day life issues. Lord Krishna's advice to Arjuna, the representation of the confused human being constantly under dilemma, is considered the fifth Hindu scripture based on Krishna's authority. There is nothing to doubt and therefore it became part of the sruti, unwritten scriptures created from awareness.
Every word that THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM utters is sruti, the Eternal Truth, as also his blessing 'Be Blissful'!
The young boy teaching men far older than him is to us an incarnation of Dakshinamurthy, the primal Guru, who is as well the presiding deity under the Banyan tree at Bidadi. The Master is Shiva, the Master of Masters, the Lord of jnana (wisdom) and dhyana (meditation) under whose tutelage, transformational miracles happen every day at the ashram and world over.
Thousands come to the Master with burning issues and questions:
What do I really want to do in my life?
What will give me real happiness?
How can I make this world a better place to live in? How can I make a difference to this world?
These are questions that have arisen in the human mind, since time immemorial. It may come to different people at different junctures in their lives. To some, it is the form of a jolt in life, a trauma of one form or another that shakes up the smooth life that they had been living till then. The loss of a loved one or a sudden downturn in business or a health problem may trigger these questions.
To some others, it could come when they feel they have achieved all that they wanted to - a good education at the most respected university in the chosen field of interest, then the desired job with a great salary, a happy married life and so one. But then at the end of it, the person wonders if he had been driving himself this far to achieve just these things! He has got the very things he wanted but he wonders 'now what?' Life brings the person face to face with these fundamental questions ranging from 'What do I really want?', 'What am I living for?' to 'Who am I?'
Without pulling any punches, Swami answers these queries in his discourses and programs. This book is a compilation of some of his discourses on the topic of 'Bliss is the path and the goal' where he makes one understand with no uncertainty that the path itself is the goal, which again is bliss itself!
The Journev of a 1000 miles
A small Zen story:
A young disciple had just entered a Zen monastery. He said to the Zen Master, 'I have just entered the monastery. Please teach me something.' The Master looked at him and asked, 'Have you eaten your rice porridge?' The monk replied, 'Yes, I have eaten.' The Master said, 'Then you better wash your bowl.' At that moment, the monk was enlightened!
This may sound absurd when you hear it for the first time. The Master was telling the disciple to wash his bowl after he had eaten. What he actually meant was, the disciple was so full with the knowledge he had acquired, with what he had picked up from various places, from various philosophies; there was no room for anything more to enter, for any clarity to happen. Cryptically he savs. 'vou better wash your bowl', and the monk was simply struck by the statement and got enlightened!
This is how Zen Masters caused spiritual awakening in their disciples. In just one moment, the disciple would be awakened. Enlightenment, self-realization, the state of eternal bliss, or whatever you want to call it, is actually as easy as removing your coat and putting it on the coat stand! It is that simple. But because of our layers of social conditioning, we look upon it as something far away from us, something difficult to achieve.
Actually, it is not something to be achieved at all because it is already there in you! How can you achieve something that is already there in you?! All you need to do is drop these layers of illusion, these layers of social conditioning, and you will see that you are already bliss. The concepts like seeking, or traveling in a spiritual journey are just ways to postpone your own flowering. You are banging on a door that is already open.
All that a Master needs to do is, awaken you to this truth, that's all. That is why Zen Masters adopted abrupt and sometimes harsh methods that will simply shake the disciple from his intellect and illusion, and cause self-realization in a moment's time.
When a Master starts his work on you, awareness will start to grip you and you will realize with every passing moment, with every action of yours, with every thought of yours, that the Master is only showing you what you already are. He just peels off layers in you like peeling an onion and with every layer getting peeled, you will feel lighter and a beautiful feeling of coming home. That feeling of coming home is only coming closer to your core, to the core from the periphery, from far away from your home to closer to your home. And what do we mean by home? Our true Self.
Of course, when the disciple is really ready, this will happen. In the path of seeking, the space inside is created and kept ready so that awakening can happen. But the problem arises because we get stuck in seeking.
Seeking should create the space in us to flower, else it is not seeking: it is simply a trip to fulfill your ego in the field of spirituality, that's all. It is simply to tell people that you know a lot about God and great philosophies that you have read and not digested, which you are vomiting on others.
Seeking is not creating something, it is destroying something - your ignorance of your true self. Seeking is not searching. Be very clear: If you seek in the hope of finding something, you will land up in terrible frustration. That is why most often you will find that there is a cynicism, a sarcasm, a disrespect in the tone of the exhausted seekers. They will be on the brink of turning their backs on the Truth or thev will think they have found it and start convincing you with their own nonsensical philosophies.
If you understand that there is no search here at all, there is only discovering, then every minute is a golden opportunity to peel off yet another layer and take one more step closer to the core. Then, the peeling itself becomes enjoyable; the path itself becomes bliss, because you are on the right path! When you are not in the right path, what happens? Instead of peeling the onion, if you keep it intact and search and add on layers to your already fat self. Then what happens? You will feel suffocated, burdened and you will wonder what life is all about.
So instead of adding on layers of stuff, you need to peel off layers and feel the joy in the path towards the core. This is when bliss becomes the path and the goal. This is what all Masters mean when they tell you that you are bliss and you are yet to only discover it. This is what I mean when I say, 'your journey inwards'. The journey to bliss is always inward; it is the only way. When your journey goes inward, bliss becomes your lifeline and automatically the outer world happens seamlessly.
And when the outer world happens seamlessly, vou start living like a King, like a Paramahamsa, Paramahamsas are the only living Kings, mind you. All the other kings are called so because of their material possessions. They have only wealth not richness. They have quantity, not quality. But a Paramahamsa is the real king who enjovs the richness of the richness of the inner and outer worlds. He lives like a lotus in a pond, untouched by the water and coveted by all.
So understand the real meaning of seeking. Don't allow your mind to get caught in the game of seeking. The mind itself is a myth and the game of seeking can take your mind to a complex web of mythology. Understand that your mind and the concept of seeking are the only two things that keep you away from God. If you understand this experientially, you will automatically drop seeking and start shedding all that is not you.
Seeking is simply shedding all that is not you. all that is keeping you away from the Truth, all that is keeping you in bondage to any place, person or thing, all that is ready to grab you and put you inside a frame. This is seeking.
So many religions and so many teachings have come into being over the past. Enlightened Masters and ancient seers have laid down formulae for people to experience what they experienced themselves. Each formula is one religion, one teaching. It is enough if you follow any one religion, any one teaching which works for you.
See for yourself if you are experiencing more clarity, more awareness inside you and better interpersonal relationships. See if you are able to watch what is happening without getting involved in everything around you. Then you have found the right teaching, the right path.
What people generally do is, they get confused by the different religious teachings and get stuck in following them instead of using them as a tool to flower. And because of so many complex teachings and religious fanaticism, many people doubt if they are even qualified for a spiritual awakening! It seems like some complex thing which you need courage to choose and have an option to skip choosing until next life.
Very often, I have heard people say, 'I am not ready for it. Maybe not this time, next time. I have to become a lot more mature to get into all this. This is too early for me. Let me finish my responsibilities and I will come to the ashram.'
First of all, no one is calling these people to the ashram. Secondly, they have a totally wrong concept of spirituality itself. There is nothing called 'being mature' and 'being ready'. All these are mere play of the mind. But one thing, when someone says these things, the Master waits for a while and allows them to settle before making the next move, because the mind can play havoc otherwise.
They fail to understand that spirituality is a way of living life at its peak in all aspects – 360 degrees, from the being level. It can make life so rich that one will not have a hangover in anything. Spirituality is an attitude. Spirituality is infusing spirit into life. Because people have misunderstood religion, they have misunderstood spirituality also.
If it is an attitude, then is there any sense in waiting for the right time to wear it? It is ridiculous to say that, is it not? To wear an attitude, you need not wait for anything to happen, for your children to grow or your retirement to approach or anything. It is just changing the way you are by bringing in awareness and shedding all that you are not, that's all.
A man came to Ramana Maharishi, a great enlightened Master from Bharat and asked, 'Bhagavan, when will I be qualified to be able to follow your spiritual path?' Ramana Maharishi looked at him silently for a while and asked, 'Are you alive'' The questioner said. 'Yes, of course I am!' Ramana declared, 'If you are alive, you are fully qualified to be spiritually awakened.'
The only interest of an enlightened Master is our inner growth. He has no interest in controlling us. He is interested in removing our doubts about our own potential. He is interested in uncovering the veil of ignorance and helping us discover that we are one with the whole of Existence, that we are not separate from it, that we are an integral part of this grand show that is going on!
We are constantly in doubt about our own potential. This doubt is there all the time because we think we are separate from Existence. We limit ourselves, our potential, our capacity, because we fail to understand that we are part of the infinite Existential energy.
Whether we believe it or not, accept it or not, want it or not, we are part of the Divine. But we are not ready to believe it. When someone tells us that we too are Divine, we think that they are crazy. I always tell people: I am not here to prove that I am God. I am here to prove that you are God! They look at me with shock when I tell them that!
I tell people, 'you are already enlightened, just express it!' They think I am crazy when I say this! Actually, the core of the onion is within it, am I right? In the same way, your core is within you. You only need to experience it and express it from your experience. Why are Masters so graceful, so stately, so joyful to look at even if they lift a small finger? It is because every expression of theirs is from their blissful inner core that thev have realized. When the core is realized, the boundaries disappear, and you become one with Existence. And when you become one with
Existence, you radiate the Existential energy around you and automatically all that you do becomes beautiful, which is why you are here for hours together watching me undauntedly!
Actually, you are identifying with your own blissful self in my presence, through watching me. That is why it is so joyful for you. The deep and unconscious yearning in you to experience the self is what causes you to experience and enjoy me. But instead of attributing it to your own beautiful Self, you attribute it to me, my form, and that is where the problem starts!
If you understood for a moment that what you are enjoying through me is actually yourself, you will automatically love me, you and everyone around with the same intensity as you feel for me because you would have then understood that the divinity that you see in me is actually there in every other animate and inanimate object.
After all, the universally accepted statement, be it the Holy Bible or the Bhagavad Gita or the Holy Quran, is that God is in everything and everything is divinity, is it not? Then how can you see God only in me? You should be able to see God in everyone else. Through me, you can be lead to seeing God in everyone else. Only when that happens, the purpose of my mission is fulfilled as far as you are concerned.
And mind you, it will happen with time, depending on your willingness to allow intelligence to step in and make it happen for you. If you function with deep awareness around a Master, you will catch the smell of Existence in him and automatically in everyone and everything around him. Awareness is the master key.
The problem is, although religions were created with the single purpose of helping man realize that he is God, for man to experience God in him, over the years, religious priests started using religion as a tool to distance man from God and to create a permanent doubt in him about realizing God so that he may become dependent on them for it. This is how they have been playing with us.
Once they sow the seed of doubt in us, we start looking to them for solutions, for techniques. Then they pose to be mediums between God and us and start controlling us! The whole purpose of religion then gets defeated. But these people continue to carry on their business.
I tell you, just ask these people what qualification they possess to control you in this fashion. As long as they are offering you some clarity on the fact that you are part of Existence, it is all right. The moment they start telling you what you should do and should not do to please God, be very clear, they are not qualified in any way to guide you.
When we go on the yearly pilgrimage to the Himalayas, I see people breaking away from our group and going behind the pandas, the priests there to give offering to the Lord. It really amuses me. They leave a live Master and place their faith on a panda to reach God!
They pay them huge amounts of money and sit with the panda who gives a small offering on their behalf to the Lord. The only intent of the panda will be to grab the maximum money from them. These people, unconcerned about that, will be sitting in all earnestness, trying to feel the nonexistent spiritual fervor in the panda's chants.
I try telling people not to go behind these pandas, at least when they come with me. But, even after my telling them, if they want to do these things then it is up to them.
And sometimes, in the name of religion, people bring in rules and condemn others from doing certain things. They bring in divisions of some sort and make you feel spiritually inferior; they condemn you in the name of man-made barriers. No one is inferior or superior to any one. If a religion cannot accept you for what you are, the whole purpose of following it is lost.
We follow a religion or teaching because we want to overcome our shortcomings, our blocks, and continuously cleanse our consciousness. When this is the religion is going to condemn us for what we are, how can even make a beginning with it?! It sounds ridiculous, is it not? We are not even given a chance! It is like saying, 'Become pure, then I will cleanse you'! We are turning towards religion to purify ourselves, to empty our conditioning and acquire deeper understanding. Then what is the purpose in laving these conditions?
Organized religions over the years create this sort of confusion. They even counter spirituality. Spirituality is about discovering who we are. It is the search for the ultimate Truth about our self and our relationship with Existence or God or whatever you wish to call it. The problem is, religions, once organized, are more concerned about power and whatever leads to power. All organized religions exploit us through greed and fear, through clever manipulation of heaven and hell. It is the confusion between religion and spirituality that also leads to the question of whether we are qualified. We are constantly told that we are sinners and as such incompetent to realize God.
But with a Master, a real Master, he will never ask you whether you are qualified, what your qualities are, what was your past, what is your economic and social background. He never instills guilt in you to have control over you; he never makes you feel like a sinner; he simply welcomes vou for what you are and directs every ounce of energy in cleansing your consciousness. That is the reason he draws people irrespective of religion, caste, creed and what not. He gives what the being needs, with endless compassion, with no strings attached.
A beautiful Zen story:
A disciple asks his Master, 'Master, am I qualified for spiritual progress? I feel there are many obstructions. '
The Master replies, 'The word obstruction is the only obstruction, nothing else!'
A Master is a living example to show you that you can experience what he has experienced. He is there to remove your doubts about yourself. All that is needed from your side is a little trust in him.
Patanjali, an enlightened Master lived in Bharat over 5000 years ago. Patanjali's book Yoga Sutra is the greatest compilation of techniques to liberate the being from the mind and unite the being with the cosmic energy, of which it is a part.
In his book of instructions, he defines various paths to enlightenment. He defines eight paths in all: yama - which deals with 5 important virtues, niyama - which deals with 5 rules of conduct, pratyahara - which is the path of detachment, pranayama - techniques to do with the breath, asana - techniques to do with one's sitting posture, dharana - consciousness, dhyana - meditation, and finally samadhi - which is the enlightenment state or no-mind state.
The first step yama, lays down guidelines for one's behavior and this alone consists of five parts: celibacy, truth, non-violence, not stealing, and not wanting to possess. Only after you practice all these parts and master them, are you qualified to move up to the next step in yogic accomplishment.
A man came and asked me, 'Swamiji, I am not qualified in these steps. I have never practiced yama and niyama; how can I learn Yoga? I said to him, 'If you are already qualified in these steps, you do not need Yoga!'
