Tapas is Intelligent Effort🔗

When you add intelligence to your effort, your effort will become effortless.

Many times, people undergo tapas just to prove something to themselves or to society. In such cases, there is a big danger of tapas itself becoming an act that comes from the ego.

In the same way, many seekers fall into the trap of trying to make some extraordinary spiritual effort, just to prove that they can do it. They torture themselves to prove something to the world.

There are two types of people in society:

1. The so-called worldly people: These are the people who are caught in the attractions and sufferings of this world. These people are tortured by the desires and fears of their body and mind. Their life is completely controlled by the desires and fears of the body and mind. But at least these people know that they are caught.

1. The so-called speakers or spiritual people: These are the people who continuously torture their body and mind in the name of tapas. I have myself seen in Bharat, people sitting or standing on nails for five years! I have also seen people standing on one leg, rolling on the ground or walking on hot coals, all in the name of tapas.

There is no need to do all this and torture your body. Actually, you torture your body because you think that it is torturing you! Sometimes, when life is gracious to you, it gives you an intense 'crash course' in tapas, where you do not sink into depression or explode into

violence, which is the period when an identity to which you have been clinging too hard is being removed from you.

But tapas does not always have to be a painful process. In fact, real tapas happens naturally, out of your intense longing for the Truth. Anything done by force is not going to help you or society. When your seeking for the Truth is intense, each false identity that is removed from you can only bring joy, not pain.

A person who knows how to enjoy the body and mind is totally at ease with himself. He feels relaxed with his body and mind. He enjoys intensely all the pleasures and the comforts, but he never abuses the body or mind.

One should know the difference between enjoying the body and abusing the body. At one extreme, you have people torturing their bodies in pursuit of sensual pleasures, and at the other extreme, you have people torturing their bodies in the name of penance or suppression. Both do not know how to handle the body and the mind.

Real Tapas is always Effortless

Usually, when people who have spent their whole life running after the material world decide to enter into spirituality, they will carry the same mental set-up in relation to spirituality also. In the same way as they were chasing wealth or success earlier, they now start chasing peace, chasing enlightenment. It becomes an ego game for them. Whether their tapas develops or not, they develop a huge spiritual ego! They feel they have done something extraordinary.

The moment you think that you are doing something extraordinary, that very act becomes a burden for you. That very achievement will stop you from making any further progress..! The moment you think you are doing extraordinary meditation, you will try to get up from your seat.

When you are sitting and doing japa (chanting), when you are counting your beads, the moment you think, 'Oh, I think I have been meditating for a long time!', what is the next thought that comes up? 'It is enough for today! I can't do anymore; my knees hurt, my back aches, let me get up!'

Just look at your own life. Whenever you have achieved something extraordinary, it has happened only when you did not feel it to be extraordinary at that time! You only realized that it was extraordinary after you did it.

One problem with spiritual seekers is, we don't know the art of being 'playfully sincere'. We don't know how to approach our seeking. Somehow, we always feel that unless we act in an extreme manner, the goal cannot be achieved.

We cannot believe that enlightenment can be had so easily, so we plan all kinds of ways in which we can torture ourselves, in order to prepare ourselves for enlightenment! It is the nature of the mind to make us feel that enlightenment is very far away, and we have to torture ourselves for it!

A small story:

During his years of performing tapas, even the Buddha made the mistake of falling into extremes. For many years, he performed all possible tapas – exposing himself to the hot sun, starving himself, torturing his body.

Then, it is said, one day he came across a musician tuning his instrument. He saw how carefully the musician was doing this, because if he tuned the string too tight, it would snap, and if he kept it too loose, he could not play the instrument at all. Too tight or too loose - both don't work!

This was a revelation for the Buddha. When you are ready for it, even a small incident can be a revelation for you. When Buddha saw the musician, he immediately understood the truth, and he understood where he had gone wrong.

From the musician, Buddha learnt the importance of walking on the madhyapantha - the Middle Path, the path of balance. Later He shared this revelation with millions of His followers, 'In the same way as you tune the strings of your instrument, so you should hold your mind in meditation – not too tight and not too loose.'

This is tapas or 'intelligent effort'. When you add intelligence to your effort, your effort will become effortless. You will not be acting out of your ego, thinking that you are performing something extraordinary, nor will you be acting out of confusion, doing unwanted things that do not produce results.

Tapas is Passion with Patience

When the longing is intense, tapas becomes a part of your being itself.

What do I mean when I say, 'effortless effort?' What do I mean when I say, 'be playfully sincere?'

Does it mean that you have to be fifty-fifty in your spiritual effort? Fifty percent of the time working, and fifty percent of the time lazy? Or fifty percent of the time playful, and fifty percent of the time sincere?

NO! Tapas means hundred percent effort with hundred percent effortlessness, and hundred percent playfulness with hundred percent sincerity.

Understand, this is not a paradox!

You must be thinking, 'Swamiji, how to be undred percent playful and hundred percent sincere at the same time?'

