Expand your freedom
17 February, 2011
When you expand your understanding about the different states of awareness, your fear, greed, joy, everything changes. Naturally, many of the problems which you think as problems, disappear. When the awareness is too clouded, too narrow, it sees even a mustard seed as a mountain.
I will define enlightenment. Enlightenment means having an expanded, complete understanding about the Cosmos, and the ability to maintain that understanding in your muscle-memory and bio-memory continuously. That's all.
I will give you one example. If you watch a movie about outer space for three hours where they describe the sun, moon, other stars, galaxies, the whole Cosmos, in a very detailed and interesting way - you are completely transported to a different space.
When the movie is over, you suddenly come back and realize that you are coming back to planet Earth, to your continent, your country, state, city, village, and finally the house where you are staying, and you will suddenly feel, O God, such a huge universe! What are we? We are dust, ants, and we are fighting over such silly things!
Or when you are traveling by flight, high up in the sky, the whole thing looks like a speck of dust, and you don't bother who is prime minister, who is president, who is chief minister, who is governor, who is judge!
Here Patanjali uses a very beautiful word - bhoota, elements. You just had an understanding about bhoota. For those two or three hours when you saw the movie, you had a broad understanding about the elements. Just that understanding suddenly shifted you to a different space. For two hours you were in that space, and then you slowly got back to this ugly, dirty, abusive so-called reality.
Poor human beings! Even if you just have the understanding of the elements for only two or three hours, when you come back to this foolishness, you feel, O God, how nice it will be if I can stay there itself! Understanding about one element for a few hours itself can give such a liberating experience. Your whole life's fear, problems, anxiety, everything disappears for those few hours. For those few hours, your fear, greed, anger, ideas about life, everything disappears, everything is different. When you come down, the problem starts again. The ability to retain that freedom, where your anger, fear, greed, everything, disappears, is enlightenment.
Even J. Krishnamurthy, a man who never accepts any meditation technique or any ideology related to surrendering or practice, accepts sitting daily to watch the sunrise and sunset. That is the only ritual he promoted in his whole life. During sunrise and sunset, he asks you to sit and surrender yourself to the Whole. It's a very powerful technique. During sunrise and sunset, just sit. You will suddenly feel God, the universe, is too big, and your problems are too small.
Even you understand freedom in one dimension, you will understand how binding this ordinary world is. If you understand the freedom in all dimensions and are able to retain that in your bio-memory, that is what I call enlightenment.