5. The presence of the master
See, when a meditation technique is done with a master, it becomes an alchemy process. If you do it alone in your home it is called meditation. When you do it along with the master, in the presence of the master, guided by the master, it becomes alchemy. It is like boiling you. The process becomes so alive and intense.
A small story:
There was a young lady who did not know cooking. But she wanted to make something for a potluck dinner that she was going to. She got hold of a cookery book and tried making a dessert.
She was holding the book in one hand. The instructions said, 'Put the vessel on the stove.' She did. Then it said, 'Put half a cup of flour.' She did so. Then, 'Add water half a liter, add a little sugar and stir it for twenty minutes.' She followed every instruction exactly but nothing happened even after twenty minutes.
Why? Because the book did not tell her to light the fire!
In the same way when you are doing meditation on your own, sometimes you may forget to light the fire. The master's presence itself is fire. It will ensure the product happens, the alchemy happens.
People ask me, 'Swamiji, why should you insist on the presence of the master?' Of course, you can listen to my words on an audio CD or a DVD. But when you sit here, the honesty that radiates in my eyes, the truth that expresses in my body language will catch you. You will catch it. You will feel the click, the connection, 'Yes, he is talking the truth.'
Even if you want to suspect, suddenly you will see your logic has no power over you anymore. These words are simply entering you beyond your logic. This will happen only when you sit in the presence of the master. We call that as Upanishad - just being around, sitting, and opening up to the master.
Open yourself with trust and just drop yourself into trust. You will see the master standing there to hold you. Just drop yourself from your head and fall into the abyss of the heart. The master will be there to hold you and make you enlightened, that's all.
5.1 Upanishad
Upanishad means 'sitting'. When a disciple sits in the presence of the master the same experience that happened in the master is reproduced in the disciple.
The disciple who experiences the master and within whom the master has been reproduced, writes down his recollections on how this process happened. The disciple or the master or someone else writes an account of how the experience was reproduced in the disciple - what happened when the process began, how it ended and what happened when it ended. This report is referred to as an Upanishad.
5.2 How upanishad happens – beyond the law of cause and effect
We have heard of the law of cause and effect. If you drop a ball, it falls down. If you heat water, it becomes steam at 100 degrees C. If you put salt in water, it will dissolve. This is the law of causality. Any action will result in a particular effect. Science has its foundation on this law of causality.
But this is not the only law in Existence. An important law in operation every moment is the law of intuition or as the philosopher Carl Jung calls it, the law of synchronicity. Here, it is not that something happens and another happens as a result of it. Something happens and a corresponding thing happens.
We are so used to seeing things as cause and effect. You can see the relation between the cause and the immediately following effect. But life is filled with instances where the effect happens so much later that you are not able to relate to the original cause. It is just like when you throw a stone in the water, you can see the immediate ripples are because of the stone. But if you came a few minutes later, you see the secondary ripples, but you cannot be sure what caused them.
You may have experienced instances like this in your life. You think of asking your friend to make your favorite dessert and you land up at her place and she has made exactly that! She just felt she should make it on that day. This is the power of synchronicity.
This happens between the master and disciple even more than in close relationships of friends, lovers or spouses. Because the master-disciple relationship is the deepest relation possible in Existence, it is the ultimate love affair.
It is the most mysterious because it is beyond the narrow range of logic. In fact, life begins only when you have touched something that is beyond logic, which cannot be framed by the mind but
Carl Jung - Renowned Swiss psychiatrist and contemporary of Sigmund Freud.
which pulls the strings of your heart. It brushes aside the arguments of the mind, always looking to criticize.
The true disciple is not a disciple because of something the master said, rather it is because of what the master is. That is why just sitting with the master, the disciple starts falling in tune with the beautiful rhythm of the master. This is Upanishad. This is true disciplehood, being open to the master so that he can shower his love on you and you can receive it in all its glory and divinity and grow.