Being balanced does not mean not entering into tapas with full intensity. Usually all seekers have this problem. I see this in my brahmacharis in the ashram all the time. When they enter the path, they are too playful; they can't wake up early, they won't sit for meditation, they can't sit for half an hour with their eyes closed!

Then, once they get the taste of this life, they enter into it so completely that sometimes they swing to the other extreme. If they are doing yoga, they try to do shirasaasana (the yogic posture where you stand on your head) the whole day, and get into trouble! Shirasaasana should not be practiced for more than two or three minutes by beginners. But they become so enthusiastic about their tapas that they get carried away.

Actually, I don't blame them. That is the beauty of this life - once you pick it up, everything else in life just starts dropping away. Once you fall in love with tapas, all that is inessential in your life just starts dropping away spontaneously.

This is what I call vairagya. See, there are three words – raga, araga, viraga or vairagya. Raga is attachment, araga is aversion, but viraga or vairagya is the state beyond both attachment and aversion.

In vairagya, you don't have to make an effort to drop your bondages – they start falling away from you naturally. You spontaneously lose both the craving for pleasure and the tendency for suffering.

Vairagya is not colorless detachment. It is intense detachment. By the sheer intensity of your longing for the Truth, all that is not Truth falls away from you. When vairagya starts flowering in you, you know that your tapas is happening in the right way.

During my tapas period, there is no spiritual practice that I did not try out. Whether it was yogic practices, meditation or worship, I did not want to leave out a single path to somehow reach the Divine.

One of the powerful spiritual practices I performed was panchaagni tapas – meditating inside a circle of fire for eight hours a day with the scorching sun overhead. Panchaagni means 'five fires' – that is, the meditator sits with fire in the four directions of North, South, East and West, and the sun overhead as the fifth fire.

I practiced this tapas for over three months. During that time, a well-wisher asked me, 'You are such a young boy! Why are you performing such an intense tapas? Won't your body get burnt by this fire?'

I replied, 'The fire of longing inside me is so intense that by comparison the fire outside is nothing! This fire is the only way I know of quenching the inner fire!'

While I was wandering, I had no idea where I was going to sleep tonight, I had no idea where my next meal was coming from. I did not even know whether all my mediation, all my spiritual practices would ever fetch any results.

Still, I was living in a state of complete surrender, because I had gambled my life for the Divine, and I was ready to lose it! Intense seeking creates a beautiful waiting in you, a beautiful vacuum into which the Divine cannot help being drawn! It is as if you pull the Divine into you just by the power of your longing.

This is what I call tapas – intense passion with intense patience. Such a tapas becomes a joy in itself.

There is a beautiful story about passion with patience from Srimad Bhagavatam, the life story of Krishna:

In the village of Vraj, there was a gopika who was in love with the Divine Krishna. Understand, the gopikas were not ordinary village women; they were highly evolved souls who had taken birth on this earth only to enjoy Krishna's Divine play and receive his spiritual guidance. Many of the gopikas were only a few steps away from enlightenment.

One night, this gopika hears Krishna playing the flute in the forest outside the village. It means that a celebration was going to happen

in the forest that night! Krishna was a master flute player, and was playing the flute as a signal, to invite the gopikas to a night of singing and dancing in the forest.

The moment the gopika hears the flute music, she is thrilled. She comes running out of her home to rush to the forest and meet Krishna. She knows that her husband is fast asleep inside, but when she comes out, she finds that her mother-in-law and sister-in-law are sitting right at the doorstep and gossiping!

The gopika is desperate; she doesn't know what to do. If she steps out, they are sure to question her. She doesn't dare offend them and go anyway. At the same time, Krishna's flute is calling her, calling her!

She can't move a step further; she just holds the door-frame and stands there. Both her passion and her patience have reached their peak..! Neither can she move, nor can she hold back anymore. O Lord, O Krishna!

The bhagavatar, the writer, describes her state beautifully:

When she listens to Krishna's music, all the joyful ecstatic memories of Krishna fill her being with ecstasy. She experiences the peak of joy, and all her good karmas are exhausted in that one moment of ecstasy. She is rewarded for all her good acts in past lives, by that one moment of intense happiness.

In the very next moment, when she remembers that she cannot go near Krishna, an intense longing, an intense suffering, rises in her. She experiences the peak of pain, and she exhausts the effects of all her bad karmas.

Once you see the peak of pain and the peak of pleasure, your karmas are over. In just two kshanas, both her merits and her sins are exhausted.

She only stood there for three kshana. One kshana is not just one moment, but one wave of thought.

The first kshana, she experiences the ultimate joy, the ecstatic memory of Krishna. In that one kshana, she experiences her heaven. The very next kshana, the pain of physical separation overwhelms her. In that one kshana, she experiences her hell. She lives her heaven and she lives her hell. So all her karmas are over. The third kshana, she just relaxes into enlightenment.

Once she has experienced the peak of passion and the peak of patience, her tapas is complete. She just relaxes into enlightenment.