Overcoming Fantasies

DO YOU FIND YOURSELF FANTASIZING ABOUT WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE TO DRIVE A NEW CAR, HAVE A LARGE BANK ACCOUNT, OR FIND A NEW GIRLFRIEND? 'WHAT IS THE DANGER OF A LITTLE FANTASY?' YOU TELL YOURSELF. IT IS A SMALL ESCAPE, LIKE A FEWMINUTES OF TELEVISION.

The muladhara chakra is located at the base of the spine and is locked by fantasy and imagination. It opens when one drops fantasy and welcomes reality.

It is common for us to try to escape from reality into a fantasy world where we are happy and satisfied. Because we are not content with ourselves and our circumstances, we are always trying to 'chisel' our partner, our family, our friends; to change them in ways which we think will make us happier. The husband is trying to chisel his wife into 'The Perfect Woman' because he believes that will bring him happiness. His wife, of course, at the same time, is trying to chisel her husband into becoming her idea of 'The Perfect Man'. These images are built up through interactions with our parents, our experiences as we are growing up and from the media. We are interacting with our ideals and not with our mates.

At the same time, we are dreaming of a better car and a larger bank account. We are all the time chasing material things in the vain hope that acquiring more and more things will make us happy. We also constantly look around to see what our neighbors have and 'borrow' their desires. The truth is that happiness flowers from within, and has nothing to do with material things or outer conditions. In fact, the more successful we become, the more depressed we are likely to be, because we can no longer sustain the illusion that happiness is just around the corner. When we accept conditions just as they are, we can begin to appreciate what we have. We can relate with our actual mate, drop the chisel, and accept reality as it is.

The key is in becoming aware of our fantasies and how we chase them looking for fulfillment. Through increased awareness and meditation, we can begin to accept ourselves as we are, accept and love our bodies and our mates. Only then do we have access to the energy that is locked up in this chakra. When we acquire the intelligence to see things as they really are, we will shift our identity to our true nature, and know ourselves as we truly are - a manifestation of God.

A child is born innocent and with a sense of completeness. Until the age of seven, before the social conditioning has taken a deep root inside, the child is not conscious of being male or female. He is centered and secure.

In the period from 7 to 14 years, the child is closest to his parents. From them, the child collects images about how the ideal woman or ideal man should be. For the male child, the suppressed half of his own personality is replaced with his mother's image and for a girl child, the suppressed part of her personality is replaced with her father's image.

Around 14, the child attains physical maturity. Now, the child starts looking for the 'ideal person' in the outside world. The child now begins to collect images from outsiders and media and builds up an image of the perfect woman or man.

By around 21, the identification with the media wears off but the ideas are already deep-rooted in our minds. Then a fresh search begins to find that ideal person in our real life. This is the search with the idea of how our 'would-be' 'should-be'. This is where the expectations start.

When you find the 'ideal person', you 'fall in love'. Life becomes poetry as the image of the ideal person and the real person seem similar from a distance. When the distance reduces, the differences become pronounced and now starts the 'chiseling' of the partner to match the ideal in the mind.

An important truth we need to understand is that a man is not 100% man and a woman is not 100% woman. A man is 51% man and 49% woman. Similarly, a woman is 51% woman and 49% man. To experience fulfillment, we need to be able to accept and express both the masculine and feminine aspects of our nature.

In earlier days, the responsibility of parents was only to give birth to the child. At the age of four, they left the child in the Gurukul with the Master. In the Gurukul,

the children were taught the Gayatri Mantra, an initiation chant to kindle the intelligence at the age of 7. If by 14 they had a spiritual experience of some kind, they were taught the Brahma Sutra, the greatest book on world philosophies, or else they were taught the Kama Sutra, the science of sex, so that they learned the art of family life. If before the age of 21 they were enlightened, they were initiated into sannyas. If not, they were taught the Yoga Shastras. This is how a child was allowed to evolve in his own way under the guidance and love of the Master.

This unique and holistic education system can be seen in THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM Gurukul where the kids are allowed and encouraged to flower to their full potential under the loving guidance of THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM.

The muladhara chakra is concerned with sex, fantasy and imagination.