Patanjali laid down techniques thousands of years ago. Over time, many great Masters have updated them to suit man's changing ways.
It is like this: In our own lives, don't we find that what worked for our children does not work for our grand children and what worked for our grand children does not work for our great grand children? If we kept our children quiet through some basic threats and it worked well with them, then our grand children would probably threaten us back with the same statements and carry on with their pranks, is it not so? So, we find that we need new ways of handling them.
A lady was asking her three-year-old son what he wanted from America. He said, 'I want a watch that tells the time.' She asked him. 'What are you talking? You already have a watch that tells the time.' The three year old replied, 'No it doesn't. I have to look at it.'
Children are so updated these days. So, what Pataniali devised was for men of that age and time. Today, man is made differently. We need different types of techniques to handle him. But understand, we are not blaming Patanjali's techniques or saying that it is inadequate. It was devised for the man of that age and time and it worked well then, that's all. We need to understand that clearly.
Meditation and maturity go hand in hand. With meditation, spiritual maturity and release of energy happens in us. This maturity and energy release further propels us into deeper meditation. Spiritual maturity is enhanced under the tutelage of a Master's grace accelerates the spiritual growth and guides the disciple in the right path.
Meditation connects us to the cosmic energy, of which we are a part and as a process, helps us focus the energy in the right direction to progress spiritually.
In the present day world, Patanjali's techniques take a lot of time. In today's world, we don't have time for anything, especially for ourselves, our personal growth. At the same time, as human beings, by our very nature, we find ourselves facing fundamental questions like 'Who am I?' When everything in the material world has been reached, when all the burning desires have been fulfilled, there is still a void in us. That void prompts us to look inwards, to ask these questions. These questions have the potential to become burning quests; they can take us from questions to quest, from urge to urgency - to understand the truth.
In this age, more than spiritual practices, Dhyana or meditation is the answer to enlightenment. It is a shortcut method which is foolproof and without side effects. The only side effect is bliss and realization of your own Self! If you are a being with consciousness, it is enough to embark upon the spiritual path. The very desire that you wish to start on this path is a true indication that you are qualified.
It is said in Tao, 'A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.' I tell you, this is not even a journey of a 1000 miles, it is a journey of a single step onto the path, that's all! Once you are on the path, you are in the goal! That is why I say, 'Bliss is the path and the goal!' Bliss is not any goal to be achieved by traveling. Once you are on the path, the path itself is bliss. It is the first step that breaks the inertia. That is enough! So just decide and take that step now! You are qualified!
Ouantum Spiritualitv
A monk asked his Master, 'What is the Buddha?' 'The One in the hall', said the Master. The monk said, 'The One in the hall is a statue, a lump of mud.' 'That is so', responded the Master. The monk got irritated asked, 'What is the Buddha?' 'The One in the hall', said the Master.
The Master was trying to tell his disciple that the Buddha could not be known by asking questions such as 'What is the Buddha!' The Buddha is to be experienced: it is to be understood through an awakening. When awakening happens, you understand that you are Buddha! This is how the Buddha can be understood.
It is like this: I have tasted nectar. Just by explaining the sweetness of it to you, by explaining its texture to you, by explaining about my experience of it to you, can you understand anything about nectar? No! But if you just taste it once, you will know exactly what it is! Only tasting will help. Until then you can have an idea that it is sweet, that it is smooth etc, that's all. But you cannot feel the real joy of it till you taste it for yourself.
A Master will always draw you to experience. Intellectual understanding is alright: it will help in creating a thirst in you to know, to experience. But ultimately, you have to experience it for yourself. The problem is, these hard-core intellectual people start thinking that they have experienced it through their mere understanding of it and they start stagnating at that level. Thev either become headstrong on this account or start feeling bored on account of it.
If they get a glimpse of the experience even once, they will simply drop their intellect and understand that the experience is unmatched and that the intellect is only the base or the foundation, not the building itself. Just the foundation will not do. The foundation is created solidly so that the building can rise on it undauntedly. In the same way, all intellectual understanding is only for us to rise above and experience what the intellect offered as a conviction.
In life, we are always looking for 'yes - no' answers, for choices, because we are so caught up with our intellect, with our logic. We are never willing to let the experience happen to us, in a natural and beautiful way. Because of our hurry to make choices in everything. we invariably choose wrongly. In our hurry, we simply discard or exclude things and later regret it. There may be no need to discard anything, but we discard because we are habituated to choosing.
A small story:
An American was traveling in England by train. In the compartment, there were a British gentleman, an American gentleman and a lady who had a dog with her.
The dog kept pestering the American by jumping on him and dirtving his clothes.
The lady seemed oblivious to the fact that her dog was being a nuisance to him.
In fact, she tried to comfort the restless dog by saying, 'O, you poor thing! You must be feeling really bored sitting in the train. We will reach our destination soon, don't worry.' Next, the dog jumped on the American and pissed on him.
Yet, the lady offered no apologies to the American and instead pacified the dog saying. 'You must be having an upset stomach. I will give you some medicine as soon as we reach our destination.'
The dog continued to bother the American.
Finally, the American got fed up, picked up the dog and threw it out of the window.
The British gentleman was watching what was happening all this while.
He turned to the American and exclaimed, 'You Americans are so crazy! You drive on the wrong side of the road, you use the wrong hand for the fork and now to top it all you have thrown the wrong one out of the window! '
In life, we continuously keep throwing the wrong person out of the window! We are always making choices and in the process, choosing wrongly and regretting our choice at some later point in time. The pity is that we always feel that we are doing the right thing by having to make a decision of one option over another.
Choices and options need to be exercised when there are contradictions and controversies. But I tell you, there is no controversy in Existence; there are no contradictions. Only humans perceive contradictions in nature, where there are actually none. The animals, the insects all are happily living in harmony with nature. They don't seem to see any contradictions or push and pull in Existence. Only humans seem to be always seeing problems and paradoxes in Existence.
If you notice early in the morning, all the creatures rise to the warm ravs of the sun. They joyously wake up, eager to face the new dawn. The chirping birds sing joyously, the fresh leaves on plants open up to receive the rays of the sun, the flowers bloom naturally in the morning. Take a cat - it will wake up, stretch itself, go for a round and check out the boundaries of its dwelling place and then start the day. They all move in such synchronicity with Existence. Man is the only being that gets up in the morning, turns over and goes back to sleep!
Existence is like an orchestra; it is all encompassing. All beings play the roles of different musicians, each with its own unique and irreplaceable role. Man is the only being who wants to break from the orchestra and play his solo music. What happens when somebody in an orchestra refuses to play according to the conductor and the rest of the band? His tune will be iarring and will only add noise to the symphony! This is what happens when we perceive contradictions in Existence and try to impose our own shortsighted perception into things.
We are all like waves in the ocean. If the wave starts considering itself as separate from the ocean, it will be in continuous fear of the ocean. This is because it does not understand the simple truth that the wave arose from the ocean, is existing in the ocean and finally will fall back into the ocean. Only when it sees this can the wave be utterly relaxed with the complete understanding that it is but a part of the vast ocean.
People ask me, 'Can we come and stay in the ashram?'
If I say they can stay by all means, they will list out all the reasons as to why and how they cannot come to the ashram.
They will say that they have their business to look after, their family will suffer, their friends will talk ill of them, the ashram is too far to be in, and all such reasons.
If I tell them not to stay in the ashram as they are not yet ready and when they are ready I shall tell them, they will feel hurt and try to convince me with all the points as to how they are ready and how eager they are to come!
They simply make me a part of their dilemma.
We always live in dilemma. We live in a dilemma of choices that we have to decide upon. We create controversies where there are none in reality. This is exactly what I mean when I say how you feel compelled to make choices in your life and how you suffer because of that.
People ask me, 'Is it not necessary for us to make choices in life? There are so many options and we need to choose, is it not?' they ask.
It is true that life offers choices. There are many forks in the path of life and we have the option to choose amongst them. The concept of free will is based upon exercising our own choice.
Let me tell you a small story:
One man read in the newspaper about a call for an interview for the post of a consultant. It said, 'Wanted a consultant with only one arm, with five years of work experience, for a chemicals factory."
The man was puzzled at the condition that said, 'Only one arm.'
He called up the company and enquired, 'I understand your other conditions but why do you want people with only one arm?'
The CEO of the company replied, 'I have had many consultants earlier. They give long advice on each matter and always go on to say - on the other hand ... I can't take it any more!'
We simply lose focus in choosing when we are confronted with life with all that it has to offer. We start feeling compelled to choose. And we start making the wrong choices and start regretting them later on. Without the power of foresight, any choice is a gamble. But the problem is, human nature is such that it remembers the losses far more vividly than celebrating the gains. As a result, the idea of choice becomes a nightmare for us and we keep falling into its trap with unconscious decision-making.
We are like a child in a candy store when it comes to exercising our choices in life. The more options we have, the more complex our decision making process becomes. If you have only two shirts or two dresses to choose from, the choice of selection is easy. However, choosing a shirt or a dress in a specialty store can become a nightmare, because our mind is excluding all the time.
Is there a reason why we must choose one option over another? Is there a reason why we cannot accept life as it is? Choice actually gives us such freedom; but we experience it as a terrible bondage. Why is this so? Where are we missing it?
The ancient Chinese wisdom of the Tao is based on the Yin and Yang: symbolizing the male and female, good and evil, darkness and light, black and white. Interplay of these opposites is constant and certain. There can never be good without bad; there can be no light without shadow. That is the way life's cards are dealt to us.
What we have to understand clearly here is this. It is our ability to work with the seemingly opposite qualities in life that leads to fulfillment and happiness and not the power to choose between one and another! This is the truth that you need to understand.
Let me explain: The very perception of something being good or bad is totally dependent on the eyes that perceive the situation, am I right? We always see things through the lens of our bias, our past, our expectations, our desires and what not and we think that is reality. It is something like this. The sky that is covered by the floating clouds is unaffected by the presence of the clouds; it is untouched by the clouds. It only appears to be absent because of the clouds. But, if you look at it and say that the sky has disappeared, will it be a true statement?
If you can see the truth as it is and not bring in your lens into it, if you can just allow the truth to be and facilitate it to prevail, you will never be faced with any dilemma or choice; you will simply flow with Existence. Choosing becomes so important and miserable in your life because you are always looking through your desires, your despair, your anger and what not.
A small story:
One man was suffering from severe multiple injuries after a bad accident. His friend visited him in the hospital. He asked him, 'It must be aching throughout your body because of the injuries all over.' The man replied, 'No not really; only when I laugh!'
Life is to do with your attitude towards it, always. A pessimist is one who always sees the dark side of life while the optimist is one who always sees the bright side of things. But the key is, to not feel any compulsion to choose between the two. to go beyond both and just resonate with Existence so that there is no choice to make; just allow the truth to prevail. If this is done, we will not feel misery or happiness that comes with a reason. We will just feel choiceless and helpless bliss, that's all.
The problem is, we forget our divinity and start thinking of ourselves as human beings with limited potential; we limit our infinite potential by the very acceptance that we have limited potential. Realize the infinite capacity in you! Know that the boundless cosmic energy is there for you; be very clear that you can explode in all directions instead of constraining yourself to the imaginary lines of materialism and spiritualism that you have restricted yourself to!
It boils down to the attitude, the perspective with which we see and perceive our situation. The wise person realizes this and does not get perturbed by anything that seems unpleasant nor does he get carried away by something that seems pleasurable. He will understand that both these are impermanent and hence, not the eternal truth.
A small story:
There was once a great young sage, Sukha.
His father, Vyasa, taught him the knowledge of the Truth and sent him to the court of King Janaka.
Janaka, though a king, was called videha meaning 'without a body'.
He was so called because even though he was a king, he was not attached to material pleasures and was established in his Self.
King Janaka came to know that Sukha was coming to him and made arrangements to receive him. When Sukha arrived at the palace gates, the guards did not even take note of him. Even though he was the son of the well-known sage Vyasa, he sat there for three days and nights with no one to care for him.
After three days, suddenly, the ministers of the king heard that he was waiting outside the palace gates and they rushed to receive him.
They brought him into the palace with all the respects, put him in a magnificent room and gave him the best food and comforts.
But, Sukha's face was exactly the same serene one when he was being treated with the utmost honor as it was when he was being made to wait outside the palace gates with no respect. Sukha was taken in front of King Janaka who was sitting on the throne.
There was music, dance and amusements going on in the court.
Janaka gave him a cup that was filled to the brim with milk and asked him to go around seven times inside the room without spilling even one drop.
The boy took the cup of milk without a word and he started going around inside the room. In the midst of all the revelry and the attractions, he was not distracted the least and effortlessly went round the courtroom seven times.
When he brought the cup back to Janaka, the king said, 'I can only repeat what your father has taught you and what you have yourself learnt. You have known the Truth. Go home, my boy.'
Sukha could not be affected by anything in the world unless he chose to be affected by it. We are the ones who choose to perceive as we do, react as we do. When you realize that it is all a question of seeing through different tinted lenses, each giving a different hue to the scene, you see the foolishness of playing with the lens and you automatically drop the lens.
When you get angry with somebody who says something you don't like, it is you who chooses to react by getting angry and expressing it. You don't realize that it is you who is making this choice and you end up blaming the other person for provoking you. This is the unconscious choice making that goes on inside us continuously.
A small story:
One man got into a boat and rowed his way into the deep parts of the ocean and relaxed for a while.
Suddenly, his boat was jolted and he woke up with great irritation, ready to pounce on the careless boat rider.
He opened his eves and saw that the other boat was unmanned. It had just lost its moorings and hit the man's boat.
The man was totally stumped.
Whom will he blame?! Just think! Who can he blame? No one! He suddenly realized that there is no one to blame but himself! As long as there is a receiving end, we keep blaming it, but when there is no receiving end? We are stumped! It is then that the idea of blaming suddenly becomes shaky, baseless. All our lives we blame others for whatever happened to us. Only fools blame others, be very clear. The wise ones never blame others; they blame only themselves.
Anyhow, this habit of making a choice actually comes from the concept of choosing between heaven and hell all the time. Society teaches us to always choose between heaven and hell. Right from childhood, the concept of heaven and hell is instilled in us. On this basic idea is built our idea of choosing in everything. If we can see everything as one Whole, then we will never feel compelled to choose. We will simply flow and whatever we do will be just a choiceless and natural way of flowing with Existence.
Many of us seek to give up material life in search of spiritual truth. For such people it seems like an obvious choice between what they think is a difficult life of spouse, children and possessions that precludes any possibility of finding ever lasting happiness, and a path that guarantees them eternal bliss.
