41. *Understand guilt first*

Understand guilt first. Anyone who wants to have a control over you, first instills guilt in you. They make you feel you are inferior in some fashion. Then automatically you follow what they are saying.

Society knows to control only through guilt. Rules are alright for children and it is good to start with rules. But it is important that as you grow, you are led by your own intelligence. When you integrate yourself, guilt cannot be instilled in you and you become intelligent also.

Actually, an incident itself does not cause guilt in you. The effect of the incident is what causes the guilt in you.

People blindly pass down rules from one generation to another and with that is passed the guilt also. Like a crown, the guilt is passed down – grandfather to father, father to son, son to grandson and so on.

All the beauty products tell you repeatedly that you are not good enough. You start feeling guilty about your own inadequate body. What do you do? You go and buy their products and use them. You automatically fall under their control. Once you use them, you are engulfed with one more feeling of guilt, 'Did I go through all this trouble for this after all?' The moment you achieve something, the first feeling that engulfs you is guilt.

Drop the cerebral layer

Coming back to lust, you create a solid cerebral layer with all the imagination collected from all that you have seen on television, internet and books. You live mentally in this layer all the time. Even when you are in a relationship, you are relating with this layer; you are not relating with the actual wife or husband. The actual wife or husband becomes a poor substitute for the images in your mind. Your lust is then contaminated.

When you indulge in this fashion, you are caught in a vicious cycle and that is why you don't go into it fully and come out, but keep going in with more and more craving. If you go deeply into it, you will flower out of it!

That is why, in the earlier days, people were able to drop their lust at the age of 40. They never had such complicated images in them. They related directly with their husband or wife. That is why they flowered out of it at an early age. They were able to move deeper into lust and come out of it. Lust simply dropped from them. They did not have to drop lust.

In Indian marriages, there is a beautiful verse which the priests make the couple recite. The wife tells the husband, 'Let you be my 11th son,' and the husband tells the wife, 'Let you be my 11th daughter.' It means, in the 11th year of marriage, they will look upon each other as a son or a daughter. The relationship would have undergone that much of a transformation by then.

When you see your children, you are engulfed with so much joy, are you not? Your relationship with your wife or husband would have undergone so much of a transformation that you will experience that same joy when you see him or her. The husband will become a son to the woman and the wife will become a daughter to the man.

When you don't have a clear understanding of your imagination, you suffer. Understanding is the key to get out of this. If you know how to live without suffering, you are leading a spiritual life. If you don't know how to avoid suffering, you are living a material life. There are only 2 kinds of life – life with understanding and life without understanding. Buddha life and buddhu (a fool) life!

You are confused about your desires and fantasies and that is why you are not happy anywhere you are. When you sit on the floor on a mat, you are not happy because you are thinking of a chair. When you get to a chair, you are thinking of a throne. When you get to the throne, you are unable to enjoy it!

If your lust is pure without any feelings of guilt or desire, you will go deeply into it without any sort of guilt or imagination and flower out of it. It is only when your cerebral layer starts to function that you start bringing in your collected imagination and fantasy and fail to flower out of lust.

Drop your cerebral layer and start feeling love towards your own body as well as the other's body. Bliss is happening continuously inside your body but you are not allowing it to surface because you are caught up in your imagination. When you drop your imagination about your body and the other's body, the impurity in your lust is removed and the first step in the alchemy process, that is removing the impurities, happens.