ENLIGHTENMENT & BEYOND
On many occasions when we asked Nithyananda to speak about his enlightenment experience he would say:
Surely I will speak about my personal experience. But unless you have a glimpse, you will not be able to relate to what I say. If I say anything about it now, it will be just one more story. It will not be an inspiration. I keep that as a last weapon to inspire you. My enlightenment story should inspire you and make you work towards that experience. After little bit of maturity, it'll be an inspiration for you to work towards that same state. It can inspire you to express or grow towards same state. Now if I speak, it'll be one more story, it will not be an inspiration.'
Yet, he did speak about this experience on a few occasions. Nithyananda's enlightenment experience happened in the forests of Omkareshwar in Madhya Pradesh in Central India. It is an island formed by the river Narmada, considered to be one of the holy rivers of India. It is one of the jyotirlinga sites of Shiva and a major pilgrimage spot. Adi Shankara's guru Govinda Bhagavad pada is said to have lived here and Nithyananda says that Adi Shankara had his enlightenment experience here.
Narmada is revered as the daughter of Shiva and its Parikrama or walk around from its source in the Amarkantek Hill to the end point in the Arabian Sea at Bharuch, Gujarat, a distance of about 2600 kilometers is considered a sacred pilgrimage.
Nithyananda stayed at Omkareshwar as well as around Omkareshwar in the jungles that were then populated by local tribes.
Let me tell you an incident from my life:
Actually if you see, the moments of happiness or joy happen when the mind stops. This may happen for just a few moments, but the impressions and the relaxation from dropping from the mind will be tremendous. When I say the mind stops, I mean, the mind gives a gap sometimes. For example, when you see nature, you will be capturing thousands of scenes continuously. But at one point in time, the mind will give a gap. It is this gap that becomes an unforgettable memory!
This was during my wandering days before enlightenment. I was walking from one city to another in India. On the way to a place called Omkareshwar, there is a thick jungle and a river flowing between the two hillocks that are completely made of marble stone. Between the two hillocks, the sacred river Narmada flows.
On a full moon night, I was just walking with a stick in my hand, swinging the stick and singing to myself. I was walking alongside the river. I was going down a small valley, and when I reached its end, I looked up and saw a big cliff in front of me. I saw on both sides, the two big hillocks shining in the full moon. Because it is white marble, it was simply shining in the moonlight!
The river was so beautifully flowing with a mild murmur. Suddenly I saw that both the hillocks were bridged! There was a physical connection between them in mid air. I went a bit near and saw that the whole thing was a honeycomb! The honeycomb was at least 400 feet long!
When I saw that, in just one moment, my mind gave a gap. Even now, I can see that moment; it was so ecstatic! I can remember that moment as such indescribable joy. Both the hillocks were simply connected! And the moment I perceived that, the mind gave a gap. Whenever you disappear into the nature, this happens very often.
Nithyananda lived in the forests near Omkareshwar for many months. During his period he lived with the local tribes who took care of him, as they did with many other sadhus who lived in that area. Earlier in this book we narrated the incidents about Nithyananda's pancha tapas experience and about the silver lamp in this area.
Nithyananda says that on one occasion he found the villagers building a hut on the outskirts of the village. Soon after this hut was built a pregnant woman walked in to the hut. After about an hour she walked out with a baby in her arms. There was no one with her, no midwife or a helper. There was not a sound from the hut when she was in labor. They build a hut, a woman walks in and delivers a baby. Later that night there was celebration to welcome the new addition. This happened a second and a third time. From time to time, the villagers would build these delivery huts for the pregnant women to walk in and deliver their babies.
After this happened a few times, Nithyananda could not contain his curiosity and asked a village elder with whom he could communicate in his limited Hindi as to what was going on. He elder simply said that this was how women delivered babies in their tribe. Nithyananda asked him how it was that they needed no medical help, how it was that there was pain and no screams that normally accompanied labor.
The old man was mystified. Pain, why, he kept asking, why pain while delivering babies, he asked. We welcome babies and it is natural for mothers to let the babies come out and no one had ever talked about pain. The word pain was not associated in their lives with delivery of babies.
Nithyananda says this brought home to him the truth how deeply we are conditioned by our beliefs. When one mother hears about or sees another having severe labor pains while delivering babies, this learned knowledge becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this tribe women had never experienced any pain while delivering babies and had not been conditioned. It was that simple.
