Swamiji, you mean the body wants to sleep, or...?🔗

Yes, I'm coming to that. I'll give you the exact clarification… hmmm?

So, you may want to sleep. But you may have read somewhere that the brahma muhurta (4.30 a.m.- 6.30 a.m.) is the right time to meditate. So you imagine that you need to wake up early and meditate – you set the alarm for 4.30 a.m. And when the alarm rings, what do you do? Switch it off and go back to sleep! After a while, you finally get up and try to meditate, but your body refuses to co-operate. Still you force it to function according to your idea of what is right for it.

Do you know, research has now proved that of the eight hours that you sleep, only two hours are you actually sleeping! During this period, your body temperature actually goes down by 2 degrees! At all other times, you are simply falling into the dream state, and rising out of it. Now if you can find out which those two hours are for you, and sleep only during that time, you can keep awake the rest of the night. On the other hand, if you happen to be awake during those two hours, even if you get ten hours of sleep later, you will keep feeling drowsy through the day.

These two hours differ from person to person. In general, there are two kinds of bodies: sauramana shareera and chandramana shareera. The sauramana body needs to sleep early and wake early. It needs sleep compulsorily between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. The chandramana body needs sleep early in the morning. You can clearly see this in your own routines – especially when you are young, when you are studying for exams! Some people are easily able to keep awake late, while others can get up early but cannot stay awake late in the night.

So if you simply read spiritual books which ask you to wake up before sunrise, and try to follow those rules, it may not work for you.

Even if you see the way we eat – long after the stomach is full, we continue to eat. Simply because we enjoy the taste of the food, even if our stomach is telling us it doesn't need any more food! Or even worse, I hear people say, especially at social functions – see, they have served me too much, but I am eating so as not to waste the food. Otherwise, what will the host think?

What an atrocity to commit on your body!

Tell me, is it better to waste the food outside, or push it through your body and then waste it? Either way it will be a waste, because your body doesn't need that food.

(much laughter)

Why are you laughing? Isn't this the truth? Don't we all do this?

If you waste the food outside, at least you are wasting only the food. When you eat it, you are also wasting the body's resources, making your body work unnecessarily to digest food that it doesn't need.

But Swamiji, at the same time, you ask us not to control the body. Then how can we control our tongue, which is asking us to eat the food because it is tasty?

Yes! Good question. You must not control the tongue. You don't have to control it. All you need to do is awaken the body intelligence. Actually, you can never succeed by trying to control the tongue – or any of the senses. Has anyone here succeeded in doing that? When you are fasting, you can be sure that that night you will dream of food. Am I right? If you fast for more than two days, even during the day you will start going crazy thinking about food! The truth is, whatever is controlled will express itself in some other way. It will refuse to be controlled!

A small story:

Once a young man came to me and asked me to help him stop smoking. I asked him how he picked up the habit in the first place. He said, once he had gone out with a group of friends who were all smokers. For his bad luck, he met his father on the road that day. Seeing him in the group, his father assumed that he too had been smoking. When he returned home, his father yelled at him, refusing to believe that his son had not been smoking. The next day, the boy says, he smoked a whole pack of cigarettes, just to spite his father! In that way he gradually got addicted.

When he asked me how to drop it, I told him, Don't drop it. Go ahead and smoke. But don't do it to prove anything to anybody. Don't do it to spite your father. And don't imagine that you have become mature and independent by smoking! Every time you pick up a cigarette, do it silently, be conscious of why you are smoking. You will realize on your own.

After just a few days, the boy returned to me. He said, Swamiji, I'm not able to smoke anymore! Doing it consciously, I realized that I was not smoking for the sake of smoking. Smoking is not that important to me.

Then he added something which made me very happy. He said, Swamiji, I feel now, why did I abuse my body all these days, pushing smoke into my system!

When you become conscious of what you are doing, many things drop on their own. This is the only permanent solution.

Of course, it may take a few days to awaken the intelligence. The patience to wait till then is what is called tapasya. In the meantime, don't fall back on second-rate intelligence that you have picked up from society, from moral codes set down by society. Have trust in your body! We always live in deep fear of our bodies. We are afraid of what might happen if we don't control our bodies. We feel as if we are sitting on a volcano! The moment we sense a cold or fever coming up, the day we have the slightest headache, we reach out for a pill. It has become totally accepted for you to swallow pills for no reason. Most of our common ailments can be easily handled with a little care. But we don't credit our body with the power to heal itself. When our body can digest food, pump blood, mend broken bones and perform a thousand other complicated tasks without help from outside, can't it take care of a fever or a headache?

Allow your body to function according to its own intelligence – you will see for yourself how much wisdom your body has!

Again, a small story from Zen Buddhism… do you know, Zen is the only religion still alive today, with a series of enlightened masters? No other religion has managed to survive so beautifully, and be so alive and relevant to every age! Zen is a great gift from Existence to humanity.

The famous Zen master Nansen, wandering in Japan, arrives in a new town. People come to see him, and say, Beloved master, we have heard so much about you! We hear that simply by being in your presence, people feel joyful, they get healed of diseases, they feel their wishes are coming true. What is the special meditation you practise to attain these powers?

The master replies simply, When I eat, I eat. When I sleep, I sleep. That is the meditation I do.

Zen masters usually talk like this! Just like you, those people also don't understand the meaning of this statement. So they ask for an explanation.

The master asks them, When you eat, do you really eat?

And I ask you:

When we eat, do we really eat?

When we eat, we think about everything except about eating! All our past worries, and future plans, appear in front of us just when we eat. Am I right?

(two voices from audience)

Yes, we are not conscious of eating…

We don't live in the present.

Yes! Beautiful. These two words are the key to today's message. These two people have expressed it beautifully. The Upanishad says so meaningfully,

Annam brahmedi navya jaanaat

Annam na nindyaat tatvakam

The commentator says of this sutra:

Food is equal to God. When you eat, if you don't eat with deep respect, without care, it is the same as throwing the food in the garbage bin. What happens when you throw the food in the garbage bin? The same thing will happen inside – or something worse! The food only decomposes inside.

Now the next thing: sleeping.

When we sleep, do we really sleep?

No! We are continuously dreaming. When we are awake, we daydream. At night, we dream. That's all.

(from audience) But not everybody, Swamiji!

No, not everybody. In fact, people who have to be alert the whole day, they don't daydream. So they are more successful in whatever they do. Because when you stop living in dreams, you start living in reality. That's why, the possibility of becoming rich is more, when you are always alert. When you are more aware, not only money, but all kinds of success will start flowing towards you.

But without dreaming, Swamiji, we can't work!

See, there are two things: planning and dreaming. Planning is always chronological, down-to-earth, physical, realistic.

Dreaming is always fantasy-based. If your real ability is to earn a hundred rupees, your fantasy will be to earn a thousand rupees. And by the time you earn a thousand, you have already started dreaming about a million rupees! Only you can find out whether your plans are plans or dreams. I can give you the torch, but it is up to you to use it, and find out in your day-to-day life, which are the plans and which are the dreams.

With a plan, if you have done your best, even if it doesn't work out you won't feel that you have failed. With dreams, even if you are successful, you will feel that you have failed! You can never be satisfied – because the next dream is already on its way!

Swamiji, are you saying that if we feel content with our