Q) It is said that after your enlightenment, you were lying for nine months without food and water. Why did you need to starve yourself?
A) If you are totally intoxicated with something, do you feel like eating? If you are filled with love, say you are meeting someone after a long time, will you feel like eating at that time? When my years of search ended, I did not feel like eating. After my experience of enlightenment, I didn't feel like I needed anything from the outer world!
When I experienced that ecstasy, it was such a great joy and fulfillment that, for nine months, I didn't need anything from outside. Only when you are empty inside you fill yourself with food! Obesity is directly related to feeling empty inside. In some way, at some point in time of our lives, we all feel empty and that is why we eat too much. When you feel fulfilled, you feel full also. I was so satisfied that I did not need food and sleep for nine months.
Q) When everyone has their own reality and worships their own God, won't it create chaos? I believe in one God. I don't understand why everyone worships a different God.
A) As long as you don't realize everything is Divine, you need to create something special and worship it. Once you grow and become mature, you realize the Divine in you; you realize that everything is worthy of worship and you don't need anything special. Then your very life, becomes worship; your walking, talking, sitting, everything! You feel so connected to the Ultimate. After that, you don't worship one form; you relate with everything, whatever is. It is such an ecstasy; everything is blessing you and you are blessing everything. Not only living persons, even inanimate things; rocks, rivers, and the things you use in your daily life, you start relating with. You include everything; nothing is excluded from worship.
Until a person grows, each one needs their own path; every person needs to be guided from his level. We can't stand on the fifth floor and ask someone on the ground floor to come up; we need to show him the steps and the way to get to the fifth floor. If I stand on the fifth floor and say, 'Everything is divine, everything is God. Come on, realize it', I will be wasting my time and he will be wasting his.
People come and tell me, 'I love the whole world.' I tell them, 'Loving the world is easy; loving your wife or neighbor is difficult!' Loving the world is easy because it's just an idea
Reality Dream
but loving your wife is difficult, because you need to do something tangible to prove it! She is with you all the time. Whereas, the world is an abstract idea; you don't need to do anything to prove your statement. You can just make the statement and be quiet. Reality is different and thoughts are very different. It's the same thing we are doing in spirituality, also. We say, 'Everything is God,' but we never experience it. That's why mystics say, 'Start with one thing.' Feel that as God and start applying that to everything that is around you.
In the beginning, for the energy you have, relate with one stone as God. Then expand the same attitude towards other things; create the same effect with every stone, every person, and every living thing, animate or inanimate. Then you will start experiencing that everything is Divine. Unless you love your wife and your neighbor, you can't really taste love. Then you can expand and start loving your state, your country and the whole universe.
Expansion is possible but, if the Master copy is not created, how can you make more copies? In the same way, first you need to feel divinity as a solid experience in your life, not as a vague theory. Only when you see it as a solid experience can you reproduce it with others.
When you experience everything as divine, you won't feel the need to defend yourself. You will be in such ecstasy; you will become open. You will feel everything is supporting you. If you really feel everything is divine, you will feel this one truth: they say the whole cosmos wants you to achieve success in your life and it continuously supports you. If you really feel this truth, that the whole of Existence wants you to be successful, is supporting you to express your potential energy, if you strongly feel it in your life, you are already enlightened!
Idol worship is to create the feeling that meditation, spirituality, etc. has come into existence. If this happens in you through worship, you will never feel like defending it; you will be just like a flower living on planet Earth. This happens only as experience, not as words.
Q) Why does the mind create self-contradicting thoughts?
A) To tell you honestly, I don't know why! I can help if you ask me how to go beyond it. I, too, wondered why we create conflicts but I cannot find an intellectual answer. How to go beyond it? The only answer is meditation. It worked in my life, so it will work in your life also; I can guarantee that. Practice the simple technique of creating ten minutes of time for yourself to sit and witness without judging, suppressing or analyzing your thoughts.
It is like watching a movie on television. Let your mind become a screen and watch it. The very witnessing will infuse intelligence in your thinking system. It can stop the self-contradicting thoughts. We create self-contradicting thoughts as long as we are unconscious about our thinking system. The moment we become conscious, we stop creating
Reality Dream 101 self-contradicting thoughts. So just create awareness about your thinking system.
Just be a witness to your thinking and automatically, you will resolve the conflicts. As long as you are unconscious, your thoughts will contradict each other. The moment you become conscious, they will complement each other. Just infuse silence into your thinking system by being a witness. The moment you practice this, your whole life will be transformed. It's a small key but only small keys open big doors!
Q) Can you talk a little about the practice where people get their nourishment from other sources, such as sun, wind, etc. and how it enhances life?
A) In yoga, they believe that energy can be taken directly from ether and air, the two higher elements; you don't need it from Earth (i.e. food) or water. This technique is called Hatha Yoga or pranayam. There are many other technical terms for it. It is possible. I read about some research done by Wisconsin University scientists on Lamas who directly take energy from ether. They did research on them and they said that, if you take, say 200 grams of some food, some energy is created in your body, but, in the Lamas' bodies, the same 200 grams of food creates six times more energy! Their system is such that they produce more energy, and doctors don't know where that energy comes from. They conclude that they get energy from unknown sources beyond food and water. Lamas say they get energy directly from the sky and ether. It is perfectly possible by practicing appropriate techniques.
Witnessing your inhaling and exhaling process can infuse energy in you. The breathing cycle has four steps: inhaling, breath taking an outward turn, exhaling, and the breath taking an inward turn. You can't be aware of it all twenty four hours a day but take twenty minutes to sit with yourself and be aware of these four steps in your breathing process. You will be infusing energy and automatically, your food intake will reduce.
You can find specific meditation techniques . Depending on your need, be it physical health, mental health or spiritual growth, you can download the appropriate technique and practice it; it will surely transform you. I pray to that Ultimate Energy, to bless everyone with eternal bliss, nithyananda.
Thank you.