Nithyananda taught us how to de-condition ourselves from experiencing pain. He told us to focus strongly on the location of pain without the thought that it was pain and therefore it was discomfort and suffering. Pain, he said, arises from lack of attention to a body part. Pay attention and it will disappear. Most of us are taught to divert our attention from pain or to suppress pain.
Neither works. Suppression increases pain. Diversion temporarily takes the pain away. If you focus on the location of pain, just the spot where the experience comes from, without labeling it as pain, it increases dramatically momentarily and then reduces and finally disappears. We were amazed at how well this technique works and so would any of you when you try it.
The physical pain may still linger but you will have no emotional response to it and there will be no suffering.
Nithyananda lived in a cave in the forest. He used to sit outside the cave and meditate. On one occasion he says that when he opened his eyes he found something that looked like a giant standing in front of him looking at him curiously at him. Nithyananda looked back at this creature curiously and without fear. After a few minutes this creature walked off. It was a bear!
On another occasion, a large snake, a cobra, was sitting in front of him when he opened his eyes. At first he felt no fear looking at the snake and the snake too stayed calmly in front of him. As soon as the thought that it was a poisonous snake entered Nithyananda's mind and fear crept in, the snake slithered away.
Nithyananda has a very powerful sense of smell and on many occasions has told us when we were in the Bidadi ashram that snakes were nearby. Someone asked him once, 'Why should we worry since we have an enlightened master is with us. The snakes would do us no harm.' He looked at that person seriously and said, 'I do not know about you, but if I saw a large cobra, I would run for my life!'
On another occasion Nithyananda spoke to us about his enlightenment.
I was on the banks of the River Narmada in Omkareshwar again. This is the place where Shankara became enlightened.
I had done many different types of tapas (penance) and tried different types of meditation techniques. Actually, I literally killed myself with these meditation techniques. Finally, a very sudden and deep depression landed on me. I had a deep feeling of being cheated and thought to myself, 'For the sake of enlightenment, I have left my family. Whatever has to be done according to the Vedic scriptures, almost everything has been done by me. Yet, it is not happening. No enlightenment, only days are passing.
One day suddenly, maybe in the evening at around four, I felt excruciating pain along with the deep depression. I felt that nothing more could be done, that there is no need to live anymore, because whatever has to be done has been done. I thought, either I had to become enlightened or I had to die. I never spent any time living my life like other people, earning money or learning how to live. I don't even know how to live! Even now, I can't count. I can't count numbers too far. I never learned anything towards material life, so I thought, either I had to become enlightened or I had to die.
I was convinced that the whole concept of enlightenment was just a story. I thought it was never going to happen in my life. I felt that at least there is no possibility for it in my life. So I decided, 'Let me commit suicide.' It was such an excruciating pain that made me decide to commit suicide.
I entered the Narmada rive, a very powerful and aggressive river. Between the two hillocks, it runs very deep and fast. It has big falls as well. I thought, 'Let me commit suicide. It is not going to be any more than two or three minutes. I will drown and be carried away.'
I started walking. When the water started coming up to my hip, in the terrible fear, I just shut my eyes tightly and continued walking. I continued walking and walking. I could feel the water continuously rising in level. At one point, I felt my breath to be very painful. I was breathing the pain inside, the suffering inside.
I was breathing the pain inside. So much of pain had gone inside and at one moment, something hit me. Suddenly something broke. When the breath came out, it came out just as bliss!
But I found that I was continuing to go inside the river. I was just moving. Since I had my eyes tightly closed, I don't know how much distance I would have walked. When the breath came out with bliss, I felt completely rejuvenated. It was as if the whole of life had entered me. I fell down and saw that I was in the other shore! I do not know what had happened. What I am telling you is the simple truth.
I do not know what had happened in between. Whether I walked through the water, or I walked on the pebbles and rocks, I don't know. I thought that maybe the river is shallow in the part that I walked, but I heard from not less than fifty persons that it is not less than 200 feet deep. I don't even know how to swim. When I fell on the ground, I saw that I was on the other shore, that's all.
Suddenly, I could very clearly feel that Narmada was laughing at me. The river Narmada is considered a virgin girl, Shiva's daughter. She was always considered to be a virgin girl. I very clearly felt she was laughing at me!
I wanted to share this experience just to tell you that when you touch the deep core of pain, you will see that bliss opens in you!
Nithyananda said that his problem then was to get back to where he started from. He no longer had the courage to walk back through the river. Unlike many others in his home town he never learnt to swim. There is a belief that monks should not swim and perhaps this prevented him from even trying. So, he walked along the bank on the opposite side for many miles till he came to a bridge that he could cross and retrace his way back to where he started.
