35. *Learn to be with yourself*

When you learn to be with yourself, you can commune with Existence. But we are never with ourselves. We are all the time with people, with noise. We identify ourselves with others, not with ourselves. We feel alone and scared if we are with ourselves.

You were alone in your mother's womb and that is your true nature. But what happened after that? You started thinking that you needed people to make you happy. You laughed with people, cried with them, talked to them, suffered because of them and what not. You don't know how to celebrate with just yourself.

The moment you find yourself alone, you start scrambling inside. Your inner chatter takes over, your worries take over and you start thinking of how to create noise or whom to call up and talk to or whom to chat with on your computer.

You are afraid of looking inwards and so you look outwards. When you become a meditator, you will slowly understand that you don't need to depend on relationships to make you happy. You are enough unto yourself. When you cannot be in peace with yourself, you will remain at the periphery of your being, caught in the so-called relationships.

You need to have a relationship with yourself first. When this is strong and steady, relating to others will become just incidental. Right now, what needs to be at the periphery is seen as the core and what should be the core is treated like the periphery. You have to reverse the situation, for which you have to turn your gaze inwards.

Go behind the mind... & beyond it

To have a relationship with yourself, you need to have the courage to go behind your mind. You are ready to give appointments to everyone but not to yourself. You give appointments to others because it is ego-fulfilling. You don't give an appointment to yourself because you are afraid that the truth might surface and you might not be able to take it. You are comfortable searching for bliss in the wrong places and complaining that it is eluding you. If you really want to find bliss, you will find it. But you need courage.

Actually, we are all searching for the same thing… that is bliss. But we are continuously searching for it in the wrong places. If I ask a youngster what it is that gives him happiness, he might readily say 'drugs'. He is also searching for bliss, for everlasting peace, but in the wrong direction!

We have moved so drastically away from our path, that our original thinking system has been completely replaced by negative thought patterns. Our life is drastically different from what it is supposed to be. By consuming drugs, can you find bliss? By consuming drugs, you are escaping from yourself and also, your health will be in trouble.

Taking drugs might sound obviously foolish to you because it is something drastic. It hits the morality scale and so it hits you. But your other subtle activities aimed at finding happiness, are also similar attempts but on a different scale, on a not-so immoral scale, so you don't think they are foolish. Whenever you get time, if you do housekeeping of your mind, you will know what I am trying to say.

Worry can cause you to make a lot of false assumptions. For example, when your son comes home late on just one day, you assume that he has probably been with some bad company and that is why he is late. This becomes a recording inside you. The next time, even if he comes home late after attending classes, this recording in you will surface and you will accuse him.

Your son will not only get frustrated but he might also resort to truly wayward ways simply to defy you. You need to understand that everyone is evolving and fluid and that it is not going to help if you are in your own frame of imagination.

It is easy to live with imagination. But I tell you: 98% of what you believe is wrong. You will realize that there is a big screen between yourself and the other person. If you wear spectacles tinted green, you will see the whole world as green.

152 Mohammed Nabi says, 'When you see the world as something, that something is You.' You complain to me about someone claiming that you are worried and so you are telling me these things, but actually you are clearly showing your own mind because you see things only as you want to see them, never as they are. When you see only what you want to see, you miss so much.

Let me tell you something that actually happened:

A few years back, I used to travel everyday with the same driver from the ashram to the city center in Bangalore.

One day, I wanted to go to a particular street and recalled the street to the driver by referring to a mosque that was near the street.

He claimed that there was no mosque in that place.

I tried recalling to him a famous hotel near the mosque, but that also he failed to acknowledge.

I finally told him that there was a Hanuman temple in that place.

His face immediately lit up with recognition.

He then went to that street and I showed him the mosque that was right there next to the temple and five times as big!

He was shocked.

He was such a staunch Hindu that he had not even seen the mosque in all those months.

Don't be with a single frame of mind.

Just think of a river: when you put your leg in the river the first time and take it out and put it in the second time, is it the same river? No! The river has changed faces; the same water is not there anymore; fresh water has flowed, has it not?

So don't strive to identify yourself with anything; life is ever changing. Because of your narrow scope of beliefs, your spiritual growth gets curbed. You become like a horse that has only a limited angle view of the road ahead of it. A broad perspective is needed in life.

Our forefathers gave us a lot of food, but not the tongue to taste it. It is up to us to experience this world with joy. The joy is in the way you experience it, not in the outer world objects themselves. This has to be very clearly understood. Your mental set-up is what makes your life joyful or miserable.

When you have a clean mental set-up, you will never worry. Only when you are confused with complex thought patterns and words, you will be worried. I always tell people: when you are not sure of yourself, you will be worried about where the planets are! You will start analyzing which planet is centered where and how it is influencing you. The actual problem is you are not centered.

Work on your mind when you have time. Look in and house-keep it. After all, you are with your mind 24 hours of the day, are you not?

I have seen people who maintain their houses so beautifully. They use the vacuum cleaner and clean the carpet till it gets a hole in it! What about cleaning the house in which you are living 24 hours - your mind? You are with it 24 hours; every single thought or action of yours involves it.

