42. *Bring down the number of thoughts per second*

When your inner chatter comes down, when your TPS or Thoughts Per Second comes down for even a split second, for that split second you are totally in the present and for that split second, you have the ability to access your past and future like an open book! When your inner chatter is high, your TPS is high and you are all the time either in the past or in the future; never in the present.

Let me explain to you what I mean by being able to access your past and future. Sometimes you might have experienced that when you are at a lecture or at a party, or in any other place, suddenly out of nowhere, you feel that the whole scene has happened before. The voices, the conversation, the place, even a few curios in the place, all will look like a replay of a scene that you have witnessed earlier. You are shocked.

Or, suddenly you think about a particular person, a friend whom you haven't contacted in a long time, and that person calls up on your phone. You are able to predict what is going to happen in the next few moments. You feel jolted when these things happen to you. Be very clear: in these few moments, you are accidentally completely in the present. Accidentally, somehow, you fall into the present.

You are never consciously in the present. You are always in the past or future. You move from past to future without touching the present. This is the truth. But accidentally your thoughts per second come down for a moment and you are jolted into the present.

When you are completely in the present for even a second, your past and future become transparent to you. That is why you see these kinds of intuitive things happening in you.

Our thinking is never clear. It is always just association; it is never real thinking.

Let me explain what I mean by association. You wake up in the morning and see a rose that has bloomed in your garden. Immediately your mind goes to someone who gave you a rose sometime in the past. Your thought then goes through your reaction at that time to the flower, or you start thinking about that person. You then start thinking about incidents that have happened with that person. In the end what happens? You miss the rose that is in front of you!

This is how you run behind the past and miss the present. This is what I mean by the word association. This is the nature of your current mental set-up. As long as your mental set-up is mere association, you will continue to go behind the past or the future, creating words and more words within yourself.

Enlightened masters live always in the present. That is why they have access to the vast ocean of the past and the future. For you, it is an accident. It is a split second when this happens to you. You even feel scared when this happens! You are so used to living unconsciously, that when you are jolted into consciousness, it is too much. Reality becomes too much!

Your TPS plays a major role in determining how far you are from the present. When your TPS is high, you live unconsciously; you are so far flung from reality. When your TPS is low, you come close to the present. Meditation and awareness is the way to bring down the TPS.

People tell me, 'Swamiji, we went for a vacation and it turned out to be hell*.*' I tell you: hell is inside you; you carry it with you everywhere. Obviously you will find it anywhere you go! When you live, you give hell to others. When you die, you get hell! Wherever you go, you want to carry your hell with you. You are so familiar with hell that even if you are shown heaven, you will feel a misfit there!

A small story:

Three fisherwomen went to sell fish one day and it became late that night when they were returning home.

They decided to spend the night in some house on the way. They entered the house of a lady who sold jasmine flowers for a livelihood and they requested to spend the night there. The lady agreed and they went to sleep in the room given to them.

The house was filled with the fragrance of the jasmine flowers.

But however hard they tried, the fisherwomen could not sleep.

They were tossing and turning, and they did not know what to do.

Then suddenly, one of them got up, brought in the empty fish basket and kept it by their heads. They went to sleep in no time!

We carry our worries with us everywhere we go and feel comfortable nurturing them! But we also complain that we are so worried all the time! We want to be free from something but we are not willing to transform and be free from it. This is what I mean by being self-contradictory. If we don't want to worry, then we should not worry. On one side we don't want to worry but on the other side, we want to worry all the time!