This is like some people giving up their jobs because they do not like their bosses. They move to another job and discover that they don't like that boss also! The problem is not with the boss but with themselves. If you have an inherent problem of getting along with people, wherever you go, the problem will follow you. The solution is not to change your jobs, but to change your attitude.
For a moment, if you stop and think what the common factor between your various bosses was, you will realize that it was you! You were the commonality factor! Your various bosses were made differently with different attitudes and different dispositions, yet you did not get along with any of them. Why? Because your attitude remained the same with every boss and there was an inherent problem in that attitude.
If you are intelligent, you will wake up to this truth, else you will create more and more illusions about others to yourself and move about completely ignorant of your own shortcomings. After all, the others are not going to lose anything by you moving away from them: it is you who is the loser.
A small story:
Once, a disciple went to his Master's cottage and came out crying. The disciple who was waiting outside asked him what the matter was. The first disciple replied, 'I asked Master if I could smoke while meditating and he beat me up.' The second one entered the Master's cottage and came out after a while laughing. The first disciple was surprised and asked him, 'What happened? What did Master tell you?' The second disciple replied, 'I asked Master if I could meditate while smoking! He praised me and sent me!'
Just see the different attitudes, which resulted in one disciple getting beaten and the other getting praised! The second disciple is the intelligent one who understands that everything can be done meditatively, that every moment can be a meditative moment, that everything is whole and integrated. Now don't think that I am advocating smoking as a meditation! Our people will correctly draw the wrong conclusions from what they hear. They will catch the words and miss the truth; that is the problem.
Just understand that the attitude with which we choose is important and not what we choose. If the attitude is right, then even if we choose to exclude certain things in our life, it will not be out of deliberate exclusion, it will be because we are simply flowing with the truth that's all. When this happens, we will not feel any misery. When the attitude is not right, we choose deliberately and end up excluding things deliberately and fall into deep misery.
With the right attitude, work becomes worship. With the wrong attitude, even worship becomes work. People go for vacation to exotic beaches and try to enjoy. But, if you carry the same mind, the same attitude of postponing enjoyment, the same attitude of compulsively choosing, how can you enjoy the vacation? You are always planning for the next moment and miss the present. If you are at work, you think about your evening plans at home. But, when you reach home, you are already caught up in worrying about the next day's work at office.
I always tell people, 'If you are worrying about your wife or children, you call it home. If you are worrying at office, you call it work. If you are worrying on the beach, you call it vacation! That is the only difference you are experiencing.' You carry the same mind, then how can you change the experience?
You experience what you are, be very clear. Don't blame the place or people or circumstances around you. Even in the worst of situations, you can enjoy yourself, only if you are enjoyment yourself. If you are enjoyment yourself, you enjoy everything around you because you are enjoyment and you know to experience and exude only that. On the other hand, if you are misery and worry within, everything will seem miserable and worrisome to you. Whatever you are filled with inside is what you will experience outside. It has nothing to do with the outer world things themselves.
In the case of the spiritual aspirant who deliberately excludes the material world to reach his spiritual goal, it is actually his attachment to material objects that leads him to take this decision. Even if he supposedly renounces the material world and becomes an ascetic, the attachment will follow him. He will continue to have the same fantasies, except that now he may be wearing saffron robes instead of other colors. Just by going to the Himalayas, you cannot give up the mind that is used to running after desires. What is needed is a change in the mental setup and the ability to handle yourself and your desires.
Desires cannot be overcome by suppression. If you fast for a day, be very clear, you will dream of food that night. If you are suppressing sexual desires, you will start dreaming of it at night. On the other hand, you can never be satisfied by madly going behind them either. All you can do is be aware of your desires. Bring them to your awareness so that you are not driven by your unconscious desires and desires borrowed from others. Awareness is the key to fall in tune with all your decisions. Then, things will happen automatically.
There is no need to choose between a material life of pleasure and spiritual satisfaction through renunciation. They are both perfectly possible to achieve together, as they can and do coexist. It is not required to exclude deliberately out of a feeling of compulsion.
A small story from the Mahabharata:
A young sage gets up from his morning prayers and goes out of his hut.
A passing crane's droppings foul him.
In great anger the sage looks up and burns the crane by just the power of his look.
Proud of his newfound spiritual powers, he walks to the nearest house and begs for food, as is his routine everyday.
The lady of the house is serving her husband and makes him wait.
When she comes out to give him food, he stares at her in irritation.
The lady replies. 'Do you think I am a crane that you can burn with just your stare?'
He was startled that the lady knew about what had happened in the forest to which there had been no witness other than him and the crane; he asks her how she knew what had happened.
She tells him to go to a person in the nearby town who would explain.
After a long search, the curious sage ends up at the town butcher.
The butcher asks the sage whether the housewife sent him.
The sage is startled again and asks the butcher how both he and the lady knew things that only the sage knew.
The butcher explains to the chastened sage that they both focused on their day-to-day duties, which they performed to the best of their ability and the mere performance of their duties had made both of them enlightened!
To be enlightened, one does not have to choose between material and spiritual life. Leading a material life also leads to enlightenment. All one has to do is to live in the present with no regrets about the past and no speculations about the future.
Life is all about living with existence and in balance. People ask me, 'It is still difficult for us to understand how to be both in material and spiritual lives. They seem to be contradictory.'
Understand this. First of all, there is nothing called 'material' or 'spiritual'. Life itself is meant to be only spiritual. Spirituality is nothing but living life to its optimum, centered within. Infusing spirit into life is spirituality! So there is no question of material and spiritual. Whatever you do has to be infused with spirit, with spirituality, that's all.
In science, before the concept of quantum physics was accepted, there was a conflict between the concepts of matter and energy. Though Einstein had postulated the relationship between matter and energy clearly, that matter and energy are inter-convertible, one group said, 'Both energy and matter exist, but in different space and time.' That was the first theory.
Soon, another group of scientists came up with the second theory and disagreed with the first and said, 'Both energy and matter are in the same space but at different times'.
After some time, a third theory was proposed that said, 'Both energy and matter exist in the same space and at the same time; there is no boundary between the two.' This was the final theory.
Once this was accepted, the conflict disappeared. It was agreed that matter and energy exist together in time and space. There is now a concept of singularity, of the simultaneous existence of matter and energy. The concept is that, at the same point in time it can be matter and energy. depending on perception. There are other theories like the string theory that further confirm this non-duality of existence. The concept of singularity or non-duality is where the mind cannot penetrate, one that is beyond matter and energy.
One of the principles in quantum physics, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that both the position and the velocity of an electron cannot be determined accurately at the same time because the very act of measurement changes the observation. They call this the 'observers' paradox'. This led to the principle of superposition according to which, while we do not know what the state of an object is, it is actually in all possible states simultaneously, as long as we don't check it. The measurement itself causes the object to be limited to a single possibility. That is the reason when Einstein was asked how energy becomes matter become energy, he replied, 'Here ends Science and Spirituality starts.' The first line of the Isa Vasya Upanishad says, 'Isa Vasyam idam sarvam' – all that exists is Energy.
As long as you feel you need to live two different lives, material and spiritual, you are only playing with words. In material life, you are in search of satisfaction of desires. It is not just basic needs that you wish to fulfill, but wants that arise out of greed.
It is certain that we can fulfill our genuine needs. It is our wants that never get fulfilled because they are increasing all the time. Mahatma Gandhi, the founding father of Bharat says. 'We have enough to fulfill the whole world's needs. But, the whole world cannot fulfill one man's wants.' In Jainism, there is a truth that its founder Mahavira states, 'When you come down to planet Earth, the total amount of food which you will eat is sent with you. The energy needed to fulfill all your desires is given to you."
The problem is this, after coming down to planet Earth, you start seeing what others are enjoying. and you start picking up desires from others. You not only want to work out your desires, but you start gathering the desires of others as well.
For example, you go to the mall to buy a refrigerator.
There, you meet a friend who is buying a color TV and oven.
Just a few moments before you met your friend, you were very happy buying just the refrigerator. However, now, your mind will start working on the color TV also.
You start thinking about it in your mind. You feel you should also have the color TV. So instead of buying just the refrigerator, you end up taking a loan and buying the color TV as well.
But what happens after you buy it? It seems like just another possession along with your hundred other possessions and the mind is racing behind something else, like the new car that your neighbor has bought or the new air cooler that your relative has bought!
Bhagwan Ramana Maharishi says beautifully, 'Till you possess it, even a mustard seed will seem like a mountain. After achieving it, even a mountain will seem like a mustard seed.' Such is the power and the nature of the mind that it can completely change the way you look at anything.
Wants are ever rising and can never be fulfilled. Wants create dissatisfaction both in terms of reviewing the past and jumping to the future. Real life, on the other hand, is all about the present.
What we do is, we think of normal material life as a horizontal line and spiritual life as a vertical line. Then we think of choosing between following the horizontal line or the vertical line; we choose between the material life and the vertical spiritual life. Only when you understand that you can travel both horizontally and vertically and, in fact, explode in all directions simultaneously do you understand that there are no contradictions in life. Till then, you will always have the conflict of which kind of life to live and how.
You may ask me, 'How can we travel in the vertical and horizontal directions simultaneously?'
To most people, material life represents all that they have in life - physical, emotional, economic and intellectual things which do not bring them the deep satisfaction that they are looking for. They feel that they have achieved all that they wanted to achieve but what for they achieved them, they have missed! On the contrary, spiritual life appears to be the greener grass that beckons, that they do not have and which seems to have all that is missing from their current lives. By giving up one for the other, they seek happiness, peace of mind and bliss.
Spirituality is actually not any greener grass that you need to choose to achieve deep satisfaction. It is Life itself! The greatest misconception about spirituality is that it is an option! Be very clear: Spirituality is Life Engineering and it is life itself. Spirituality implies that you are physically and mentally healthy and sound, that your relationships are happy, and that you live in awareness and spontaneity. At no stage are you bound to your own self and family; the whole world becomes your family, your responsibility; compassion arises for all, not merely when and where it is of value to you. This is the state that Lord Krishna refers to as 'Vasudeva Kutumbaha', the Universal Family, where you are one with everyone.
Once I asked a person who used to drink regularly why he stopped drinking. He replied that he wanted to go to heaven.
He had read that in heaven, you get soma rasa - drink of the Gods! So, he gave up drinking in this world in the hope of getting to drink in heaven.
I told him, 'Never give up something on the basis of greed. Give up only on the basis of understanding. What is the guarantee that you will get soma rasa after death?!'
Now I tell you, if you give up anything based on greed, you will never get soma rasa in heaven!
If you drop things in the hope of pleasures of the other worlds, remember it is still the same greed playing tricks on you. Look into your life deeply. In how many cases is your greed hidden by the beautiful words you use to describe it?
Just look at the faces of the people who torture themselves in the name of attaining liberation. There will not be a trace of joy in it! That is not the way it is to be. It is not they have gone beyond greed either. They have simply shifted their greed from the so-called material world to the so-called spiritual world, that's all. They are still driven by greed only.
If desires drop on their own, it is a different thing. The scale of measure is this. If you are happy and fulfilled in doing what you are doing, without feeling that you are missing something, you are doing well, that's all. As long as you keep forcing yourself to do things that leave a deep void in you even after doing it, you will never experience that happiness and fulfillment in you. So never choose and force yourself. Try to embrace everything until you settle down with the things that give you deep fulfillment without causing yearning.
When this settling happens within you, you will be able to support your actions with tremendous conviction and surety. Even if the whole world stands against you, you will be able to stand by your stance because it is out of your own deep experience and not mere intellect. The danger comes in when, without desires dropping on their own, you try to take up a stance of renunciation. Then, you will find that you don't have enough conviction and strength to go through it.
By its very nature, the mind hankers after more and more. It keeps driving you with the illusion that your desires will give you joy tomorrow. This very hope makes you run behind tomorrow without living the present fully. Tomorrow will also come to you as today only. You really have only this one moment, the current moment to live. Even two moments cannot come together; it is only the single current moment that you have. Understand that.
For example, when you are young, you yearn to settle abroad thinking that life there will be good. When you get there. it may not be as nice as you thought it would be, but you start working to buy a nice house thinking that it will give you the happiness you were seeking. Once you have bought the house, you will think that if you get married and have a wife, real happiness will be yours and you get married.
Then you feel that if you have kids, you will feel real happiness and you have kids. Finally you would have reached the end of your life and you will think that you will be happy only when you are able to retire with money.
However, by the time you retire, the mental setup you have created to continuously run behind tomorrow would have become a habit.
You would have actually forgotten how to enjoy life!
Relaxation is only a word for you, not an experience. Naturally, you have lost the sensitivity to live life fully, the quality of enjoying life.
It is like selling your eyes to purchase a beautiful painting, selling your sleep to buy a bed or selling your life to purchase a house!
A small story:
There was once a poor farmer who had lost all his wealth and land.
He was praying to God to help him get back some land, in which he could grow some crops and make a living.
On hearing his fervent prayers, God appeared before him and asked him what he wanted. The man asked God for a few acres of land upon which he could do farming for a living. God took pity on him and granted him a boon, saying, 'Whatever land you can cover by foot from sunrise to sunset tomorrow will become yours.'
The man was overjoyed and couldn't sleep the whole of that night. He waited the whole night impatiently for the sun to rise, so that he could start walking. At the break of dawn, he set out to cover the land that would become his.
He walked a few miles and covered the land that he had originally wanted for himself. He then remembered the scriptural saving that every man should leave enough possessions for three generations. This thought made him walk on.
By noon, he had enough land to last many generations. He still felt dissatisfied. He was now keen to be the biggest landowner in the region and walked on.
By now it was well past noon, the sun was scorching his skin and he was extremely thirsty and hungry.
But, he did not want to waste even a single moment by taking rest or stopping to eat, since he will lose that much of precious land.
He continued walking further.
After a few hours, his body was begging for some food and water. But no, the man wanted to cover just a few more miles, so that no one he knew could match the extent of land he owned. In the distance, he saw a burial ground and a river flowing beyond it. He was very happy at the thought of having a river in his possession and a place where he and his progeny could be buried comfortably.
He refused to heed to his body's desperate pleas for rest and food and decided that he would stop only after he had crossed the burial ground and reached the river.
Just as the sun was about to set, he reached the river.
Desperately thirsty, he bent down to sip some water.
The moment his lips touched the water, he dropped dead out of sheer exhaustion!
The man had managed to acquire miles and miles of land but in the end, all he could really use was the six feet of land in the burial ground that he was finally buried in!
Running behind the future can never be life; it is just slow death. When you jump from the worries about the past to the fear of the future, you are just like a scorpion-stung monkey that keeps jumping around from one place to another not knowing what to do.
