But isn't that very difficult, master?🔗

Just change the programming in your mind, that's all! Instead of always saying it is very difficult, start saying it is easy. It is you who creates the word 'difficult' in your mind. In the beginning your mind will not accept that it is easy. It will resist. But if you go on telling yourself that it is easy, you will find that there is nothing to it and that it is actually easy.

Ramana Maharishi - an enlightened master from South Bharat - says so beautifully, 'So easy this ātmavidyā – knowledge of the soul; so easy this enlightenment!' His followers ask him how he can say that it is easy. To this he replies that only to achieve in this outer world, to have a good lifestyle, you need to work very hard. But to achieve in the inner world, you only have to relax and be quiet; that is enough! All that you need to do is just be.

We have been trained to achieve so many difficult things that we have forgotten how to achieve the simple things! Just look in. You are not so poor that you cannot even address your own mind with good words, cannot even speak kindly to yourself. Of course you can!

To do meditation, stillness of the mind is necessary. They say prānāyāma - controlled breathing techniques - helps a lot.

'Stillness of mind', 'prānāyāma', all these are big words which create more complications. Meditation is very simple. Now, as you are sitting, just become aware of your boundary. Not going where you are not, is meditation. Being where you are is meditation. Usually what happens is that when you are here, you are thinking of your home. When you are at home, you are thinking of the evening discourse. At the discourse, you are thinking of when you can go back. At home you are thinking of the next day's office work. At the office, you are planning the evening outing. When you are outside, you start thinking of home again. Our mind is never where our body is. When we can be completely where we are, we are in a meditative mood. So being in the present, living with awareness and consciousness, is what I call meditation.

We are always disturbed by too many words and ideas. Just relax and be where you are. Feel the ground, feel how you are sitting, and feel all the parts of your body. Just experience the present. By just being totally in the body, you will start experiencing life. Because this idea is so simple, it is very difficult to understand.

All our lives we are used to thinking about the past or future. It is very difficult to come out of it.

If you are used to living in the past or in the future, don't be bothered by it. When you say it bothers you, it means that it is not your nature! So why do you want to do something that is not true to your nature? Here is a small logical example: when you have a headache, you try to come out of it. You take some medicine to come out of it because headache is not your normal nature. In the same way, if worrying and thinking about the past and the future gives you pain, then obviously, it is not your nature! So stop worrying! Associate yourself only with living in the present.

Let us say you have come from Hyderabad and settled here for the past 30 years. As you have had no practice, you have forgotten how to speak Telugu. Suddenly if somebody starts speaking to you in Telugu, will you not remember? In the same way, bliss and living in the present is a language more close to you than your own mother tongue. Up to the age of 7, you were in that state. So start reclaiming that forgotten language, that forgotten state!