What is sex? It s a tremendous creative energy. The whole world has arisen out of the sex energy.

Most people are confused about their desires and fantasies and that is why they are not happy wherever they 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 lose the capacity to enjoy it!

We do the same thing with our mate. We are not happy with ourselves and so we decide to try to change our mate to suit our fantasies, thinking that will make us happy. We collect images mostly from the media and try to relate to that image. We need to understand that no living person can live up to the image we carry in our minds simply because the image is not built from reality! The image is a cut-and-paste from various quarters of our dream world! No image can be matched with reality because at the end of the day, it is only an image, a fantasy! It is alright if

you collect your images from real life characters, from the people you see around you. But you collect from the media.

As long as we float and flirt in love, as long as we keep our distance and keep our time short with the other person, we are fine, we remain in a fantasy world, we are not at the functional level. It is only when the floating stops and the real relationship starts, when the distances reduce and time increases, that the problem starts!

The more fantasies you collect, the more your falling time is before you hit the ground in a relationship and so the more the damage. The fewer fantasies you collect, the fewer the number of things there are to compare with and the less trouble you will have. If you don't have any fantasy or imagination, you will immediately meet your soulmate. If you don't have fantasies, anyone you marry will become your soulmate.

In Vedic marriages, there is a beautiful verse which the priests have the couple recite. The wife tells the husband, 'Let you be my eleventh son,' and the husband tells the wife, 'Let you be my eleventh daughter.' It means, in the eleventh 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.

Daily Awareness Practices

From now on, try to watch with awareness, the play of your mind in whatever you see. Try to see how your mind plays in every scene that you see and distorts it

with fantasy. Try to catch the scenes as they are before your mind steps in and passes judgment on them. You will then see how subtly and seamlessly your mind plays in whatever you see, causing you to believe that there is always something wrong with what you see. When you do this, you will see how much of reality you are missing. Once you are aware of this, you will start seeing things as they are and appreciating the genuineness in things. Once this happens, the same world will look more beautiful than ever before.

Write down your ideas on how a perfect husband, a perfect wife, a perfect father, a perfect mother, a perfect child and a perfect friend should be. Choose any five relationships relevant to yourself, and note this. Do it honestly. Then read objectively what you have written down. You will find, deep down in your unconscious, pretty much all your ideas are drawn from popular media. Once this hits you, you can consciously catch the moments when media figures enter your unconscious. Once you become aware of the impact the unconscious has on you, you will stop registering such kind of information.

Of course, you will be aware now of the need to accept your partner and you will be trying to move in that direction. But watch when you tell yourself to accept your mate as he or she is. Even the word 'accept' carries a feeling of condemnation. When you say the words 'with all his faults', it is like a silent complaint. It is like saying, 'What to do, we have to live with it!' No! Welcome the other person into your life, just as he or she is. There is a difference between accepting and welcoming. Accepting is like making a compromise. Welcoming is opening out your being to the other person without any expectation, unconditionally. Welcome your mate!

Just do an honest check. How long is it since you looked into the eyes of your husband or wife and spoke to him or her? A very long time I am sure. And we feel that the early days were golden days and that life has become boring. It is your attitude that makes it boring. That is why, if you decide that your wife is a fool, she will always look like a fool to you. If you decide that your husband is the type who controls you, he will always appear that way to you, whatever he may be doing. Drop this attitude. You will then find a certain freshness in every person and thing that you come by.

For just 24 hours, make up your mind that you will see your wife (or husband) as if you are seeing her for the first time. Receive every word or action of hers with a freshness and innocence without jumping to conclusions. Feel lovingness in you towards her. Even if she says things that provoke you, listen to those statements with awareness and respond in a calm and loving way, instead of in the usual argumentative way. You will see that you are actually opening out new avenues for both of you, you are giving the two of you a new space to evolve. Suddenly, you will realize that all along it was your attitude that made things look miserable. Of course, you might say that the wife too must reciprocate. You have the power to transform yourself and others. With just a change in your mental make-up, you can do much. When you decide to change, your wife will automatically change her ways too. We are all ready to point our fingers at another when it comes to relationships. We forget that two hands are needed to clap and make a noise. When you work on yourself, you can make things better for yourself and for others. Don't worry about the other person also needing to change.