You see, desires are the only things that sustain life for us, no doubt. The moment you wake up. the first thing that gets you out of bed is desire. If you sit and think, you will understand what I am saying. Desire is the first thought that gets you out of bed. Either you think of some pending work, some office deadline, some help that a person needs from you. some thing. But as long as these desires are mere needs and not wants, it is all right. The problem is, over time, our wants and needs get mixed up and we lose our clarity on what we really need.
Once your borrowed desires start dropping, you will find that all the energy that you invested in fulfilling them is now available to do a lot more things. You will also experience liberation. By liberation, I mean living a liberated life while you are alive, free at the level of the being. That is the real liberation. After your death getting liberated is all right, but while you live you should feel liberated, that is the essence of life.
What is the point in living a heavy life? People make fun of spiritualists saying that they are torturing themselves while living and therefore losing out on real living. This is because, first of all, these so called spiritualists portray a wrong picture of spirituality to others. They follow rigorous disciplines and appear tortured as a result of that. They appear neither liberated nor happy in any way. Unfortunately these people are taken as the hallmark to brand spirituality.
Real spirituality is allowing yourself to flower out of worldly things and then using the same things to enjoy, without any attachment. When you are rich inside, you will be able to live with or without comforts, with or without material things. And whichever way you live, you will shine with a brilliance incomprehensible to people. That is the real fragrance of spirituality.
So understand, when you are haunted by all the borrowed desires, you will feel heavy and dissatisfied all the time. When you start coming out of it, you will feel light and blissful.
Enlightened Masters have no desires as such. All their energy that was earlier in baser emotions like anger, sex and greed becomes pure energy and compassion. That is why they are able to handle such masses of people, attending to each one's needs without tiring. Unless the energy is pure compassion, this is just not possible. Can an ordinary person handle millions of people's worries and anxieties at the same time? Even if he has a service oriented mind? Only pure energy can do it.
Just by the fact that a single person is able to handle practically the whole world's problems you can conclude that the person is enlightened. It can be no other way.
It is perfectly possible to groom ourselves to be without desires, fear, guilt and all such emotions, because, anyway, they are just a play of our mind. The big problem in our lives is that we never try to be without these. We never try these ideas in our life - ideas that suggest that we can live without such emotions. Even before they enter our system, we have some arguments to destroy them. If we are really interested in living a life free from worry and fear, we will try to create a space within us where these ideas can take root and grow to become an experiential reality in us.
We are happy feeding on these ideas, but staying as we are. We keep on going between the past and future. Seeking the past and future itself arises out of desire. Seeking itself is desire! Seeking itself means moving from where you are! But life has to do only with the present moment. So seeking is really a means of moving away from the present.
When you are in the present, in the here and now, you are actually in a no-thought zone. This is what is called the 'Zero TPS state': TPS is 'thoughts per second'. This is the state of Samadhi, Satori, THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM state, Enlightenment, Salvation or whatever you call it. You will have complete awareness and total consciousness but you will not have any thoughts.
It has been researched and found that we use hardly 10% of our mental capacity and we see just 2% of what is actually present in our surroundings. This is because we are never in the present moment; we are either worrying about the future or regretting the past. So, all our energy is absorbed in these wasteful thoughts and we don't see what is happening in the 'now'. Every thought has something to do with either the past or the future, in some way. Sometimes the connection with the past or future is so subtle that it will be difficult even to perceive.
The vertical shaft in the center represents the Thoughts per Second or TPS. The horizontal axis has the past on the left of the shaft, the future on the right of the shaft. The present is at the point where the vertical axis touches the horizontal axis. At any given time, the greater one's TPS or 'thoughts per second' is, the farther away one is from consciousness of the present moment. You keep moving from the past to the future very rapidly without even getting a glimpse of the glorious present.
When your TPS comes down, or when your number of thoughts per second is low, when you are more relaxed, you enter more and more into the present. When this shift happens, you have a clearer vision of the past and the future as indicated in the diagram, instead of just skidding in and out of the past and future. When this happens, familiar incidents from even past births and intuitions of the future will start to surface in you.
Also, when your TPS is low, you are one with Existence; you have touched base.
Let me relate to you an incident that happened in the ashram one day:
While walking in the ashram one day, I saw a snake lying in front of me on the path. I was just watching it for some time and it was oblivious to my presence and continued to stay there as if I was not present.
After a few seconds, I noticed that the snake suddenly moved as if sensing some presence.
I saw that there was a man behind me and both the man and the snake were terrified and the snake moved away sensing the presence of the man.
What happened was, there was no 'I' consciousness in me since I am in a zone of no-mind where there are no thoughts. Since there was no 'I' consciousness in me, there was no 'you' consciousness in the snake! Only when the consciousness of 'I' happens in you, the sense of 'you' happens in the other party. When you are in the present and zero TPS zone, you are one with Existence; your presence does not cause fear in others and raise their self-defense to protect themselves from you. But with the man behind me, there was an intense 'I' consciousness when he saw the snake and this induced the snake to get the strong 'you' feeling and it got frightened and moved away in defense.
Anyhow, there are moments when your TPS comes down unconsciously. When this happens to you without your consciously attempting it, be very clear, for those few moments when your TPS has dropped, you are more in the present. When your TPS is actually zero, you can clearly see the entire past and future. When people experience a feeling of déjà vu, they have actually dropped accidentally into a near-zero TPS state. This is also the reason why enlightened Masters can clearly see the past and the future.
The mind enslaves you into believing that you can only travel in one way, horizontally or vertically, spiritually or materially. That is why you do not grow in many spiritual practices that force you to choose between the two, material or spiritual.
Instead of two axes, you can have multiple axes, infinite axes that offer infinite possibilities in the past, present and future, as well as across all points in space. Being in the 'here and now' helps transcend barriers of time and space so that one can be everywhere at all times.
This phenomenon of singularity, that Hindu scriptures call Brahman, Buddhists call akasic record and which is generally referred to as Universal Consciousness, refers to the state of penetration of the time shaft at which point one is simultaneously in the past, present and future.
This is also the state of enlightenment, as the ego or mind breaks down at this point. It is an explosion within one's mind that is multidimensional in time and space, in the total absence of thoughts.
To reach this state, all one has to do is to stay in the present and suspend wasteful thoughts of past and future. As for the present, just focus on what you are doing at that time. For any other activity, you need some talent and potential. For example, to be a Picasso, you need the talent of a painter; to be a Mozart, you need to have the talent of music. But, to get enlightened, all you need to do is to be alive! As long as you are a human being and alive, you are qualified to be enlightened.
Buddhism refers to the enlightened state as the 'mindful' state. Buddhist meditation techniques such as vipassana seek to introduce us this state of mindfulness, which is the state of the present, of the here and now. Most of us are not involved fully in what we do. When we eat, we do everything else but focus on the food. We talk, watch the television, or read books paying little attention to the food that we eat.
Vipassana is a beautiful breathing technique by which awareness is infused into us and we come to the present easily. In fact, vipassana can be applied to our habits to get rid of them. You see, all habits are because of our unconscious state. We know that a habit is bad for health. Intellectually, we know it. We have read in all possible books, magazines, told by friends and relatives, seen it happening to our own friends, people dying due to excessive consumption of alcohol, but what happens? Although we know all this, the moment we think of drinks, we get a sudden inspiration to drink and we go ahead! All our so-called clarity simply fails us. The desire to drink simply blinds and overtakes us.
A small story:
A man got hit on the road by a car and he was carried to the pavement and whisked into a car. The person who took charge of him yelled to someone outside. 'Get him a drink, quick,' The man opened his blurry eyes and enquired, 'How serious do I have to be to get a Scotch?'
You see, our unconscious is so powerful! It simply overrules and overtakes us.
If we are with intense awareness, we can never be victim to these habits. Because of a lack of awareness, we do these things. Just try to do this simple exercise. When you drink the next time, instead of gulping down the liquor, just play with it; feel the taste of it; sip it slowly, taste every drop before it goes down: look at your body's reaction to it; feel the change in your body as the liquor passes through it.
If you drink just once in this fashion, you will see that your desire to drink reduces tremendously and the habit may even leave you after a couple of times.
We are so caught in our unconscious ways; awareness is totally missing and so we keep doing the same mistakes over and over again, blindly, with no sensitivity. If you act with awareness, all the unwanted habits will simply drop; you don't have to struggle to drop them.
A small story:
A king once went to a Zen Master and asked him, 'Master, I have heard that you always live with joy and bliss. What is the technique that you use?'
The Master replied, 'I eat when I eat. I sleep when I sleep.'
The king was confused and asked the Master, 'Do we also not do the same thing?' The Master replied, 'Surely not. When you eat, are you really eating? You plan about the future and worry about the past. When you eat, totally eat. When you sleep, totally sleep. Then, your whole life will become worship. '
We do things mechanically. We do things with our mind, never with our body. Even eating and drinking we do with our mind - it is a kind of cerebral enjoyment. Our body is actually more existential that our mind is a myth - a mere collection of thoughts. If you are able to free yourself from thoughts, your mind is no longer there! But your body is real. Even for great Masters who are in the state of no mind, their body continues to be real.
So, do things with your body, with awareness. Then you become total and not cerebral. When you do things with great awareness you become total. You become what you are doing. When you eat totally, you become the eating. When you laugh totally, you become the laughter. When you can become something totally, you are actually touching base with yourself, not with your mind.
The mind is the most superficial thing ever, but we have empowered it and kept it as a deep phenomenon: that is the problem.
When you become total, you are integrated: you are not fragmented. When you are fragmented, all the fragments in you simply cause chaos. But you have always been taught to be fragments, because only if you are fragments you are easy to handle by society. If you are integrated, society can't do much with you. It cannot play its mind games on you.
So, stay in the present in whatever you do. When you take the next step, when you brush your teeth, when you smile at some one, just focus on what you are doing at that point in time. If other thoughts fleet by, witness them as an observer without getting involved. These thoughts will die down by themselves. As thoughts slow down and gradually disappear, you near the time shaft interface. When all thoughts are suspended, you are in the time shaft, with the entire time frame of past to future available in front of you.
At this point, there is no past; at this point, the future is known; even as you focus only on the present, you are aware of the future. Therefore, what you decide to do in the present is with complete awareness of what the future entails; you develop powers of intuition and omniscience.
You are what the scriptures call a trikala jnani: one who knows all the three time zones, of the past, present and future, one for whom the universe holds no secrets. You are actually a Master of the Universe.
Patanjali, the father of the Yoga system declares, 'When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction and you feel yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Suddenly, dormant forces, faculties and talents within you become alive and you discover yourself to be a greater person than you ever dreamed yourself to be. '
You have the potential to be infinite. But the mind plays its games. I tell you: You are not human beings waiting for a divine experience; you are divine beings with a human experience!
But the mind is the most wonderful magician. It simply makes up what you perceive as reality based on the desires that you have. Your desires are the food for your mind and as long as you feed it, it will keep dishing out realities the way you want them. That is why, what was a burning desire one moment will suddenly seem not so important when it is achieved and you would have moved to another desire, to another fantasy.
Just like how children play with sandcastles, the mind makes us play. The only difference is, children enjoy their games as they are playing for the sake of playing. If you watch them, you will see that they meticulously build a big stack of cards and the next moment. they will just pull a card from it and bring down the whole stack in no time! They don't brood or regret that they took so long to build the stack and it is all gone now; they know it is a game and enjoy it totally. On the other hand, we take all our mind games seriously, forgetting that we are the ones who started the game and playing it.
Once we understand that the mind is a myth that makes things look real, we can start liberating ourselves from it. But somehow, although we know this intellectually, we don't take steps towards coming out of it. We find comfort in getting entangled in our mind. We simply escape facing reality and end up complaining about our miseries.
We conduct chakra meditation camps where seven meditation techniques are taught one for each chakra.
In these camps, people tell me that they wish to do all the seven meditations for the seven chakras everyday in their house.
I tell them to do one to start with and focus on that one; but they insist they want to do all. So I say all right.
After a few months, if I see them in the ashram and ask them if they are practicing the meditation techniques, they tell me, 'I am hoping to start soon but I am unable to find the time!'
We have no problem in giving appointments to other people for our time. But when it comes to giving ourselves an appointment, we have a serious problem.
We are all the time in a hurry when it comes to doing worship or meditation. And even if we meditate or worship, we look at our watches all the time and find short cuts in what we are doing. We will have a hundred other things to think about that distract us whenever we sit down to meditate.
A small story:
One man sat down to meditate. He had barely closed his eyes when the maid walked in with noisy anklets. He immediately opened his eyes and screamed at her for disturbing his meditation. The next day, he sat down to meditate again. This time again the maid walked in but tiptoed in making very little noise. But still, the man opened his eyes and screamed at her for disturbing him.
The third day, the man sat down to meditate and waited to hear the sound of the anklets!
We are all like this! We are ever-ready to blame external factors for distracting us.
People feel they should go to the Himalayas for meditation. 'What for' I ask? Because the Himalayas offer a silent atmosphere. No doubt, the Himalavas carry a vibrant silence in them, but what is the use? You carry your same noisy mind there too! Be very clear, distractions are distractions only as long as you feel they are distractions. Just fall in tune with them; they will no longer be distractions, that's all.
If you go to the Himalayas and meditate, you might be able to meditate better; but remember, the silence is not your own. It is the silence of the Himalayas. Meditation is discovering the silence within you; it is discovering the emptiness in you; it is going beyond your mind and body and experiencing that you are one with Existence.
Silence is actually a great virtue, but the most difficult to follow. We are taught to talk and talk. So much so, if we stop talking for even a few hours, people think we are ill, or something has gone wrong with us! People can never feel the beauty of silence. Of course, the silence that we radiate should be a live silence, not a dead silence. Understand, we are not talking about the silence that we experience because something went wrong or we are angry or we are exhausted. All that is silence with a reason, with a negative reason most often.
The way in which we live, most often, our silence is because of some negative reason. We may be silent when we are watching the television or listening to music or carrying on a silent fight with someone, or because we have had enough for the day. This silence is not what we are looking at. The real silence is that which happens on its own, as a result of a deep fulfillment at the being level. When the fulfillment happens at the being level, there will be no need to express through words.
Most of our talk, most of our words are some kind of a gibberish. We talk to escape from ourselves, from the deep silence hidden within us, of which we are strangely afraid; which is too intense for us to take because we have never been allowed to pursue it, we have always been kept busy in one way or the other away from it. We have felt glimpses of it but felt it to be very strange because it is unknown territory. When we are young, society keeps us busy and when we grow older we master the art of keeping ourselves busy so that we are comfortably cushioned from the inner silence.