He had been staying in a cave in the forest, similar to one that over a thousand years earlier Govinda Bhagavad Pada had stayed in. Before he set out walking across Narmada, in his deep frustration Nithyananda threw away the few precious belongings he had carried till then. He threw away his mala, the rosary of rudraksha that he used as a meditation aid. He threw away a picture of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa that he always carried with him. This was a framed photograph with a glass front and the glass shattered as it fell on a rock. He threw away his water pot, kamandalu and his stick. He says he also discarded mentally the mantra that he had been meditating with since childhood.
'What us is all this, I felt' he said, 'I believed in these people and wasted my precious youth. I no longer have any trust in all these great masters like Ramakrishna and Ramana. They have misled me.'
He then sat down in the cave and relaxed. This incident happened on the 25th December, 1999, Christmas day. A week later on the 1 st January 2000 Nithyananda arose with the overwhelming experience that he was one with the Universe.
The very first time I met Nithyananda I asked him about enlightenment and that was the only time. 'What is it?' I asked, 'What is this experience? How does one get it?'
He said simply, 'When your curious questions become a deep quest for truth and when your urge truly becomes urgent, you will experience it. You need to be desperate. You must feel you cannot breathe any more, as if you are drowning. Then you give up and relax. It happens.'
On many occasions since then Nithyananda has spoken on the process of Self Realization or enlightenment. The word Self Realization says it all. When one realizes who one is, one is enlightened.
Several years ago, a group of us were sitting with Nithyananda in a small hall then called Ananda Nilayam, near his cottage in Bidadi ashram. He was talking to us on the Shiva Sutras. He was explaining why the Shiva Sutras were so cryptic, so brief. Devi was the ideal disciple to Shiva, she was part of Him. She was so ready that Shiva had no need to explain. She had already surrendered herself to Him. Nithyananda said that this surrender was the most important quality of any disciple and that was the only path to enlightenment. Then he told the group, 'Don't waste your time and my time. Don't sit on the threshold blocking others from coming in. Come in now or leave'.
Unanimously we all said that we were ready to come in, we were ready to surrender. He said, 'That is a lie. None of you is ready to surrender. You do not even know what that word means.' He then went on to explain surrender.
There are three stages of surrender. The first is intellectual surrender. It is the acceptance of what the master says. Swami says that for many acceptance of what he says depends on whether the teaching is in line with one's comfort level. Time and again, he has said that for most spirituality is a week end exercise. It is something you do when you have nothing else to do. One decides to go and listen to the master if one has no other important appointments.
Many of us do not even reach this level. Questions arise when what he says is in conflict with our earlier belief systems, what we think are scientific truths or religious commandments. When what the master says is in conflict with what we have experienced so far in life, what we have believed so far in life, there is serious questioning. How many times one has seen parents deciding to cut off from the Master when a child, heaven forbid a daughter, decides to walk away from marriage and into a monastic order. One's entire edifice of what one's life should be collapses in front of one's eyes and along with that, one's faith in the Master.
One must be ready to move beyond one's zone of comfort in the path to surrender one's intellect. As long as we wish to live within the furrowed grooves of our conditioned memory pathways, within the shades of what we have learnt and learnt to live by, we are guided by our mind. It is the unconscious mind driving us as it wishes. The entire framework of our ego is the unconscious. It is the collected identikit of all our past beliefs and value systems. To let go of these is to give ourselves up. To let go this identity is to die. This is why we are so afraid to die, even though we all know we must. We do not know what will happen to us after we die. We cannot believe the priests who tell us that if we place a few coins in the box we shall go straight to heaven. There is no guarantee. So, we cling to out beliefs, we grasp our identity like the proverbial straw as we get buffeted in the wind and we hope and we pray that we do not die; no, not just yet.
Surrendering even the intellect, the very first stage of surrender, is therefore not as easy as it sounds. The conviction has to arise within, that whatever the Master says is true. That conviction can only happen when one's ego, one's identity, dissolves. Nithyananda says that as long as traces of ego remain, we remain in questions and doubts. All our questions arise from the inner violence to prove ourselves, to prove our knowledge, to prove that we know what is good for us and we know how to control our lives. As the ego dissolves, questions too dissolve into doubts, when the desire is to know, knowing that we do not know. This is how I lived my entire life and now it seems to be so useless, what do I do now? The tone of the question changes and it morphs into a plea.