..................................................... Moving from Lust to Love

Lust, like anger, is a tremendous energy. Actually, until such time as you understand what lust is and how it can be transformed, any action that you do is lustful. Even if you pick up a pen, it is lustful; if you are petting a small child, it is lustful. There is a certain animal nature in most of the things that you do because your energy is still 'base' and has not

transformed into higher energy. The problem with lust and sex is, they have been magnified and imagined to be much more than what they are. Because of suppression, sex is made out to be much more than it is. There starts the whole problem. It has been contaminated to a great extent by the media.

................................Understanding Chiseling

A relationship can never happen as long as you have fantasies. Even if you stay for twenty-four hours in the same house, you don't look into the other's eyes,

because you live with fantasy and not reality. You don't actually live with the real person. You see all that the other person does through your imagination and conclude that your life is a punishment to you from God.

At this point, if we accept reality, there is no problem. But do we accept the other person? No! We take out our brush and paints, and try to adjust the color! We try to change the other person to suit our mental image. This is the most damaging thing in any relationship. We try to sculpt each other in the way we have imagined them to be. We try to possess the other and convert them into matter. We degrade energy into matter. Here starts the problem of the unending war of life!

If you are unmarried, drop your fantasies so that you can choose your life partner and not a dream partner. When you select a person, just remind yourself that you are going to be spending your entire life with him, not just a few months. Don't think of it as just a fling. It is a life-long matter. If you are already married, drop your fantasies; only then can you start a real relationship with anybody. If you enter with a chisel and hammer, a real relationship cannot happen. What happens in chiseling is, you start chiseling and when you think that you have finished chiseling, your imagination has changed; it has become something different and so you have to do more chiseling to match the slightly changed imagination! This becomes a never-ending cycle.

Actually you love the image of your wife, not your wife, and whenever she acts as you expect her to act, you love her. Your real love is not for your wife; it is for your mental image. If you really loved your wife, you would change your image to suit your wife, but if you love your image, then you will try to change your wife to fit the image.

Sit down and concentrate on your muladhara chakra. If you notice, your muladhara chakra is always tense. It is always tight. For five minutes, mentally forgive your husband or wife for anything disturbing that they have done. Really forgive them; go to the root and drop the feeling of resentment. Do it totally. Just accept them as they are. Give them your deep love. After just five minutes, you will see that the muladhara chakra is totally relaxed . If just five minutes can give you this result, just imagine what will happen if you change your entire attitude! You will experience a tremendous energy flow! Y

Whatever power has been given to you, learn to use it with awareness! Even anger and lust are great energies given to you by God. When you have respect for that

energy, you will not waste it or misuse it.

You should never get disturbed by your own anger. If you get disturbed, it means that you have you have not gone through anger with awareness; you have allowed anger to overtake you. This is the scale to see if you have used anger properly!

You need to use anger in the right way in the right quantities. Anger is a tremendous energy if we know how to use it rightly. Knowledge about anger reduces anger.

............................Moving from Abuse towards your Body to Love towards your Body

Are you aware of how much you abuse your own body? You overeat and cause disturbance to the beautiful digestive system functioning inside you. You stay up late in the night and torture your body when it is crying for rest. You smoke and drink despite knowing that it is not good for your body. Are all these acts those of friendliness to your body? Some of you even hate your body and therefore neglect it.

When you feel comfortable with your body, a certain grace happens to you. Skin diseases happen mostly because you have certain hatred towards your body. They happen because you have low self-esteem and disrespect for your own body.

Once you drop your imagination about your own body and the other's body, you will be able to start showing compassion and friendliness towards the other's body. Friendliness is the component you need to add in the alchemy process to transform lust to love.