People come to me with guilt. I give them some ideas to come out of it. They insist on learning meditation. I give them some meditation technique. After a month, if I ask them if they have done it, they say no and they carry one more guilt feeling, of not doing that meditation!
We only wish to try to transform: we really do not wish to transform: yet. we would like to loudly proclaim our wish to transform. This is what I call holiday religion. We practice part time spirituality. It is just skin deep for us. And at the end of it, we are filled with more hypocrisy and guilt.
This is like saving that you are trying to read but don't actually read. Can you try to read? Either you read or not, isn't it?! How can you try to read? What does that mean? It means that you are just cheating yourself. You can't cheat others by saying these things. They are not going to be cheated anyway. You are the one really cheated.
Even a meditation becomes a ritual if it is restricted to one part of your life at one time in a given space. Meditation is not a quantity that is to be added to your life: it is a quality that needs to be built into your life.
If this is understood, meditation can become an enjoyable way of life. The quality that meditation can add to your life is phenomenal. It can bring in such an acute awareness in you that you will find your performance in the outer world that much more intense and awe-inspiring. It can make you aware of such nuances that you will start understanding the small things that actually add quality to life versus your earlier ideas about the grosser things. What any amount of intellectual build up cannot do to you, basic attitudinal changes and meditation can do to you.
The mind and your conditioning trick you into thinking that meditation and spirituality are arduous tasks. You always think that you have to practice for a long time and only then you can expect a quiet mind. That puts you off from even entering into it. But, how can you do anything about the future when all you have in your control is the present is what decides the future.
The attitude of accepting and welcoming the present as it is, will lead you to this new dimension through a quantum leap; postponing in the name of the future will just take you on the same road that you have been traveling all along. Only thing now, your target has changed from material things to meditation!
Anything that you ever did or that was done to you in the past cannot prevent you from saying yes to what 'is' and taking your attention deeply into the 'now'. If you say that it is preventing you from jumping into the now, it only means that you are allowing it to influence you. It means that you are comfortable in remaining with your conditioning without allowing growth to happen in you.
A small story:
A young girl walked into the lawyer's office. She wanted a divorce from her husband. The lawyer asked her, 'On what grounds are you applying for a divorce?' The girl replied, 'Desertion.' The lawyer looked at the baby she was carrying in her arms. The girl quickly spoke, 'Well, now and then he does come home to discuss things and establish peace.'
Just look at this! This is what happens with most of us. We allow things to go wrong and then maintain the blame on the usual things in life, that is, the past and the future. Be very clear, nothing from your past and none of the circumstances can influence you if you are centered on the present alone.
There is no starting point in worldly life; there is no end point in spiritual life. Enlightenment is not an end; it is a new beginning. An ultimate experience is not the last experience. It is just the greatest experience till that point in time.
Some one asked me, 'We feel so blissful after the meditation camps. How do we retain the bliss of the meditation program?' The moment you wish to retain the bliss, you are choosing out of deep ignorance; the bliss will escape from you. It is just like water flowing in a river; it stays in your open palms as long as you have hands open. The moment you want to possess the water and try to hold it. it escapes!
Bliss is like a breeze. You can simply enjoy the breeze that is already there. You can neither create it yourself nor can you possess it. It is there, you are there as a part of it, immersed in it, that's all. So it is with bliss too. That is the real property of bliss. When you understand this, you will understand that although meditation camps can help show you what bliss is, it is actually there within vou and there is no need to try to possess it.
It has been said that you can never step into the same river twice because the moment you step in once, the water has flowed, so the river is not the same when you step in the second time. But I tell you now: You cannot step into the same river even once! When the sole of your foot touched the surface of the river the river was in a particular state. When your foot was halfway down the river, the water that you touched before has already flowed. When your foot touches the bed of the river, the water that is flowing over your leg is different again because more water has flown! The river is continuously flowing!
This is how bliss is. It is continuously happening. You can never possess bliss. Bliss will possess you!
Let me tell you an incident from my own life:
When I was twelve, I was playing with this technique of just watching where thoughts came from. I didn't even know that it was a meditation at that time. On the foothills of Arunachala hills, in my hometown of Thiruvannamalai in South Bharat, I was sitting on a rock, just practicing this technique that I had been practicing for a long time.
Suddenly, something happened; something opened. I felt as if I was being pulled inside. Suddenly, I could see 360 degrees in all directions. I could see everything in front of me, behind me, to my right even without looking to the right and to the left even without looking to the left. Not just that, I felt that whatever I was seeing was all me! It was such an ecstatic experience; it was so intense. It was three to four hours before I could open my eyes. I felt an intense fever of bliss that lasted for three days.
Then slowly, tremendous fear gripped me. I began to think that some ghost had possessed me and that was the reason I was able to have the 360-degree vision. An elderly spiritual lady who used to look after me at that time told me, 'You are not possessed by a ghost, you are possessed bv God.'
For six months, I was so afraid of the experience that I did not meditate. I was afraid even to close my eyes. I never even went back to that rock. I would walk miles out of my way to avoid having to pass by it.
Then one day, I told my experience to my friend and even proved it to him by asking him to place a coin behind my head and telling him if it was showing heads or tails. At first he laughed; then, after a few times, he became afraid. I told him all that was happening behind my back. He was terrified. He made an excuse to leave and never came back! I was pulled to go back to that rock at times. I reasoned it out to myself, 'Even if it was a ghost, it was so blissful, maybe it is not so bad.' But the fear kept me from going to it again.
After this experience, nine years of intense tapas (spiritual practice) followed, just to get the experience again. When it finally happened, my body and mind were ready and the experience never left.
Actually, I was in supreme bliss when I had my first spiritual experience at the age of twelve. But the problem was, I wanted to possess it; I wanted to possess what had happened and that was what drove me to the nine years of spiritual practice. Finally, I was so frustrated at the futility of all the intense physical and mental spiritual practices that I had been following for nine years and I dropped the very idea of enlightenment. When I let go and relaxed, when I dropped the idea of enlightenment, of possessing it, it possessed me!
Seven days after my giving up the intense practices, on the banks of the sacred river Narmada, when I was just enjoying nature's beauty, my thoughts stilled and I reached the zero TPS state and attained the state of Eternal Bliss or THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM.
People ask what they have to renounce to be spiritual. I tell them, 'Do not renounce what you have; renounce what you do not have.'
They are shocked when they hear me say this. They are unable to understand what I mean. What I mean is, renounce all the illusions that you are harboring which is not really you! Renounce what you are not! When you are with your wife, don't allow Ms. Universe to come in between! When you have a home, don't allow a fantasy home that you saw in the magazine cover to come in between. Eniov what you have: it is yours. You don't have to renounce it. Just renounce what you don't have, that is enough. It is those things that you don't have that cause trouble to you.
The problem is, these so-called spiritualists have established that it is a sin to enjoy material things, things that we have with us. I always tell my disciples that they will enjoy the best of the Western and Eastern worlds when they are with me and I ensure that also. I tell them to take care of their personal appearance, wear beautiful clothes, flaunt themselves in a beautiful way - after all God has created each one in a unique mould. The least we can do is flaunt ourselves as a mark of respect to God's creation.
They need not dress up vulgarly, but they should enjoy themselves as wonderful creations of God, they should have a certain pride about being a wonderful creation of Existence. It is not a sin to dress well and enjoy in life. We have it, so we are enjoying it. What is wrong? Life is there to enjoy, not to suffer under pseudo morality and pseudo conscience. It is there to explore and enjoy with innocence and freshness.
Very often you find that people who enjoy themselves not out of ego but just out of being comfortable with themselves. have a certain innocence in them: a certain infectious joy radiates from them. On the contrary, people who think it is a sin to flaunt what they have will be repressed and oppressed, and will suffer from low self-esteem and a deep sorrow.
The problem is, as I said earlier, we have been trained to choose all the time. That is why these questions arise. Especially perfectionists like to choose all the time. They feel so compelled to choose. Understand: Life is not perfect, only death is, One who does not make mistakes, or believes he or she makes no mistakes does not respect others. Do not try to be perfect: do not choose. If you avoid mistakes and try becoming a perfectionist, you will end up making the biggest blunder of wasting this gift of life without fully living it.
Life is a fulfillment only when you live it totally, not when you live it as a perfectionist. When you are perfect, you are as good as dead. When you are fulfilled every moment and the tasks that you perform will also carry the fragrance of it and will also appear total.
Perfectionists are narrow in their thinking, in their chosen field or chosen field or chosen task, they try to achieve perfectionism. There is a lot that they exclude in this whole process; they miss the very spirit of life. They see life through a very limited scope. Today, everything has become so specialized in all the fields.
In engineering companies, each one specializes and works in a very narrow area of work, am I right? Similarly, in the field of medicine also, specialists have become very common.
One man went to the doctor with burning pain in his leg. The doctor saw him and asked, 'Which leg is causing you pain?' The patient replied, 'My right leg doctor.' The doctor said. 'Oh! Sorry, I specialize only in left legs!'
This is how everything has become; limited, narrow. You are useful to society when you specialize, no doubt. But your perception itself becomes narrow. This is not the way it is meant to be. Life is so expansive; it is all encompassing. It needs to be drunk. But the problem is, we are so caught in the material world. We have forgotten that the whole purpose of life is to drink it and flower.
In Sanskrit, there is a beautiful word called Māyā, which means illusion. Philosophers say that the world is just an illusion. We find it very difficult to accept this. How can we believe that what we see, touch, feel is just an illusion when there is a physical reality to it?
A small story:
Once, a philosopher was explaining to a man that the whole world is just an illusion. The man got angry thinking that the philosopher was just trying to fool him into thinking that what he could see with his eyes and feel with his touch was all his hallucination. He picked up a stone and threw it at the philosopher's foot.
The philosopher shrieked in pain.
The man retorted, 'Why are you yelling? Isn't this world just an illusion? How are you then feeling pain?'
The concept of illusion has to be clearly understood. What we see is difficult to accept as illusion. That is why, in the East, we have a term to describe this: Māyā. Yā mā iti māyā: that which is not there but which disturbs you as if it is there is māyā. We do not see reality as it is but we see it through our lens of past and future. We associate the reality with our past and extrapolate the future from it. We are not able to view it in an unbiased fashion.
Just like how the sky is untouched by the clouds moving in front of it, in the same way, vour true Self is untouched and separate from your body or mind or thoughts. It is something beyond these. Māyā makes you believe that you are just the body or the mind. It limits the true and eternal You to the ephemeral body and the transient mind.
The Paramahamsa Upanishad, one of the Hindu scriptures that defines the qualities of an enlightened Master says, 'What is the state of the illumined man? All selfish attachments have dropped from him. He lives his life for the welfare of all. He faces heat and cold, pleasure and pain, honor and dishonor with equal calm. Free from the sway of doubt and false knowledge, he lives united with the Lord of Love. Entering the non-dual state, he attains the goals of evolution.'
When you are under the sway of illusions it does not mean that the world itself is an illusion. It means that what you see is illusory because what you see is different from reality; what you see is a mere projection of your mind is only a collection of thoughts. Which in turn is a collection of deductions based on past happenings and ideas instilled in you by others. This is what is meant by illusion.
What you create with your mind, with your set of instilled beliefs causes you to see the world in a particular way. That is the illusion that you are experiencing. Each one experiences things in their own way, through their own illusion. That is why although the world is the same, people's experience of it differs. Each one has his or her own illusory view of life. Illusion or Māyā has to be understood in this fashion.
All forms of duality, such as pain or pleasure, happiness or joy, are projections of this illusion. That is why an enlightened person who is believed to be out of illusion, experiences permanent bliss and none of these conflicting emotions.
When the great Master, Lord Krishna says in the timeless piece of philosophy and poetry, the Bhagavad Gita, 'The true yogi or spiritually evolved person is wide awake when the world sleeps'. he does not mean in the literal sense that the enlightened person is awake when the world is sleeping at night. What He means is that the enlightened person has broken the veil of illusion and he realizes that the perceptions of the opposites are only transient and not the Truth. So, he is not swayed by the opposites. He is no longer in the dream world that most of us are living in.
Legend has it that Janaka, a ruler in ancient Bharat, who was a highly learned sage as well, had a person going around his capital. Mithila, shouting: Jagrat! many times a day. This means Wake up! Wake up! Not only did his subjects need to be woken up from physical sleep, but also prodded into wakefulness and awareness from their unconscious and subconscious.
Do not think that you dream only when you are sleeping. Even in the waking state, you are weaving your dreams of the future and are not aware or conscious of the present. Everyone is in his own dream world. his own version of reality, which is nowhere close to the actual reality. When you realize this consciously and break out of it, you will find that the entire Existence is so beautiful; it is God and you are God because the entire Existence is one.
During nighttime, we are aware that we are dreaming, during daytime we are not aware that we are dreaming, that is the only difference. With fantasy, we are not just limiting ourselves, but are actually disrespecting ourselves. When you feel someone is more handsome than you are, you create a space, a gap between you and your body. You lose your uniqueness. You create dis-ease within yourself. God is not an engineer; he is an artist; he is a painter, a sculptor; no one being is like another because God has created all of us in a unique way.
When you see some hero on the television flexing his muscles, you yearn to be just like him. I am not saying that the desire to be physically fit is bad in itself. But, when you start being driven by the desire to look like someone else, you create a rift in your being, a wound in your being. Do not impose limits and thresholds and standards on yourself based on others. Compare yourself with your own self and see how you can better your standards and raise the bar. When you are thinking about others all the time, you are in the future, with your fantasy. When you are in your own boundary, you are in the present.
Living in the present moment is the missing link that helps you to traverse the horizontal and vertical lines at the same time and space. Every moment is a possibility that you can explode in all directions. In quantum spirituality, there is no attachment or detachment. If you are not in awareness, you detach and attach. When you are in awareness, there is no attachment or detachment. You simply are, that's all. You will not even be able to associate yourself with these opposites.
What do we mean by attachment and detachment?
Attachment is out of a deep ignorance of the fact that everything around us is part of a larger game, of which we are also a part. The truth is, all people, all thing are all part of this grand universe. As long as we enjoy each person, each thing as a part of Existence. it is alright. But attachment makes us do otherwise. We catch hold of certain people, certain things, in the name of family, friends, pets and what not, and suffer because of that.
We feel love is not possible if we don't feel attached. No! Remember, an enlightened Master feels love for the whole universe and vet he is not attached to anything. This is supreme love. This is real love. Love is nothing but an overflowing energy in you that flows naturally because it is overflowing. Love is pure energy. And attachment is something made up by the mind based on some conclusions, from what you have been taught, from what you have read, from what has been drilled into you from a young age by society. So don't confuse love with attachment.