You bring in Vaastu Shastra, Feng Shui etc. which are all sciences to keep the space inside your house in a pure and energized condition. But you fail to understand one thing: you need to continuously energize your home only because you are contaminating it with your negativity.

When you contaminate the space in your house with collective negative thoughts, with your worries, the space starts radiating the negative thoughts back to you. You get caught in a vicious circle of negativity the moment you enter your house.

How many times have you felt that you are perfectly alright until you entered your house? The moment you enter, you feel gripped by a force of familiar negative thought patterns. This is nothing but your own thoughts that you have managed to fill your house with. What do you then do? You call an expert in Vaastu shastra to change the layout of the house, or call a temple priest to perform some fire ritual and cleanse the house or you apply Feng shui ideas to your house.

When these things are done with sincerity, they will no doubt be useful. But you have to understand one thing: these are only supplementary methods. The actual thing is, to clean your own self and radiate a blissful mental set-up so that automatically, the space in which you live radiates that.

A man was asked what the difference was between his past and present.

He replied, 'Earlier I used to sit on the floor on a mat and eat. Now I sit at a table.'

You see, in the past and the present, his mouth is the same. If there is no radical change in you, your life will seem only this much different. Just as beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, taste lies in the tongue that experiences it. Your mental set-up defines the taste of your life.

Most often, we know that we need to change but somehow we fall back comfortably in the present set-up of ours. We get caught in the same wheel again. One side of us tells us that we need to change and the other side unconsciously slips into the familiar patterns again. Even if you are presented with many opportunities to change, you feel cozy in your present state and choose to remain there.

Help your children too

If you live with a solid mental set-up, there is a great danger in it: There is every possibility that your children will imbibe it from you.

I am reminded of a joke:

A husband and wife were both pick-pockets by profession.

They would often discuss that if they had a child, it would be very prosperous!

Soon, they had a baby.

The newborn baby however had its right hand closed very tightly. They could not get it to open it.

The doctor attending to it tried all sorts of things and finally took out his gold chain and dangled it in front of the baby's eyes.

The baby slowly opened its hand and inside it was the midwife's gold ring!

This is only a joke, but understand that as parents, you have every possibility of passing on your mental set-up to your children. So be aware every moment and work on your consciousness; work on cleaning the inner chatter and framework inside you.

We always try to control children and make them into puppets. Children are wild energy. We try to box that energy so that it becomes convenient for us to handle.

A small story:

Two dogs were walking down the road. The first one said, 'My name is Sandy. What is yours?' The second one paused awhile and said, 'I think mine is No, No Roger.'

The dog's owner must have kept telling the dog, 'No, no Roger,' for everything that the dog did! The dog had started thinking that its name was No, no Roger! Just like this dog, children also start absorbing and learning from our words and body language. When children are very young, they refer to our words and actions subconsciously and take them to be the truth. So when you are with children, be even more aware, try to keep their intelligence alive instead of trying to blindly control them.

Mothers are continuously trying to do this. For example, if it rains, the mother will tell the children to get into the house because they might catch a cold. If she does this a few times, automatically the child will think of a cold when it sees rain. Even if it drizzles, the child will start sniffing.

Actually, man's body is the most intelligent, self-correcting, autoimmune system. But somehow, we trust our mind rather than the inherent intelligence of our body. There starts the problem and all our worries.

A small story:

A father camel was explaining to the son camel the body structure of their species.

He said, 'You know, we have humps in our body to store water for a few days when we are in the desert.'

The son asked, 'Why are our eye lashes so long?'

The father replied, 'To protect our eyes from sand storms.' The son then asked, 'Why do we have such bulbous feet?' The father replied, 'So that we can travel fast in the desert.'

'Dad*,*' asked the son, 'what are we then doing in this zoo?'

You see, our body has been designed so beautifully! If we just allow it to run on its natural intelligence, it will function well. The moment you impose conditionings on the body, you start experiencing difficulties.

In the Himalayas, the sadhus, wandering mendicants, live inside caves. They are the healthiest people ever. Come sun or rain or snow, they continue to live; their body adjusts itself to the prevailing conditions. We just have to trust nature and our own immune system. But somehow, we keep imposing our worries and our mental make-up on our body. This is the root cause for all our diseases.

Be reborn with the master's presence!

A master is one who can give you a new mental set-up, a rebirth. He gives it just by his presence. If you are in the master's presence, it is enough. It will happen. When the master's energy floods you, your mental set-up changes, you are reborn. You enter into a space that you never even knew existed.

When you are reborn in this fashion, you will be free from the grips of all types of emotions. You will be able to handle them with such ease that you never knew before. You will become just an observer of everything that is happening around you.

I was watching the television the other day in a hotel where there was a meditation workshop. A particular Indian channel was showing a duet song from an old movie. Another Indian channel showed another duet song from a new movie. I was telling my secretary that these two channels only showed that there has been no real growth in human consciousness over the years.

The same patterns are repeated again and again like five people kicking a ball around in a closed room. Familiar patterns make our intelligence dead. Even our worries are nothing but familiar patterns stored in our minds, ready to impose themselves upon us again and again.