When you are with your partner, drop your cerebral layer (the layer that you have developed using input from outside) and start feeling love towards your own body as well as to 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 - removing the impurities - happens. The second step is to add the element of friendliness. The third step is to allow the alchemy process to happen, have the patience and perseverance to process your transformed emotion. Then you will experience the supreme and mutual emotion that is love. The other will also reciprocate your transformed emotion and then you have arrived! Your being becomes bliss! Then, you have done your meditation properly! Y

Carry with you words that heal you and others. Show friendliness towards the other's body, mind and being. Spirituality is not ringing the bell regularly in the pooja room and praying to Goddess Lakshmi for wealth. It is imbibing the Goddess Lakshmi's qualities of grace and goodwill. Wealth will automatically happen. Y

In Tantra there is a technique wherein upon waking in the morning, you touch your body at every point with deep love, and allow the subtle body to settle down in the gross or physical body upon awakening. Simply spend 5-10 minutes touching your body lovingly all over. You could also utter words of love and appreciation for each body area. If you do this, your body will develop a grace and begin to radiate well-being and love. Y

Just for once, walk into your garden and look closely at a flower or a leaf with utmost awe and love in you. Feel the beauty of it in your heart and look at it lovingly. Connect to the wonders of Existence through it. Handle it like it was a new-born child. Feel the emotion swelling from deep inside you. Now think of the number of times you have unconsciously plucked at the same flower or leaf while you were walking near it and simply chucked it elsewhere. Do you understand the difference between the two emotions, the two attitudes? Now, are you really being friendly towards everything and everyone around you? Y

Look at everything with awareness. Now, you are functioning from your unconscious and so you are behaving in a violent fashion towards these things without even knowing that you are being violent. If you look at them with awareness, you will see the immense beauty in them and treat them with love. Stop talking about the violence outside and start addressing the violence in you. Automatically the violence outside will stop. We are always ready to point out the imperfections of others. What about our own imperfections that are so many in number? Don't judge yourself when you notice yourself doing this however. Just notice. Shift your awareness to the inside journey. When you are upset about something happening outside, shift your awareness to yourself. Chances are you are projecting an inner quality onto the outer world.

Just allow the child to be free in its ways, even if it means that you have to take certain risks. Children have in them a certain sense of intuition and instinct. So, you can take the necessary precautionary measures and allow them to explore. Just allow the child to be his or her own natural self, giving the child adequate opportunity to explore himself or herself. Children when untouched by social conditioning, are by nature so comfortable inside their own boundary.

Also, children are so total in their expressions. So don't suppress them. They don't know to bring in their mind and exhibit superficial or hypocritical behavior. We have all mastered the art of hypocrisy by allowing our mind to exercise restraint. We never express totally.

Y Try your best not to allow children to watch the duets (romantic song sequences featuring the hero and heroine) on television. If they simply enjoy the music and dance along with it, it's alright; but what they do is, they internalize all that they see the duets, the emotions and what not. This is where the problem starts. Everything will get stored in the muladhara chakra, the sex chakra. Then a mere suggestion is enough and the muladhara will be ready.

Y Don't suppress the child's other half, male for female. Let him freely express and experience himself in different ways. Don't teach him to be gender conscious.

Y When it comes to children's clothing, it is always better to dress them in single-piece clothing instead of two-piece clothing. The latter gives them a sense of dividing their body into two and with time, they forget and become insensitive to the lower half of their body. It is almost a division in their consciousness. That is why today, if you are asked to visualize yourself, almost always, only your upper half will come to your mind. You simply neglect your lower half.

Y Allow children to use both their hands freely. We all discourage them from using the left hand for various things. Why can't the child be ambidextrous? There is nothing wrong in it. Arjuna in the Mahabharatha was ambidextrous. He could wield arrows with both his hands with equal ease. When we hear of these things, we listen with awe but fail to understand that we are also perfectly capable of these things, if only we give ourselves the chance!

Y If you have noticed, all children enjoy whirling. Whirling is their way of allowing centering of their energy to happen. You can whirl freely only when your manipuraka chakra is clean. Children are so innocent and worry-free and hence they are able to whirl effortlessly. But do we allow them to whirl? When we see them whirl, our head starts whirling and so we stop them! We tell them, 'Sit in one place! It's not good for health' and what not. I tell you, just allow them to whirl. Place a blanket beneath them so that even if they fall, they will not get hurt.