What is detachment? Detachment is being able to see that we are not attached in any way except that we are all an integral part of the Cosmos! When this happens, all greed, fear, attention-need etc. simply disappear and when all these disappear, we become a loving energy.
Attachment arises out of these emotions. When you are possessed by greed for wealth, vou become attached to wealth. When you feel insecurity or fear, you become attached to your property and relationships. This same fear applies to your relationship with me as well. You are in deep fear of attachment to me. If you can love me as pure Existence, you will never feel threatened by any sort of attachment to me. It is only when you are superficially in it, when you feel attached to my form, to my physical presence, to the gains you get through me, to the temporary happiness that you get through me, you will feel threatened due to attachment to me.
If you can move beyond all these and love me as pure Energy, as the all-pervading Existence, as pure loving energy, then there will be no room for attachment, detachment or any other emotion except a pure and permanent joy at the being level; your body language will then simply radiate the peace and the joy that you experience. When the joy you experience is peaceful and not under the sway of attachment and other mind games, you will radiate an infectious fragrance; people will find it inspiring to just be around you.
How do all these emotions enter into us? Because we don't see ourselves and others as one. We are not taught to live as a universal family. We are not taught that each of us is like a bubble, independent and rising. We are always taught to catch and clutch with other bubbles. We call one bubble as mother, one bubble as father, one bubble as sister, one bubble we call money and what not. And based on these relationships, we nurture fear, greed and desires.
A small story:
One man met his friend and his wife. His friend seemed unusually depressed and his wife was in a merry mood. He asked them what the matter was. The friend said. 'I lost a thousand dollars in one consignment.' The friend sympathized with him and asked why the wife seemed happy despite the loss. She replied, 'I'm happy he gained thousand dollars. We lost only 50% of our profit margin.'
Attachment always makes us see things with a pessimistic attitude, with a fear of failure. But when you are detached, when you can see it as a whole and not through your attachment, you will feel liberated even as you are living.
Detachment is liberating. It is often mistaken to be coldness. No! When it happens out of a lack of understanding, it becomes coldness. Detachment is also mistaken to be insensitivity. When you are intenselv aware of all that is happening around you, you are actually intenselv sensitive also.
Only with this awareness and sensitivity, detachment can happen. When you are not aware, when you are not sensitive, you will be caught in a layer called attachment that actually bogs you down.
But people think you love only if you demonstrate some sort of an attachment to them. They expect us to show signs of attachment to them: thev expect us to feel bad while departing from them, they expect us to be present during certain times to show our attachment to them.
A husband and wife moved into a new neighborhood because of a new job that the husband had been offered.
While the husband carried on with his new job, the wife arranged her new home in her own tasteful ways and got talking to the new neighbors and getting familiar with the whole neighborhood.
One day, the husband came home from work and they sat down for tea.
After a long silence, the wife said, 'Our neighbors are such a loving couple. The man comes home after work everyday and gives his wife a kiss right at the doorstep before entering the house. Why don't you ever do that?'
The husband looked bewildered. He looked up said, 'But how can I? I don't even know her!'
You see, people are always looking for reassurances, for signs of attachment from each other. Be very clear: Attachment is purely a lack of intelligence. When there is real intelligence in you and vou are aware and sensitive and are able to see things objectively. attachment will automatically drop. You will, in fact, become compassionate towards everyone without feeling attachment! That is the real growth! That is the liberation you need to work towards.
Detachment is not feeling the illusion of attachment; it is feeling love towards everything without feelings of pain or pleasure as a result of this love. When you feel this way, you stop expecting things for yourself also. And when you stop expecting things, it becomes liberating for you. You feel light and energetic.
Attachment causes heaviness; detachment causes lightness. Attachment is a result of imbalanced emotion; detachment is a result of pure love. Attachment causes anxiety; detachment causes bliss.
A small story:
There was a very respectable man in a certain town.
He was respected by all in the town as a learned man and was a guide to all.
One day, a young girl in that town announced that she was pregnant and that the man was responsible for it.
The entire town was shocked and the chief of the town asked him about it.
He listened and simply asked, 'Really?'
The people in the town stopped respecting the man after this. The news spread around the whole town and people would spite him every time they saw him.
A few days later, the girl confessed that she had told a lie and that the man was not responsible for her baby.
The people of the town scolded her for it and approached the man and apologized for what had happened.
The man looked at them and asked, 'Really?'
The people once again started respecting him and talking to him like before.
The man was supremely unperturbed by the sequence of events. Neither was he perturbed when he was accused of something he had not done and was disrespected by all the people. nor was he pleased when they started respecting him when the truth came out.
When you are centered on your core, you can be this way. When you are like this, you will also not be attached to the results of your actions.
Lord Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, 'Karmanye vaadhikaraste maa phaleshu kadachanah' . It means: Do your duty but do not expect the results. He does not mean that you should work without expecting your salary. What He means is that you let the job itself become the enjoyment. Do the job with a totality and enjoy while you are doing it. Let the act of doing itself give you bliss. When you enjoy the path, even if you fail to get the desired result, you will feel deeply satisfied. However, if you do not enjoy the path, even if you succeed, you will still feel dissatisfied. This is what I mean when I say 'Bliss is the path and the goal'.
Let me tell you a real incident that happened some time back:
Once, one of my devotees handling the collection of money from my meditation classes in the USA lost the money before transferring it to the bank.
Some of my very close devotees were very upset when they heard about it.
I told them, 'Relax. When you are handling such big amounts of money, this is bound to happen at some point in time. Don't worry.'
But, they felt terribly sad because according to them, it was hard-earned money and I had worked very hard for it.
I told them, 'When you work intensely, the work itself is the reward, not the results of it. As long as you work on the basis of greed, there will be no joy. '
When you work out of greed or desire for the result, you will find yourself working without enjoving the whole thing and also worrving about the results. When you work for the sake of enjoving the work and not for some intended end result, the work itself will bring you jov. You will not be attached to the results of it; if the results happen, they will be something incidental. Also, this way, you will work more intensely because of the joy you find in doing it. And automatically your results will be more beautiful. These are secrets that people do not know.
Some of my disciples tell me, 'Master, when we do your work, we experience such joy in doing it that once its done, firstly, we wonder if we really did it, and secondly, when people come and tell us that it is beautiful, strangely we feel no attachment to the job nor to their compliments. We feel strange when they refer to the done job in a very appreciative way. We feel no connection with it. We are only able to recall the experience we went through while doing it. We remember only the process. And above all, we feel we have grown so much in the process of doing it'
I tell you, it is so beautiful to do something as a meditation, totally doing it and not thinking of the result at all.
When people hear the essence of the Bhagavad Gita, they think that they should not think about the result, and trying not to think of the result becomes another burden on their being! They find it hard to avoid thinking about the results. This is not the way. When you do this, you start with the result in your mind and try to push it out. This can never happen! Simply immerse your being in the iov of doing the work and then there will be no space for the results to enter. At the end of it, you will see that you have created results far beyond your comprehension.
The trick is that we should live within our boundaries: focus on what we are doing and where we are. Usually, when we are in one place at one time, we always think about another time and another place. Our body is never where our mind is. When we are in the office physically, our mind is having a vacation; when we are at home physically, our mind worries about work in the office. We invite illusion into our lives and suffer because of this. When we learn to live within our boundaries, in the present, we will find that there are no boundaries; time and space are no longer constraints.
Accept what there is. The Isopanishad, one of the major Hindu scriptures, declares in its opening lines: Isa vasyam idam sarvam: From the Cosmic Energy came all matter.
Everything is divine; nothing is excluded. If you wish to be enlightened, drop the idea of enlightenment. The idea of spirituality is like the stick that lights the funeral pyre on which the dead are cremated. It is brought in to burn the material life; once that is accomplished, you need to burn that stick as well and move beyond it - into Quantum Spirituality.
Quantum Spirituality is not a holiday religion; it is where spirituality and day-to-day living merge and bliss becomes the path and the goal!
Be Blissful!
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions ...
People ask me so many times.
I am so tired having to make decisions all the time. Why can't others make these decisions and relieve me?
How can I make more decisions, more correct, most of the time?
How can I make people around me, people who work with me, agree with my decisions and be happy?
How can I stay happy with my own decisions?
A lot of us have faced similar questions at some point in time in our lives. There are times when vou just don't want to take up the responsibility of the decision and see the effects of it. A CEO will tell you how tough it is to make the decision of laying off people who have worked hard for decades for the company; but he has to make them leave because of the tough economic conditions.
Or there are times when you feel passionately about some cause and put in all your effort to make it happen but others don't seem to feel it is as important as you do and you struggle to make them look at it your way. Decisions evoke different reactions and mixed feelings in all of us in various situations.
A small story:
A young girl was shopping for dresses.
She carried a pile of dresses and walked to the trial room and found that it was locked. The salesgirl at the shop told her that they close the trial rooms 15 minutes before closing the shop.
To the salesgirl's surprise, the young girl heaved a sigh of relief and said, 'Thank you so much! You have just saved me from spending 500 dollars and the headache of having to make tough decisions!'
We are all like the lady with the pile of clothes, ready to heave a sigh of relief to know that the trial rooms are closed for the day. Most of us are so happy not to have to decide. Some experts even go to the extent of advising that not taking decisions is quite ok, since not taking a decision is also a decision!
But, life is all about taking decisions. At every point in our lives, we are faced with situations that loudly call out to us to decide, even if that decision means that we flow with what ever happens.
We make our decisions at three levels within our mind-body system. At the very basic level, we react instinctively, without awareness, just like animals. We act before we think. We react viscerally. We take our decision out of our unconscious instincts. If we are not aware of what we are doing and why we are doing it and afterwards feel guilty about it, we are at the instinct level. This is the animal level.
Animals do not feel guilty when they react instinctively since that is their nature. As human beings, we feel guilty after we act instinctively. This is a common cycle we all go through in our every day lives. We act before thinking, and then go on a guilt trip. Try to understand, except when our lives are in danger, instinct is not our nature.
By the word instinct. I do not mean the natural instinct that is there in us. I mean the unconscious superficial level decisions that we make, without allowing our inner instinct to guide us. Our natural instinct is to flow with Existence. This is the way we ought to be. It comes from a deep connection that we are capable of with Existence. When we act from this, we will never get into wrong decisions or guilt. But this deep level instinct has been marred by our conditioning and life style. We therefore operate not from our basic instinct but from instinct at the superficial level, devoid of the touch of the Existential energy.
Psychologists have studied and found that children under the age of 7, function with their basic instinct and therefore live life spontaneously and in tune with Existence. If we just nurture their natural instinct and allow them to evolve, we will make them beautiful beings. But we keep telling them what to eat and what not to eat, what to do and what not to do. By and by, they lose touch with their natural instinct and slip into unconscious and confused instinct based actions; actions that stem out of a confused and heavy data bank of information. This is instinct based decision making.
Take the example of animals. They operate purely out of their basic and natural instinct, their connection with Existence. Have you seen a cow consulting a doctor or psychologist for clarity on matters regarding decisions on diet, habitat etc.? No! They simply flow in the right way, that's all. This way of functioning will never get you caught in the turmoil of decision making because you will not treat decision making as a separate task! The problem comes because you are treating it as a separate task, as an arduous task that calls for your energy and time. No! It is actually simply the way the river flows, that's all.
So try to understand the difference between desperate instinct and basic instinct. Desperate instinct is almost suicidal; you simply plunge headlong into decisions and suffer because of that. Basic instinct is liberation! It liberates you from the clutches of the so-called decision-making. It elevates you and shows you that you are a spiritual being in tune with the Cosmos. The more you dissolve into the feeling that you are the Cosmos and not any separate entity, the more relaxed you become, the more decisions simply happen!
At another level, the second level, we analyze things with our intellect till we are totally exhausted, before taking any decision. We go through various plans, reject one after another and decide to go with some plan of operation. This process of decision-making makes us feel tired and almost paralyzed.
And the pain is not over with the decision. We constantly make multiple guesses, revisit the situation and start all over again thinking about what else can go wrong with all those decisions that we have already made. As long as all our decisions are conscious and we are aware of why and how we are doing something, why we are thinking this way, we are in the intellect level, which is the human level. As humans, we worry.
Intellect can never give rise to whole and intelligent decisions. Intellect itself means fighting between the various fragments within ourselves in trying to reach a decision. Just imagine: if we tied four people together with a rope giving a little leeway, at the day, would any of them have achieved any fulfillment? If one tried to scratch his head, the rope will cause the other to stop what he was trying to do! If the other decided to take a few steps forward, another one will be stopped abruptly in what he was trying to do! It will be just a push and pull of things and finally, nothing concrete will get accomplished! But all four of them will be exhausted, is it not?! They are exhausted without achieving anything!
This is exactly how the intellect functions. All possibilities, all dilemmas, all so-called choices in decision-making stall the progress, and the decision that emerges may appear to be correct for that moment, but at the expense of much repentance with time.
When you are in the level of intellect, under the push and pull of emotions and thoughts while taking decisions, any decision that you take causes repentance is some form. For example, if after considerable contemplation, you take a decision to stop your education for a year and take up a job, you might excel in your job, but there will be a lingering regret that you stopped your education.
Your friends who are continuing to study will tell you are missing because you discontinued studies.
Your relatives will tell you that you are doing something totally wrong in not following the conventional routine of studies that has been laid out after deep study in earlier days.
When you listen to all this, your mind will start to waver. You will feel that you took a wrong decision. You will start shaking in fear that you have done something drastically wrong in your life.
But supposing, you had taken the decision to continue with your studies and not work, if someone came and told you how much work experience will open you out before continuing to study, you will repent then also!
You will feel, 'Oh God! What a golden opportunity I have missed. I could have learnt the nuances of work and then continued to study; then I would have been able to absorb education better' and what not.
Both ways, you will repent! Both ways, there is a push and pull. If you did one thing, the other thing will haunt you and if you did the other thing, the first thing will haunt you.
You will stop repenting only when you take a total decision. A whole decision. And when does this whole decision happen to you?
When you drop the divisions, when the four people become one and the rope vanishes, when you become integrated and get a clear vision from within, guided almost by an invisible but strong space within, whole decisions will start to happen in you.
When you decide through your intellect, you are deciding from the mind, superficially; when you decide from within, you are deciding through an expanse of space that does not hold any opinion, which does not know any binding words, which is not fragmented, which is not limited by any preconceived notions as to which is better or which is worse, which is pure love, which is pure innocence, which guides through a deep connection with ocean of Existence of which you are part.
