The Four Gifts
things: human body manushyatva, listening to dharma - dharma sharana, devotion and progress towards the spiritual experience of enlightenment.
Here the word is translated as restraint but I tell you that word means going towards the higher energy, higher consciousness. Beautiful sutra! While walking on the planet earth through different forms, with the pressure exerted by simple karma, the soul attains purity and becomes eligible for human birth.
One has to be capable of listening to pure dharma. You may think what is meant by listening to pure dharma. Don't think, listening to pure dharma is such a simple quality. No, even if you are sitting here, there can be thousands of obstacles inside your mind. It is not really easy to open to the real dharma.
People come up with all types of dharma. People come up with all types of weird excuses to escape from dharma. I have seen many people telling about me, 'He is so young; what can he teach!' That is the big problem, what to do? In the spiritual field always age is a big problem. In the Vedic tradition age is not required to achieve enlightenment.
Anubhava Vs Anubhooti
See there are two things, anubhava and anubhooti. In Sanskrit we have two words for experience. In English we don't have two words, because they do not know about anubhooti, that is why no word exists.
Anubhava means experience by so many incidents in your life. Anubhooti means experience of enlightenment. Let me explain anubhava and anubhooti, then you will understand about the pure dharma and how we are escaping from pure dharma.
Anubhava means going through many experiences, like first you touch the fire from matches, and then you understand this fire will burn. Then you touch the cigar fire, 'Oh, this fire also burns,' you touch all kinds and all varieties of fire and understand that all these fires burn. By the time you come to the conclusion by again and again touching and experiencing, that all fires burn, your body is ready to be burnt! You become old enough to die and be burnt. This is called anubhava adding more and more experiences and doing big analyses and coming to conclusions.
Anubhooti means the first time itself you touch one fire and realize and experience the Truth that all fires burn. Just one experience is enough to give you the Truth. This is called anubhooti.
See, anubhava depends on the number of incidents which happen in your life. Anubhooti depends on the number of lessons you learn from the incidents in your life. There is a big difference. For the outer world you need anubhava. For the inner world you need anubhooti. There is a big difference between anubhava and anubhooti.
There is another one category of people who experience something beyond anubhava and anubhooti. They don't even touch the fire. They see somebody else touching the fire and realize that fire burns –they are called Paramahamsa. They don't even go through one experience. They just see what others go through and escape.
I will give another example – you can see in your life that you always postpone life. The person who constantly postpones joy and bliss, waits so that he will have anubhava and enjoy. The person who lives the life starts expressing anubhooti.
The person who sees others and learns the lessons without even going through them uses the knowledge of others' research and development. He is a Paramahamsa.
Spiritual enlightenment does not need anubhava. It needs anubhooti. Many times when we don't want to listen to the higher Truths, we create all kinds of confusion and difficulties for ourselves. The mind is so cunning, whenever you cannot practice some Truths, you just pretend as if you are practicing.
When you can't come out of your hypocrisies, you feel comfortable thinking and believing that everyone is hypocritical. When we can't come out of hypocrisy, when we cannot raise ourselves to higher spaces of consciousness, we feel comfortable feeling that others also are like us. Our mind creates enough difficulty to listen to the higher Truths.