Y Never instill fear in your child! Let him be free; let him climb and fall a few times. Let him enter a dark room and come out with whatever experience. If you constantly discourage the child, it can lead to various phobias like height phobia, darkness phobia and the like, which can later turn into fear of making unknown new decisions etc.

..................................... Dukkha Harana Meditation

Your body is filled with toxins. Your mind is filled with fantasies. The body needs to be detoxified. The mind needs to be intoxicated with bliss. Dukkha harana does both. Apart from this, it strengthens your new system and removes body pain and mental suffering.

Y Step 1 (-Duration: 10 minutes): Rhythmic breathing a. Stand with your eyes closed. Breathe deeply and rhythmically from the depths of your body, always through your nose with your mouth closed.

b. Move your hands, flex your knees and bend to a semisquatting position and then rise up. Move as if you are a bird in flight, up and down, knees moving up and down, arms moving up and down, all rhythmic in line with your breathing.

c. Do the movements gently and synchronize your inhalation with upward movement and exhalation with downward movement. If you have a heart problem, do only as much as you can. Similarly, pregnant women and others with physical ailments - do only as much as you can. Do this for 10 minutes.

Step 2 ( Duration: 10 minutes): Tensing the body Y -

a. For the next 10 minutes, keep your eyes closed and tense each part of your body, part by part, limb by limb, then let it relax; tense and relax one limb and then move to the next.

b. Start with your feet; move to legs; then move to thighs; next to the hips; then to stomach and lower back; then to chest and upper back; then to your arms from finger tips to shoulder; next to the neck and shoulders; next to your face, and finally to the top of the head.

c. Relax each part of your entire body before you move to the next part. This is like an isometric exercise with each part of your body.

Sit down keeping your eyes closed and chant the 'hoo' kara sound, just the word 'hoo'. There is no need to chant it deeply and loudly. Just chant it in a relaxed manner. As you chant, simply witness whatever happens inside or outside your Being. Remain in this relaxed state with a smiling face and blissful mood. During this time, there may

be many experiences; just watch them as you would watch the television. Watch your mind thought by thought. Don't focus on the muladhara at any time during the meditation, as this will create fantasies, which you are trying to remove.

The first two parts of this technique are actually a preparation for this third part that is the actual meditation. When you come to the third part, you will see that the mind becomes silent effortlessly, by itself. Silence cannot be forced upon you; it can only happen by itself.

This chakra is located at the base of the spine and is locked by fantasy and imagination. It opens when one drops the fantasy and welcomes reality.

In this diagram, we see a folding mirror. The mirror facing you is 'reality', or the life circumstances as they are. There are two mirrors which fold into the reality mirror. The one on the left is the 'fantasy' mirror; what the man in the picture wants to create for himself, while the 'true' mirror shows what the man is not yet willing to accept: that he himself is a manifestation or expression of God.

The man in the 'reality mirror' is holding a hammer and chisel. Because we are not content with ourselves and our circumstances, we are always trying to 'chisel' our partner, our family, our friends; to change them in ways which we think will make us happier. The man in the picture is trying to chisel his wife into 'the perfect woman' because he believes that will bring him happiness. His wife, of course, at the same time, is trying to chisel her husband into becoming her idea of 'the perfect man.' These images are built up through interactions with our parents, our experiences as we are growing up, and from the media. We are interacting with our ideals, and not with our mates.

At the same time, the man in the reality mirror is dreaming of a better car and a larger bank account. We are all the time chasing material things in the vain hope that acquiring more and more things will make us happy. We also constantly look around to see what our neighbors have and 'borrow' their desires. The truth is that happiness flowers from within and has nothing to do with material things or outer conditions. In fact, the more successful we become, the more depressed we are likely to be, because we can no longer sustain the illusion that happiness is just around the corner. When we accept conditions just as they are, we begin to appreciate what we have. We can relate with our actual mate, drop the chisel, and accept reality as it is.

The key is in becoming aware of our fantasies and how we chase them looking for fulfillment. Through increased awareness and meditation, we can begin to accept ourselves as we are, accept and love our bodies. Only then do we have access to the energy that is locked up in this chakra. When we acquire the intelligence to see things as they really are, we will shift our identity to our true nature and know ourselves as we truly are; a manifestation of God.

Swadhishtana