This leads us to the third level of decision-making, what we call intuition! We go past the intellect, go past memory banks and delve into our innermost being in order to decide. Such decisions are of the highest quality. When we are in this mode of decision-making, we don't feel tired or exhausted; we feel happy. We feel energized with such decisions. Whether we are doing anything or not. if we are continuously aware of where we are and what we are doing, and if we are continuously in a blissful state, we are in the intuition level. This is the super conscious or divine level. This intuitive state is our true nature, which is why it makes us blissful.
With intuitive decision-making, it not only makes the right decisions for us, it also gives us the energy to take it through.
People ask me, 'It is so important in corporate life to decide correctly. Otherwise we cannot succeed. How can we be perfect in our decision making?'
It is said that to be successful, all you have to do is to be correct more number of times than your opponent, that's all! So it is not such a serious and perfect thing that is impossible to achieve. It is perfectly possible to make the right decisions with your pure inner intelligence.
A small story:
Three nuns were walking in a forest.
They were returning to their monastery in the evening.
It was getting dark.
They heard running steps behind them and a man's voice shouted at them to stop.
The nuns were sure that the person following them had bad intentions.
They whispered to each other and one nun ran away to the left leaving the other two on the path.
The footsteps behind them continued to follow, but were now a lot closer than before.
Now, one of the two nuns ran away to the right through another path and the third one continued running straight.
After an hour, the three met up at the monastery gate.
The third nun had just reached there panting furiously and the other two asked anxiously, 'What happened, are you all right?'
She said. 'Yes. I am ok.'
They asked her fearing the worst, 'What did you do, what did the man do to you?'
She replied. 'Oh. nothing. He caught up with me all right and told me to take off my clothes. So I told him to take his pants down, while I lifted my skirt.'
'Then what happened?' the other two nuns screamed in unison.
The third nun continued, 'It is simple. A woman can run a lot faster with her skirt up than a man can with his pants down, so I escaped!'
So all you have to do is to out think your opponent. Your decision needs to be better than his, that's all. It does not have to be perfect! Just try to understand this logic. Then half the pressure of having to make perfect decisions will leave you. When we start aiming at perfection in our decisions, we expend our energy in it and don't achieve what we are aiming to achieve. Instead, if we allow a playfulness, an intelligence, a totality to prevail, the decisions will emerge effortlessly and they will also be the proper ones.
The mistake managers make is to think through their intellect. They exhaust their energy in thinking through their intellect. If you ask any of the great scientists and researchers who have invented and discovered great theories, again and again, they say that their success came from something beyond their intellect, something beyond logic and facts, something they are not able to place their fingers on, something that gave them the intelligence and guts to take effective decisions.
Descartes proudly declared, 'I think, therefore I am', and millions have echoed him over the centuries, equally proudly and equally blindly. We fail to realize as Descartes did, that the gift of intuition that transcends the intellect is what links us to the Cosmic Consciousness and therefore, makes us truly what we are.
What we need to imbibe is the truth of Vedanta - Hindu philosophy, that states: I am divine when I have no mind. When vou transcend the mind. transcend thoughts, and connect with the inner Self and are truly aware at all times, you are automatically in the state of intuition.
What scientists call serendipity, which is a natural happening without verifiable cause, is in fact, intuition. Almost all inventions and major discoveries are serendipitous. The scientist may have embarked upon a path that is logical and rational, but somewhere along the path there are revelations that are not part of the original script. We can make an endless list of them: The laws of gravity discovered by Newton when an apple fell on his head, the discovery of penicillin, the invention of the telephone and many other such discoveries and inventions without which our lives would not be complete today. They were all based on serendipitous accidents that were not part of the scientists' game plan.
One of the famous examples is that of Kekule, one of the scientists who were working on trying to explain the properties of a certain class of carbon compounds.
He was trying to make out the molecular structure of the chemical benzene, which had properties that could not be explained by the traditional molecular structure models that were available then. One night, he had a dream of a snake putting its tail in its mouth.
When he got up in the morning, he had deduced the molecular structure of benzene as a ringshaped structure!
This opened the doors for organic chemistry, which deals with a whole class of this type of compounds that have a ring structure, a molecular structure that had been unheard of till then.
Only intuition can enable this quantum leap in any field. With the rational, logical mind, you can only extrapolate from your past experiences because it cannot comprehend anything that is not already present in its database of experiences, in its familiar pattern of things.
How many times have we ourselves not experienced a strong gut feeling towards a decision but at that point find there is no logical explanation for it? You follow the decision and it takes you to the solution of the problem but the start of the path was not in rational and logical thinking.
It is not only the scientists; whether we believe it or not, whether we accept it or not, whether we understand it or not, we all have the gift of intuition. Ancient sages of Bharat, the great yogis say that we can all have intuition if we work for it. They have demonstrated that intuition happens beyond intellect. They are all living examples to prove the statement also.
These vogis say that intuition is beyond science, beyond rational thinking, beyond traditional logic. They insist that we can tune into intuition as a part of our regular lives; that it is not a gift for a chosen few. In the modern society, intuition is an accident we stumble upon it. With the vogis, it was a natural happening. The question, therefore, is not if we can all be intuitive, but merely how we can exercise our intuitive nature.
Many of the postulates and results in Vedic mathematics also fall into this category. Since they came out of tapping intuition that enables a direct quantum leap into the results. many of the results seem to be virtually impossible to be derived by rational thinking. Intuition is always a quantum leap, never a sequence of logical steps or any process.
If you look around, there is continuous intelligence and energy that is there to solve your problems. If you have lived for 50 years and still have problems, in spite of the experience you have, you are just disturbing yourself. You can live another 50 years based on your experience without worrying. This is the truth.
A small story:
A boss holds a meeting to organize for a farewell for one of his retiring staff members. He says. 'Here we have an employee who does not know the meaning of disloyalty and tiredness. What should we give him?'
A voice from the back resounded, 'A dictionary.'
If you want to solve problems you can try with logic, with your intellect. If you wish to dissolve problems for all times you need intuition.
Someone asked me. 'Is intuition an evolution of instinct?' I say: No.
Darwin's evolutionary theory breaks down at the human level. If Darwin's theory of evolution were to be true, all monkeys would be humans by now and humans would have evolved into something better like superhumans, is it not? But there are so many monkeys still remaining and man has been in this latest state of evolution for such a long time! He has not become a superhuman!
The underlying truth is that humans are the only species with consciousness. Buffaloes cannot become Buddhas or enlightened beings. however long and however much they try! Only human beings can become Buddhas and this is because they are pure consciousness. This has to be understood. It is because of our clear consciousness that intuition is possible.
The human brain stores memories and skills of our entire past: therefore, we actually know how to fly and to swim. Even if we do not know how to fly and swim in this birth, just by virtue of these stored memories and skills in our depths, we actually know these skills. It is just that we are conditioned to limit ourselves and have therefore forgotten our potential to fly and be free. We have lost both the instinct and the skill.
We have become thinkers. We know to execute any action of ours only by thinking first. The moment you think, you limit yourself. Thoughts connect the past and future. Thoughts are a sump between the past and future. If one of these, either the past or future is removed, all thinking stops.
The future is just a collection of our past. That is why, we do not have the intelligence to even make new mistakes; we just repeat our past mistakes! When we are in the present, the here and now zone, all that we are aware of is the present. Our mind stops when we are in the present. But it is not happy. The mind, just like any other being, has an instinct to survive. So, it comes up with all kinds of reasons why we should jump to the future because only then can it exist.
When we step into the present, we step out of time bound awareness. We step beyond tension. Our body stops producing adrenalin. Time bound awareness is mass, which is solid. Non-timebound awareness is pure energy, liquid, dynamic, bubbling and creative. We step out of our boundaries. We become free. We become intuitive.
When our thoughts reduce to zero, when they stop, our present vision extends into the past and future. We become free of time and space constraints.
The great sages of ancient Bharat measured time through the concept called kshana. Kshana is not chronological time. It was not measured as the amplitude of a pendulum or the frequency of an electronic chip. Kshana was not generic time, but individual time. Kshana is the time between any two thoughts in an individual. When I use the word individual, I mean that kshana varies from person to person; my kshana and your kshana are different.
In the case of the average person, in whom the mind is constantly active, desires and thoughts pour out without a stop; the time between two thoughts is very, very small, so small that you can't even make it out! In the case of an enlightened being, who is in a no-mind state, in whom there are no thoughts, kshana is infinite.
Kshana is the time between two thoughts. It is the space between two thoughts. This is time and space that Buddha referred to as shoonya, and what Sankara referred to as poorna. It is the no-mind zone, the mindful zone, in which you touch base with yourself. It is that present moment in which you come face to face with the divinity in you, when you recognize the cosmic energy that you are a part of.
When you are in that kshana, you are truly aware: you are energized and refreshed. The more you fall into that kshana, the more intuitive you become. Most often, we only accidentally fall into the kshana, and when this happens, we find miraculous revelations to us like what we discussed earlier. Meditation takes you into the awareness of this kshana.
When you are in front of an enlightened Master who is in a no-mind state, without thoughts, your own thought level comes down, and your kshana becomes longer. Without even trying you become calmer, more peaceful, and more aware.
The same experience occurs when you are in the energy field of an enlightened Master who is no longer in his body, but is in a Jiva Samadhi - where he entered into final resting and where his body has been placed and covered. Many of the great temples in Bharat such as Thirupati, Thiruvannamalai, Mantralaya and Palani are built around the burial spots of enlightened Masters and that is the reason why we feel such sanctity and peace in these locations.
They say that the idle mind is the devil's workshop. The idle mind meant here is very different from the idle mind we have been discussing. The idle mind that they talk about is a mind that is listlessly engaged. The idle mind that we are talking about is the mind that is empty of all thoughts, that has transcended thoughts, that has seen the Ultimate Truth and has died in its efforts. It is God's own workshop! They are two ends of the same spectrum. Of course, extremes always look alike!
Scriptures state that spending 11 kshanas in this zone of no-mind, without thoughts, enables one to alter the future and 22 kshanas in the time shaft zone leads to enlightenment. When we relax into our Aina chakra, our third eye energy center that is present between the brows, at zero thoughts per second, we become intuitive, and can harness the Cosmic Intelligence or attain to enlightenment. We can then write our own destiny and become masters of our lives.
When we move into the present, into this intuitive state of no mind and no thoughts, and allow decisions to happen by themselves, choicelessly, without forcing them through logic and rationale, decisions will always be correct; because these decisions are driven by the cosmic energy.
How does the mind work?
A small story:
A lady visited the doctor, a general physician and complained of a lot of pain. The doctor asked her where she experienced pain. The lady touched her right knee and said. 'It is paining here doctor.' Then she touched her stomach and said, 'It is paining here too doctor.' Then she touched her left ear and screamed, 'Here too it is paining doctor.' The doctor was watching her all the while. He then told her, 'You've got a sprain in your right hand.'
Our mind tries its best to find something to magnify and chew on. If it doesn't find anything it tries to find something out of nothing!
Most of us think that our minds are very logical. We feel that our mind is our master because of which we are able to achieve so many things. Actually, the most illogical thing. Just try this experiment. Sit down for five minutes and write down all the thoughts that come to your mind in these five minutes, honestly, without editing. Whatever thought comes, put it down. Then, read what you have written. You will realize how illogical the mind is!
We are running a mental asylum inside our heads. One moment, you would have been thinking about your workplace: then, for no reason, you will find yourself thinking about the house. The next moment, without realizing it, you will be thinking of someone in London. There is no connection, no rationale and no logic in the way our mind moves from one thought to another.
Vivekananda, an enlightened Master of modern day Bharat says beautifully, 'The mind is like a drunken monkey that has been stung by a thousand scorpions. ' Can you imagine the state of this monkev?
A monkey by itself jumps for no reason, and a sting of one scorpion is enough to make anyone jump leave alone a monkey. Imagine the state of a monkey stung by a thousand scorpions! Unimaginable is it not? While this is difficult to imagine and we feel that it is too much to comprehend, Vivekananda uses this to describe none other than our own mind within us. He is describing the mind within us with which we are trying to comprehend this very statement, the mind that we believe is our friend, philosopher and guide.
If we look deeply into our minds, we will completely agree with Vivekananda. After all, Masters never make any statements that are lesser than the truth. Only we don't understand them and therefore exclude what they are saying or interpret their words with our own mind.
Our mind works in myriad ways, truly. It is just like a monkey that jumps from one thought to another with no logical connection, with no rule or regulation, where there is only chaos and no order. And we remain faithful servants to it. If you sit down and go through each and every thought in your mind, you will realize that actually, 99% of it is wasteful; 99% is not of any use, is of no productivity; does not relate to the present moment at all.
If you look into the mind, there is only a current of thoughts, that's all. It is a mere association of thoughts, one to another. They are all parallel, unconnected thoughts, all about the past and the future. It is a general mess! Of what use is all this? The only thing it does is to damage the consciousness. The more thoughts, the more damage to the consciousness - be very clear. And the danger in this whole process is that it has become unconscious within us.
In the meditation programs, when I ask people to write down their thoughts without filtering, it is an amazing revelation to them! First, they are unable to comprehend their own mind, second they are unable to keep pace with their mind when they attempt to write. third it scares them and finally, they find it totally new although they have been with that mind throughout their lives!
Almost all our thoughts are just a race towards nowhere. It continuously creates layers and more complex layers over our consciousness. That is why very often while our consciousness is compared to a crystal clear pond, our mind is the moss that covers it. While our consciousness is compared to a clear mirror, our mind is the dust that covers it.
Why do we say this? Just think, if you only focused on the present moment, you will not have thinking to do at all. Your mind will not think at all. It will become only a tool to handle every passing moment. It will simply be a tool. It will be like a child's erasable magnetic board on which you can write a few sentences for that moment, erase them, re-write and again erase. Most of the time, the board will be empty is it not? But through that board, so much would have been transacted. And there will be no trace of any of those transactions.
While the board remains empty, so much will be happening through it. While the board remains white most of the time, just the essential lines will appear as we write on them and then erased through the slider eraser. It is a beautiful board actually. It shows how exactly one's mind should be used; how the mind should be handled, beautifully, without any strain, without any stress, just like a child's magnetic board!
From the metaphor of the board we can learn that a very small space is enough to handle large volumes of information; that it is possible to keep that space clean and beautiful always and yet transact through it; that our mind is meant to be kept clean always: that it is a thing as miraculous as the magnetic board is for a child.
And what does that small space do? It is simply available to write small statements pertaining to that moment, to handle that moment, to flow with the moment and take decisions spontaneously, and then it becomes empty until the next moment calls for it. Each instance of writing is for that moment, precious words for just that moment and then it goes away!
