Inner And Outer Violence

Q: Is it possible to be detached without being indifferent? How do we keep our hearts open along the spiritual path?

Please be very clear: only a person with an open heart can be detached.

If you are indifferent, you will only be dull, not detached. Only a person who can give himself completely can also detach himself completely. Understand that you never shower yourself on anybody because you are afraid that you may not be able to detach. The power to share and detach

is one and the same. If you cannot share yourself intensely, you cannot detach yourself. The person who struggles is half of everything, being able to neither attach nor detach. The one who can attach fully can also detach himself.

Many of you are so much in need of attention yourselves that it is difficult to express love and affection to others all the time. Your heart energy center, the anāhata chakra, is blocked by a desperate need for attention. You suck energy from others, since attention is energy. The main reason for this is your upbringing. Since childhood you are conditioned to please others and over time you cannot exist without approval of others.

Many of you may have experienced this. When someone is bitter and grieving and you give him or her a shoulder to cry on, you are left feel drained of energy. You are not doing anything physical. You are not even experiencing anything emotional directly. You are only listening to some one cry. Yet, it affects you, it drains you. This is real. People suck energy from you. If you are not centered in your heart center and your heart center is not open, you will feel drained. This may then affect you physically.

By unblocking and energizing your anāhata chakra, the heart center, you become a permanent source of energy and become capable of showering attention, affection on others without expecting anything in return and without feeling drained. We teach a simple meditation technique

to activate and energize the anāhata chakra in our first level chakra energization courses, the Life Bliss Program level 1. Not only is this capable of giving love without expectation, but it is also a powerful self healing meditation.

When you do not expect anything in return, you have no attachment and you become detached. Detachment does not refer to a state of non-caring, it is in fact just the opposite. The right word is nonattachment, not detachment. When you are not attached, you do not differentiate between strangers and family and friends. You shower attention and affection equally. There is no boundary to your circle of care; it is infinite.

Attachment binds you to the past and present. Nonattachment centers you in the present. When you genuinely care, and care unconditionally, you are no longer bothered about what a person did in the past and how he or she behaved with you. You are also no longer concerned about how they may act with you in the future. All that matters is that you care now.

That is why true love is always in the present. That is why it is blind; it is blind to the past and future. Real love only has eyes to see in the present moment. So long as the love has a fixed object, it remains blind.

When you let go the object and let the love flow wherever, to whomever and however, love blossoms into compassion; it is love expressed in a state of total awareness.

Q: Some Masters talk of the Self as poorna and some as sunya. These have contradictory meanings. How can both be correct?

Buddha refers to the ultimate stage as sunya, nothingness. Sankara refers to the same stage as poorna, the fullness stage. Both Masters refer to the same state. Sankara refers to Self-realization and liberation from all bondages of life and death. Buddha also refers to liberation from all bondages though he says there is no Self and all that there is, is nothingness.

Nothingness and fullness are opposite sides of the same state. They are not different from each other. They are just being viewed differently. When we refer to sunya, we negate; when we refer to poorna we include, that's all.

The Vedic chant 'poornamadah poornamidam' says that from fullness arises fullness; when fullness comes out of fullness, fullness still remains. One can replace the word fullness in this chant with nothingness and the meaning will not change. Just as there is nothing beyond nothing, there is nothing beyond fullness.

Whatever you may add or subtract or multiply or divide from infinity, it will remain infinity. In mathematics if you add to zero you may get something, but if you add anything to nothingness, it will absorb the nothingness into it like a black hole and there will be nothing to show.

Sankara, who talked about poorna, fullness, was the ultimate denier of everything. 'Neti, neti, not this, not this,' was his motto. At eight years of age, he responded to his guru Govindapada, on the banks of the river Tungabadra with six verses that form Atmashataka. Every verse in this response is denial. 'I am not this, I am not that,' Sankara says. I am not the five elements. I am not the emotions. I am not the enjoyment. He says, 'I am Shiva. Nothingness leads to fullness.'