Many of us have experienced this process. To some it has been easy, they are the blessed ones. For many it has been a tortuous journey, but a blessed journey. As the ego drops, as one's identity dissolves, one experiences for the first time liberation from all the baggage one has carried. Judgmental opinions about people and preconceived notions about how we should act or not act slide away, allowing one for the first time in one's life to see people as they are and incidents as they are. What the master has said time and again, that there is nothing inherent right and nothing inherently wrong, suddenly bursts like lightning dispelling the dark ignorance that one has carried thus far.
'Why don't you believe me', Nithyananda said to me once, 'I am telling you that you are enlightened. If you trust me, if you have surrendered to me as you say you have, you should believe me'.
But as he explained while talking about the Mahabharata once, one's ego is stronger than the master. Duryodhana is the ego and killing Duryodhana was more difficult than killing Bhishma, Drona and Karna. Even the master has to wait till the disciple is ready to surrender the intellect, the ego.
The next level of surrender, Nithyananda said, is the surrender of the heart. The next level is the emotional surrender to the master. For those who are ruled by the heart this is probably a short cut that by passes the surrender of the intellect. Surrender of the heart can only happen when the brain does not interfere. Women come to mind automatically as the first choice in this group and indeed they are. By and large women are less ruled by their ego than men are. Men who have been successful in dropping their intellect behave as an archetypal woman would, responding and relating from the heart.
When the emotional connection with the Master is strong, when the heart surrenders to the Master, when the intellect is completely abandoned, the very memory of the Master can reduce one to tears. It is a primal and uncontrollable response triggered by a spoken word, a written word or a picture, or even a memory. Blessed are those who reach this state. Ramakrishna says that when the memory of the master of a chosen deity brings tears to one's eyes out of sheer devotion, then be clear, that person is no more tied to the cycle of samsara, birth and death; such a person will not be reborn.
What an easy way to fool Yama!
When the emotional surrender is complete, it is not only the master but all those who are associated with the Master also take on the hue of the Master. This is when the Buddha gets reflected on the Sangha and two merge. In fact when there is intellectual and emotional surrender, all three, Buddha, the master, Dhamma, his teachings and Sangha, his community, all three merge into one seamless entity.
Nithyananda has emphasized this point many times. 'It is easy to love me' he says, 'It is easy to fall in love with a good looking master. But that love has to extend to my family of followers. Only then you have true devotion to me,'
What Nithyananda teaches is not the dry withered principles of gnana or vedanta. What he teaches is the flowing sweetness of the nectar of bhakti. Gnana, wisdom, when note experienced in its entirety can make one arrogant and isolate one from others. True realization of the Self is not exclusion. It is all about inclusion. He teaches what Krishna taught in the Gita, 'vasudeva kutumbaha.' The world is the family. As we saw earlier, as we move through the energy layers of our mind body system, the distance and the separation between 'you', 'I' and God reduces till all three merge. That point of merger is Self Realization or enlightenment.
'It is not enough if you surrender to me intellectually and emotionally. It is a good beginning but not enough. You must learn to surrender your senses' said Nithyananda.
'What?' we chorused as one, 'What do you mean by surrender of the senses?'
He then told us of this incident from Mahabharata.
After the war was over and Pandavas became rulers of Hastinapura, Krishna was walking with Arjuna. Suddenly Krishna pointed to a bird on a tree and exclaimed, 'Hey, Arjuna, look at that crow. See how pretty that green crow is!'
Arjuna looked where Krishna pointed. 'Yes, Krishna, It is a beautiful green crow.'
They walked further. Again Krishna pointed to another bird on another tree saying, 'Arjuna, look, there is a black crow on that branch.'Arjuna nodded, 'Yes, Krishna. I see that black crow.'
Krishna turned to Arjuna, 'What a fool you are. How can a crow be green? Yet you said that the crow was green. Have you gone blind?'
Said Arjuna, 'Krishna, when you pointed to the first crow and said it was green, what I saw, what my eyes saw was a green crow. What can I do?'
What could he do? Arjuna's senses had surrendered to his beloved master. What his eyes saw was what the master said. There was no dissonance. The faith in the mater transcended the power of his senses.
Nithyananda then said, 'If I tell you that these white walls are black and eyes see them as black, then and only then your surrender is complete.'
We said we did not know how to and pleaded, please teach us.
It was as we moved along with him that we learnt that his presence taught us. We also learnt that it was not the physical presence that was needed. As he says often, 'When you sit in front of me, I am not present here as you may think I am. When you do not see me, I am not absent as you think I am.' When the trust in the master is complete, he resides in you. There is no place that he can go to or you can go to, away from each other.