The next moment requires different words, powerful words but different words suited to that moment. When the mind works in this fashion, the words that appear in the mind for every moment will not be dependent on the person at all! They will simply appear according to the situation, according to the requirement of that moment, driven by emptiness actually, driven by the all-pervading intelligence, and then goes away.
This is how Masters operate. That is why you can never frame them. They don't have an inner chatter at all! You act out of your inner chatter, your inner chatter decides who you are. That is why it is easy to frame you. But with a Master, there is no current of words in them that is there all the time in us. They are empty inside, blank and clean like the magnetic board. As and when things take shape, as and how things flow, some words appear on the magic board, handle the moment and disappear!
It is so beautiful, is it not? That is why, the kshana we were talking about earlier, the time gap between two thoughts is very large for them and it is infinitesimal for us. It is infinitesimal for us because there is a constant current of words in us! It is difficult to find any gap between one thought and another because they occur almost simultaneously, all inter connected even if there is no logical connection between them. The kshana is not perceivable.
There are meditation techniques that ask us to focus on the gap between one thought and another, which is based on this kshana. It is the most difficult meditation for us! We can do any other meditation but this! We will probably go insane if we try doing this. It is only then that we realize the sort of madhouse we are running in us. There is virtually no kshana in us! In trying to perceive the kshana, we will make it even smaller and non-perceivable!
By ourselves, we are a beautiful mechanism with an inbuilt intelligence. If we allow this intelligence to flower and express itself, we have fallen in tune with ourselves and with Existence, of which we are a part.
It has been researched that to emulate the parallel processing done by the human brain, to receive a piece of information, analyze, understand and respond, it would need a computer which is three floors in height and the sound which would be generated would be at least that of ten generators! We have such a powerful system within us.
So how does the mind normally work? How does this collective intelligence of the cellular svstem of our mind body entity function? How can we consciously optimize our mind body system?
Sages of ancient Bharat described the process. They described it not in physical terms but in conceptual terms. Their description enables us to understand how the mind functions. Let us now take the process of seeing, which is almost 80% of our total sensory perception.
Your eyes see me now. In Sanskrit, we call this seeing power chakshu; it is the energy behind the physical eyes; it is not a physical organ. Chakshu is a virtual digital signal processor.
Its digital signal output goes into your memory, called chitta in Sanskrit, as a digital file.
The memory starts analyzing the facts of the case; it compares the input it has received against its database. Chitta acts as a filter; it excludes first. It responds based upon comparison and elimination.
For example when you are seeing me now, it says: What I see is not an animal, it is not a rock, it is not a plant and so on. It says, na iti, na iti: not this, not this.
The partly processed filtered file then goes to manas, your mind. The manas makes a positive identification of what is seen.
The mind concludes: What you see is a human being talking to you: he is a swami; he is taking a class on spirituality, and so on. The manas concludes 'This is it'.
The object identified by the mind, the manas, then takes a quantum leap to the ego as a file.
This ego is the part similar to what has been described by Freud and others as the collective identity of the individual, where all experiential data is stored.
The ego associates the file with earlier similar memories and decides based on past experience what to do now.
For example, if you have had a good experience listening to some spiritual class earlier, if you have had some pleasant experiences with a swami earlier, you will decide that you will stay here and listen. If however, the data shows that your experience with such a person or some similar class has been bad, you immediately decide that it is better to leave, and you move.
The ego decides for us. We express that decision and act upon that decision. This zone of ego is not under the control of our conscious. logical and rational mind. It simply overrides our logic, The ego stores impressions, past memories, unfulfilled desires and various emotive reactions continuously, whether we are conscious of these experiences or not. The ego never sleeps, not even for a moment. The data stored by the ego are called samskara in Sanskrit.
Samskara are nothing but the remains, the vestiges of unfulfilled desires. When your mind leaps between the past and the future, you miss the present and are not able to live it fully. You are not able to fulfill your desires completely. These unfulfilled desires remaining in us are the samskara that drive us. They are our deep, driving force.
When you make the final decision by looking up the huge database of the unconscious, be very clear that it is the samskara that are making the decision for you. Every samskara distorts the file before the decision is taken. Every samskara writes its signature on the file before the decision is taken. When there are too many samskara, the decision is taken impatiently and impulsively and the decision is out in no time.
The Brihadaranya Upanishad says,
You are what your deep driving desire is, As is your desire, so is your will, As is your will, so is your act, As is your act, so is your destiny.
Because of all your past decisions, the present is happening and because of all your present decisions, your future will happen.
The problem is, many of your decisions are made unconsciously. So. when the situation arises. you don't take responsibility for it. You have forgotten your past decisions. This is like going to a restaurant, eating whatever you want and then when you finally get the bill, you are shocked and refuse to pay the bill saying you have not ordered for such a big bill!
You lack a certain understanding: All your present is only the result of your past decisions and all your future is only the effect of your present decisions. Be aware of your present; that is enough. There is no need to worry about the past or the future. By doing this, you will be able to design your future, because when you do this, you are doing it consciously. There is no need to be concerned about destiny and free will.
People are always concerned about free will versus destiny. I tell you: Just be in the present moment; the future will simply take shape in a beautiful way. When you are in the present totally, you will be so joyful and light; the future will not distract you at all. You will just live moment to moment without the need to worry about the future. That is the beauty of living in the present.
Buddha teaches, 'Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.'
From birth we carry mental attitudes that are called vasana. Vasana are the seeds from which the desires, unfulfilled desires of samskara spring forth. Compared to vasana as seeds, samskara can be termed as plants. These samskara drive us into action, which is our karma. Karma, in comparison to vasana as seeds and samskara as plants, are full-fledged trees.
It is something like this:
Imagine a lady walking through a shopping mall. She sees a pair of shoes on the window.
The first and second time, she just looks at them and passes by.
The desire to look at them comes from her mental make up, the vasana.
The third time she stops and thinks how good these shoes will look on her, how she can wear them to parties and so on. The vasana has now taken root and becomes a samskara, which now adds a lot more substance to the fleeting look.
After a few such encounters with the shoe, the lady buys it, creating karma.
Of course, she may wear the shoe just for a week or two weeks and then discard it. The cycle of vasana, samskara and karma start all over again when she looks at another pair of shoes.
As long as the desire is not fully satisfied with awareness, the cycle repeats. The key here is to complete it with deep awareness.
When we do anything with awareness, we will never create karma (unfulfilled actions) for ourselves. When we don't infuse awareness into all that we do, we will always have lingering desires that become our karma.
Let me explain what exactly I mean by the interconnected usage of the words 'unfulfilled actions' and 'awareness':
Let us say your boss fired you in front of the whole office. There are two ways in which you can go through the scene.
The first way is to react immediately and talk back to him in anger; you simply let go and fire and walk out. You become lop sided here: you are not balanced, you are not centered; you are swaying to one side and creating a new cycle with the boss, a new cycle of words and actions; you act out of unawareness here. When you act out of unawareness, you are simply reacting, you are not acting. be verv clear. When you don't hold your awareness with you, you simply react, iust 'out of the top of your head' and you create what is called a karmic cvcle. This is how karmic cycles start and these karmic cycles that are initiated are what are referred to as unfulfilled actions.
A karmic cycle is created by you when you act not from your core, but from your periphery and create situations that need to be completed in some way or the other, at some time or the other, in this birth or another birth. When there is an imbalance in your words and actions due to lack of inner intelligence and awareness, you create a karmic cycle.
The second way, is to remain centered in your consciousness, hold on to your awareness, watch the whole thing taking shape, just quickly become the watcher when your boss fires you. When this happens in you, there will not be any need to fire back at all. There will be no reaction because awareness is reining the whole show. When awareness reins, you can never react. You can only act and that too in a very deeply intelligent way. Your act will simply dissolve all possibilities for a karmic cycle to take shape from that scene.
When awareness is continuously there, you will never create cycles that need to be completed. Mind you, by acting out of deep awareness, don't understand it as suppressing your emotions that drive you to let go. No! It is not suppression itself is felt only when emotions are waiting to let go. With awareness, all these emotions of anger, fear, lust or greed will be reduced to a mere play of the mind and when this happens, they are no longer rearing to go and therefore there is no question of suppressing them.
So our samskara, our unfulfilled desires actually define us. They drive us. They lead our life. Samskara drive us to take illogical, unconscious and irrational decisions. For instance, a person decides to smoke knowing fully well logically that it is bad for health. He still goes ahead. He has no control over his actions; his action is driven by his samskara, his desire that is unfulfilled.
How can any person consciously send smoke into his system? The person is not conscious of what he is doing and hence does something totally against his conscious decision. He knows that smoking is injurious to health and that a lot of people have died due to smoking. But he gets an inspiration to smoke, a decision that simply overrules his logic; and he smokes. After smoking what happens? He feels guilty. That is a different matter.
These samskara come up and confuse us, they depress us, they disturb us, they stress us, they cause guilt in us and create scope for more guilt. Samskara can and will change the whole course of our life. They can create conflicts. When you live your desires fully, there are no remnants left and hence, no samskara will be there to pull you back into repeating the action so as to fulfill the desire.
The famous Hindu philosopher J Krishnamurthy says, 'Even if once in your lifetime, you can witness your emotions without moving your body and without support or suppression, you will see very clearly that samskaras lose power over you. If you support the thoughts and emotions, samskara grow stronger. If you suppress them, they lead to perversions.'
Elimination of samskara is elimination of the negative energy from within our system. One who is without samskara is fully aware: he is enlightened. Samskara keep you in bondage. They are the root cause of all suffering. When Buddha said that desires are the root cause of suffering. he was referring to the effect of unfulfilled desires that drive us irrationally, blindly, without awareness.
When you remember something that disturbs you, you create an energy clot; and when an energy clot takes shape, the space in your being reduces. When you meditate on your inner space you expand. For proper expansion to happen and for vou to experience iov, there should be no energy clots within you that disturb you; there should be no samskara.
From a young age you are taught your samskara. You accumulate them. When you are attracted to something intensely or hate something intensely you collect files on that. Understand: One kind of logic is this: All men have one head, Socrates is a man, and so you can conclude that Socrates has one head. There is another type: There are two doors; one door is open, what about the other? You cannot say anything about the other door. This second logic is the logic of intelligence. You need to be deeply aware to employ this logic successfully. If we are aware, we will never collect more and more samskara. We collect these only because we are not aware.
People ask me why they should follow a Master. I tell them, 'either follow a Master or follow your samskara.' It is a very clear choice!
Anyhow, this process of perception and identification of what we perceive, the process that happens between our eyes and our mind happens with our awareness, consciously. However, the process the file takes between our mind and our ego happens without our awareness; it happens unconsciously.
Often we decide at the ego stage against our logic, against our best interests, irrationally, dangerously. You certainly know that smoking is injurious to health based on logic but your mind takes a leap and decides without your control, unconsciously, dangerously, to smoke. The problem is, we don't even know that our unconscious mind is playing. We don't even know that our decisions are distorted by thousands of samskara in the decision making process.
When you are aware, conscious, you are in control of your actions and thoughts. Most of the time, however, it is the subconscious or unconscious mind taking decisions. This subconscious mind is like a huge database of our past experiences. Since it is just a database, it is really like a film projector. Whatever is stored in it gets projected on the screen. If you want to change the scene projected, it is of no use to catch the screen. All you need to do is to turn off the projector or change the reel being played. The subconscious mind is like an autopilot mechanism. When the autopilot mechanism is in charge, the vehicle moves without the awareness or observation of the pilot, which is the conscious mind. That is when the conscious mind is free to dream about the future or dig the past.
Most of the time, we are under the control of the unconscious mind. The perception of any incident or moment is usually intercepted at the level of the unconscious mind itself without allowing the decision to be reviewed by the conscious mind. We are not even aware that we are not in control! We hardly spend 5% of our activities using the conscious mind on a given day.
The way to get in control then is to be aware, fully conscious, so that your conscious mind is more engaged in taking decisions rather than the unconscious mind, which is not under your control. Then, you will no longer be in the grip of the past or be in the false limitations imposed by your unconscious mind taking decisions based on its programming by society and the environment.
Let us say that the process time taken for the information to travel from eve to mind is Tp. This is the time when the transfer process for the data is logical. It takes place consciously, with awareness. Now let us say that the time taken for the unconscious process, from mind to ego is Tq. Here, the data passes through samskara, which distorts the file, twists our decisions without our knowledge.
When we are driven by the unconscious mind, by the power of the samskara, we become restless. We decide without knowing what we are doing. We act without awareness. When our samskara are more, there is no patience to go through all the samskara and take a decision, so the decision is taken impulsively out of deep confusion. As soon as the information goes to the ego, it comes back with a decision, just out of the top the head.
In this case, Tq is much lesser than Tp. The leap to the ego and back is very less when compared to the time taken for the data to reach the mind from the eye. What happens here is, when faced with a decision, we feel uneasy, we feel guilty, there are many mixed emotions and past samskara waiting to put their signature on the file containing the data and so Tq is done in no time and the decision is passed. Also, when we operate in this fashion, we will feel exhausted at the end of it because of the play of our samskara upon us.
It is when the time taken for the leap to the ego and back, that is Tq, is greater than the conscious process time Tp that we are really aware of what is going on. We are then able to act above the instinct and intellect levels with pure awareness. We are then in a super conscious level and our unconscious is infused and filled with a vibrant silence and intuition instead of clogged with samskara. We become aware of who we are. what we are and why we are doing things: what we are doing. The decisions taken at this level of intuition are total for us.
Infusing silence, bringing thoughtless awareness to your unconscious zone is your ultimate liberation. You become a videhi - one who is outside his body even when he is in his body.
At the very least, we should operate in such a way that we spend equal time in our conscious mind as we do in our unconscious, where Tp = Tq so that we perform with the power of our intellect, instead of instinct. When we perform with our intellect, our decisions will be all right but we are still not using our full potential: we are still not operating in the zone of intuition that is meant for us. We will be in a break-even state as far as our energy is concerned; we will feel neither exhausted nor rejuvenated, we will just be, that's all. But when we work in the zone of intuition, we will be rejuvenated at the end of the day. That is the scale to see in which zone we are working.
How do we reach this zone of intuition? How do we move from instinct to intellect to intuition? How do we keep the area of ego empty, free from samskara?
Meditation is the only solution. It takes us from intelligence, to the state of intuitive thinking. It creates tremendous awareness in us that sheds light upon the unconscious and burns out our samskara. Meditation leads us into intuition, into a conscious awareness of the present. without influence of the past. It creates us anew; it gives a fresh lease of life free from the past and the future, just helping us be in the present.
Meditation is the ultimate gamble that one can undertake to completely transform, to completely come out of illusions, to embark upon a journey where bliss is the path and the goal.